Most people are individually optimistic, but think the world is falling apart
hannahritchie.substack.com
hannahritchie.substack.com
The article is interesting as a way to understand how people are feeling. I think there are deeper questions to examine.
We don't necessarily "feel" it or "see" it, but the world has been changing dramatically for the last 50 years, or so. We all know this.
The introduction of key technology has resulted in accelerated changes. If we could step back from the everyday, we would see ourselves on a slope of change that is almost vertical.
This slope of change affects everything in our lives--society, culture, psychology, environment, government, etc.--there is nothing that can escape these changes.
The question of "the world falling apart" is really a question of how dynamic the change in the world has been over the last 50 years and our collective reticence to adaptation.
Some sense that we need to "return to better times" as a coping mechanism. Except the concept of "better times" is a fallacy. Intellectually we know this.
It is true that many of us enjoy the benefits of the changes in our ability to communicate, to entertain ourselves, to do our jobs, to travel, and so on. But some are unfortunately not able to enjoy the benefits, while certainly receiving the negative impacts.
I believe that we are all better off if we first recognize and accept the changes, and then find ways to navigate these changes collectively--even if this requires letting go of concepts that have worked in the past and/or adapting those ways to the new realities. It requires a new state of mind to begin to accomplish this. Reach out to those that need help in adapting.
Suspect it’s social media. Eg insta tells me London is turning into an unlivable hell hole. Meanwhile stats say lowest murder rate in a decade and better than basically every major us metro.
The ability to hold two conflicting thoughts and yet continue to function is a test of intelligence - be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
You don't need to lie yourself that the world is not falling apart, but being truly optimistic instead of nihilistic at the face of that is a difficult test for any intelligent human being.
In the scale of the universe and history, most of what you do is not important, but it is very important that you do it (rambles on about Gita, Ecclesiastes and Plato ...).
We are pulling people out of poverty like no other era has ever been able to do.
In my lifetime I expect we create a food factory that takes clean water, atmosphere, and electricity in. Automation happens, no humans, and it produces foods. We can simply build as many of these as we please, anywhere.
Literally everywhere I look things are going fantastically.
My grandparents were not rich at all, but they still owned houses and land that I will never be able to buy from the salary of an engineer or programmer. I own my apartment, but its true value is far less than of the big houses and ample lands on which my grandparents lived.
Moreover, while there is an abundance of cheap and reasonably healthy food around me, I cannot find at any price food with a comparable quality with that which I could eat at my grandparents, which was produced by themselves, from their cultivated land and from their animals.
There is an abundance of cheap clothes, cheap enough that there is no need to worry about repairing them, like in the distant past, but anything that I can buy in a normal shop has a much worse quality than the clothes that were available many decades ago. At least unlike with food, I can still find good quality clothes, but only if I order them online from various countries and from a different country for every kind, as there is no place where everything is optimum (e.g. I buy some things from Sweden, others from Scotland, others from Ireland, others from Austria, and so on).
There are of course things that are much better, mainly those with electronic components, but there are already many years since the prices of these have been growing almost continuously, so they have become less and less affordable.
In conclusion, while there are plenty of things that are much better than when I was young, there are also a lot of things that are much worse. It hard to say which is the balance between bad and good, especially because the things that have become worse are essential necessities, while those that have become better are mainly optional things, useful for research or entertainment.
I sincerely doubt that you can't find food better than your grandparents' by any objective measure. I suspect this is just nostalgia. I've lived and ate at rural family farms before, and while they often have better tomatoes than a typical supermarket and other tiny perks, if I had to pick between getting my food from the family farm and getting my food from a supermarket every day, I'd pick the supermarket without question. And I can always go to an upper-end market or a farmer's market if I really craved high-quality tomatoes.
I have never had any complaints about the quality of my clothes, including clothes bought at physical stores. I'm not sure why ordering clothes online is a downside.
No i wouldnt agree. Post birth surgeries, then age 4 infectious disease that is now taught in Med universities because of how badly that went, one of the few people ever in history. I had my own icu area after surgeries. After I recovered, I did start grade 1 like a normal kid. I made my first ever friend, who then got hit by a car and died.
few years later I had a particularly bad ragweed season and nearly died. Ended up a bubble boy for months. Few years after that the catholic priest thing happened to me.
Ya, I wouldnt say im lucky.
>My grandparents were not rich at all, but they still owned houses and land that I will never be able to buy from the salary of an engineer or programmer. I own my apartment, but its true value is far less than of the big houses and ample lands on which my grandparents lived.
I dont know where you live but in north america there's tons of opportunities like this. I could probably buy and renovate a house in Detroit for a few months salary.
>Moreover, while there is an abundance of cheap and reasonably healthy food around me, I cannot find at any price food with a comparable quality with that which I could eat at my grandparents, which was produced by themselves, from their cultivated land and from their animals.
Homesteading in north america is hard work but very rewarding. The governments practically pay for you to do it. But it is a ton of work.
>In conclusion, while there are plenty of things that are much better than when I was young, there are also a lot of things that are much worse. It hard to say which is the balance between bad and good, especially because the things that have become worse are essential necessities, while those that have become better are mainly optional things, useful for research or entertainment.
When i read your post, it reads like you're doing all the right things but are in the wrong place.
Consider the same water bottle but in different places.
At costco is .25cents.
At restaurant is 1$.
On a flight is 2$.
Middle of a desert, no other store for 50km, 5$.
On the spacestation its 10$.
I don't think your complaints about your life are true, see my other comment, but even if they were they make no impact in the big picture of "has the world gotten better or worse."
All of which are essentially meaningless with sub-replacement fertility rates. It's neat that homicide rates may plummet just before extinction ensues, but that doesn't do much to console me.
Come on, just think about this for a minute. Is your model that we're just going to have fewer children, so that each generation becomes smaller, until we run out of people?
Most people who think they are clever say this. I don't even doubt that you are, it's that you're lazy and never bothered to think about it. Yes, sub-replacement fertility inevitably leads to extinction and especially so for a species like humanity (given the root causes). If each generation is inevitably smaller than the last, then at some point the only smaller number is zero. And if the rate of fertility decline continues to accelerate, it isn't thousands of years in the future either. Since each youngest generation is raised by the older generations who had low fertility themselves, that youngest generation internalizes it at norm... so population can't plateau and drop no more (which would require the women in that youngest generation to grow up and all decide to have 2.1 children on average).
>Come on, just think about this for a minute. Is your model that we're just going to have fewer children,
In my model, each generation adopts the anthropological norms of western civilization which includes low fertility, but inevitably sets it as their ceiling. They can have fewer than that norm for any reason (bad luck, economic woes, whatever), but they'll never have more. And if they *do* have fewer, they've just set the norm even lower for the subsequent generation. This and dozens of other factors are quite alarming.
Massive decreases in population change culture. The Western cultural context we have today won't just magically persist, converting new people, until we run out of people. At worst, we'll end up in a world where the majority of the population consists of the descendants of current high-fertility subcultures. Even that is extremely unlikely. Fertility rates only become a population-level problem a few generations down the line, at which point we are almost guaranteed to have artificial wombs and other technology that changes the dynamics of reproduction entirely.
Fertility is worth worrying about because it may cause fewer resources for the elderly, particularly in some acutely affected nations. It is not an extinction risk.
Plagues, wars, yeh. But this decline works differently. You don't wake up 3 years later with tens of million missing. You just get older, everyone about your age gets older. You die of old age at about the right time... maybe a little more than life expectancy estimated. And the generation younger than you, same thing, just you're ahead of the race.
There's never anything big enough to change culture here. Not in any way that matters. And for all the thinking you've done, the best you can come up with is "nyuh uh, something will magically make it all change just before it'd get REAL bad".
>At worst, we'll end up in a world where the majority of the population consists of the descendants of current high-fertility subcultures.
These aren't little dots of mold in a petri dish. The high-fertility subcultures don't survive this any more than anyone else does. The Duggars don't get to have 400 grandchildren, even if they had 20 children. The Amish don't get to stay the Amish... too dependent on their host culture. Sure, they can build a barn in a day but there's not a single fucking Amish nail factory (or iron foundry, or ore mines) anywhere. They don't weave their own cloth. They're doomed too.
>Fertility rates only become a population-level problem a few generations down the line, at which point we are almost guaranteed to have artificial wombs
Science fiction magic will save us! Nevermind that Xi will be able to grow entire clone armies, that's a small price to pay for magic that will save us from our own inability to fuck.
>It is not an extinction risk.
Says the guy whose best idea comes from bad genre novels.
Imagine your prediction pans out until there are 10 million people worldwide, the size of a large city. It won't, because this entire premise is deeply ridiculous, but imagine. How is this society going to maintain the same culture we have now? Are all these people unable to recognize that low fertility is leading to extinction, despite the very obvious historical data, or do they just not care? How long do you think people will even have the capacity to keep producing and distributing birth control?
But the amount of doom-and-gloom messaging skyrocketed in the period and most people tend to believe the news and think that things suck for everyone else, just they are doing ok personally. And something in the middle for people they can personally observe like their town or district.
Idk what's wrong about it. Fixing the messaging is unlikely because positive messages are not newsworthy and not clickable.
WARNING: This is going to be a rant.
- I can't change my job. There are no more jobs available in my area. All competitors got bought or went bankrupt during Covid. I have no leverage for better wages. If I get fired (not likely, but just saying), I'm screwed. I'll have to move in a bigger city. And even then, chances for a better job are very slim. I'm not paying rent or mortgage here, but I'll have to if I move. Bigger city also means more time wasted commuting.
- I almost had enough money to buy a house in another city. Then Covid came, prices exploded. Now I can't. I'm getting older and each year the max. bank loan I can get is one year shorter.
- I had to replace my car. I had enough money to buy new and I wanted a PHEV instead. But then reality hit me: all new cars have road sign beeping, lane change beeping, tyre pressure beeping, service reminder beeping (by calendar instead of distance), Ecall tracking, DCM non-removable, head unit not replaceable, etc. etc. I can't buy that! I had to buy a 10y old used car instead. I took the same model as the old one, but different year/gen, and it is worse in almost every way. I still couldn't escape the service reminder, a suggested gear indicator that's always wrong, a more powerful (+20hp) engine that feels waaay weaker and consumes a bit more than the old one, no feedback in the steering wheel even in "sport" mode, less powerful air conditioning, less ergonomic interior, worse mirrors, worse view ahead, worse view diagonal due to thicker and more inclined roof pillars, wind noise from the left front door, etc.
- I can't upgrade my PC. I'm trying to vote with my wallet and there's nothing to vote for. I'm stuck at Phenom II 1100. I'm against UEFI and secure boot and, except Longsoon, all decent CPUs are locked down with signed firmware. The GPUs are all too expensive relative to how very few recent games are worth playing and how much time I have to play them.
- I can't watch Netflix anymore. I'm trying to vote with my wallet again and not buy a closed-source spyware-infested media player. I've been using a RPi4 with LibreELEC. Netflix plugin for Kodi (CastagnaIT) is abandoned and stopped working 2 months ago.
- At job, mandatory upgrade to Win 11. This week, font antialiasing got enabled after an update and I can't find any setting to disable it. All I see is a blur, my eyes hurt.
- Also at job: new colleague, Facebook generation, if you know what I mean.
- This year the last 3G phone network is going down. I searched for a phone replacement and I can't find any. I have just 2 requirements: 1) call and answer with one hand without looking at the screen and 2) auto-record phone conversations so I don't have to search for a pen and paper all the time. Nothing matches. I bought a Fairphone, the last one with an audio jack, and I'm keeping it in a drawer until the Nokia stops working.
- Electricity got a lot more expensive. Gas too (for heating, hot water). The other gas (for car) too.
- Food got worse at my favorite restaurant. Probably the cook emigrated.
- I can't find any classic style pants with nice wide accesible pockets (insert hand from the back toward the front of the pants). All pants are tight at the hips and have jeans-style vertical pockets (insert hand from the top, straight down) that I can't access while sitting and without scratching the back of my hands.
I could go on and on. I'm trying to think of some good things that happend in the last 10y and there are very few.
Do you mean font smoothing? Start -> run -> SYSDM.CPL Advanced tab -> Settings -> Then uncheck Smooth edges of screen font to disable font soothing
- I used to be able to buy a phone I could back up. Right now, in the name of privacy, I can no longer do this, except if I share all my data with Google via their cloud option.
- I used to be able to afford media players that presented the internal storage as a USB stick. Nowadays, not even mobile phones can do that!
- I used to be able to search for a term, and get a cached web page displaying a site at a time it definitely had the search term. Now, nobody offers a similar service.
why is it so hard for people to understand that naive should be spelled with 'i' because that one is part of English alphabet and keyboard, while the 2-dotted one isn't?