What are the few examples of such things?
Not all is bad still, sone things are better, but it surely can always get worse, especially at the "base" (global warming, mass extinction, political polarisation/instability)
How do you know genuine optimism is in decline?
What do you mean by common culture here?
Genuine questions.
We don't have agency in that.
> How do you know genuine optimism is in decline?
I don't, this is a statement relative to what it felt like to me ~20 years ago (early web enthusiasm, the internet as a network of many smallish communities, a global, curated library). It's highly subjective.
> What do you mean by common culture here?
By common culture I meant widely shared knowledge, values and narrative (within, perhaps, a certain large enough subgroup/in-group of the general population). With the cambrian explosion of Stuff There Is, this may become increasingly unrealistic until everyone lives in their own world.
Also, I'm pretty worried of information overload and the associated forgetting of good stuff of the past. There needs to be a common thread that links culture together. This is especially strong in mathematics with chains of thought spanning hundreds of years, whereas pop or news culture seems to have acquired goldfish-level memory. Societal knowledge integration capacity is finite. Maybe it'll balance out after some time or maybe it will end in idiocracy.
I'm very thankful for Wikipedia and archive.org...
But, as I said, there's still things to like, even though they move about (e.g. from forums and IRC to Discord). And technology is now in part honest sci-fi, except without the societal sophistication that should come with it (see e.g. SEO/AI/science paper spam, filter bubbles). We can grow this sophistication or we can die trying, I guess.
Fair enough. What difference does it make if "we" or other spiecies (or natural events) have agency in that?
> ... this is a statement relative to what it felt like to me ~20 years ago...
So essentially one of your feeling (happiness) is linked to your other feelings in some sort of a loop, correct?
Which kinda leaves out anything objective out of this equation, for this particular source of unhappiness.
My usage wrt human agency implies will, cognition and self-reflection. Ecological exhaustion is not inevitable like with a cosmic catastrophe, because economic decision makers and consumers will it so.
"Legally" speaking, we can be held responsible.
> So essentially one of your feeling (happiness) is linked to your other feelings in some sort of a loop, correct?
It is linked to the widespread disregard of sanity and self-regulation and more specifically to the ongoing and upcoming damage this causes. We are clinging on to broken systems (food, energy, travel, throwaway electronics, general level of consumption, neoliberal narrative) thinking it can go on forever.
I don't believe in karma, but I do believe in self-correcting systems. And the biosphere is one.
Meanwhile chief capitalists are obsessed with childish or cultish ideas of colonizing Mars (lol), building kitsch cities or conquering the earth with AGI.
That said, I also think there's a timeline in which a suitable AGI really does save us and other life forms from ourselves, but it's a fundamentally non-democratic process and a huge gamble, perhaps the last one we will ever make.
Any specific examples of non personal issues?
but i like to see it as an emphasized version of the inventor of comedy genre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristophanes