Ask HN: Are people optimistic about the future?
Do you think humans in the future in general will be more or less happy than they are now?
"این نیز بگذرد"
Attributed to Attar of Nishapur (1142-1221), who was beheaded by Genghis Kahn's Mongols. In one of Attar's fables, a powerful king gathered a group of wise men and asked them to produce a ring that would make him happy when sad, and sad when happy. After much consultation among themselves, the wise men presented the king with a ring inscribed "This, too, will pass".
- https://archive.org/details/quoteverifierwho00keye/page/160/...
We live now in bad days. This, too, will pass.
It will certainly pass, I’m about 50-100 years after untold suffering to anyone who is not upper class
do we? if it gets worse, we are living in good days now.
So housing and now cars are marketed to the rich and wealthy, we're losing things we took for granted.
Anonymity is basically dead on the internet. Worse being they don't just want my ID to participate but scans of my face, God knows who they are selling this data too.
We have less and less agency over anything. In the U.S both political parties are essentially the same. If you are an outsider like Massie, Planter or Omar they will successfully destroy your ability to represent the public. The game is rigged.
The bad times will continue and worsen until a cataclysmic global event resets the system. We'll see.
For example I voted for Claudia de la Cruz in the 2024 election because she was on the ballot in Virginia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_De_la_Cruz_2024_presid...
There’s no party, neither the Democratic and especially not the Republican Party would come anywhere near these policy positions and I’m in support of 100% of the positions they seem obvious to me as correct.
The parties are basically lighting rods at this point. They claim that they're for this or against that, they would do this, we should do that, and if only we... blablabla. But in the end, nothing concrete ever changes. Sure there are adjustments here or there that quickly get canceled by the next administration, but nothing systemic is ever really changing.
- SCOTUS would be radically different in composition without a GOP President being elected in 2016. That would have preserved post-Watergate reforms that prevented broad, sweeping executive actions that go against Congress's wishes. So at best Trump II could only look like a Trump I
- We wouldn't have attacked Iran. Continued closing of Hormuz has pretty far-reaching consequences
- EU might not be trying as hard to be as independent on defense matters, and the US would be active in Ukraine
- US would not be as ambivalent about Taiwan under a non-Trump administration
There are many places where things wouldn't have changed much. But electing Trump has had far reaching consequences to the constitutional system.
As of today, the EU has not done anything concrete and real to be more military independent. Yes they have created "institutions" and "programs" and enacted "regulatory changes" (things they love to do in Europe), but concretely their military capabilities have not moved at all. These are just the thing the EU has been doing for a long time with never any result.
Again, do you have actual data to predict what the US position vis a vis Taiwan/China would be with a different administration?
What I will give you is that yes, Trump is way more disruptive than the previous tag team game the blues and the reds were playing before. I still don't think it will change much. Trump has not done anything truly radical.
1. Iraq War (how does President Al Gore convince us to go to war in Iraq?!?)
2. ACA (President McCain passes the Affordable Care Act or something like it)
3. SCOTUS and downstream consequences (How does a President Hillary Clinton appoint a SCOTUS that overturns Roe v. Wade, to name a few)
Those are fairly preposterous, so I don't know how you can hold "it doesn't matter"
On Iran War itself, we didn't attack Iran for decades :) Past Presidents knew about the risks to the Strait of Hormuz, and this president clearly ignored numerous warnings.
(a) Past Presidents did not ignore these warnings, it's well known this would be a move from Iran from military planners (b) Current president clearly did (c) "It never matters" doesn't hold, because clearly
Hormuz being a known / ignored risk is well known
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/us/politics/trump-iran-st... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/13/goal-plan-ir...
ACA didn't happen because of Obama for example.
But global property has never been lower. We’ve never lived in a time with such access to medicine and vaccines. We have cheap solar and wind some argued would be impossible.
But in reality much of what you say is only part of the picture.
On politics. We’ve never had a time since 1900 of higher political engagement. Turnout in elections has rarely been so high as the last two decades.
I also disagree that the parties are that uniform. We have Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Abigail Spanberger. The GOP has JD Vance types who are little like classic hawkish Lindsey Graham republicans.
Tech billionaires have never been as consistently unpopular[1]. And data center activism has been pretty universal across partisan lines
Finally housing prices in the US finally flattened after a big spike in COVID. And housing completions have increased [2]. Car prices have actually fallen in recent years [3]
1 - https://yougov.com/en-us/ratings/business-figures?sortBy=fam...
2 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=27&eid=20985
Side note: nobody else seems to have mentioned climate change yet in this thread. The fact that we are currently in the process of determining, through our CO2 emissions, what the medium to long term future of human society looks like seems...incredibly significant! And yet people don't seem to want to talk about it. Is it ignorance? Or resignation?
The event that sealed it for me, was after decades of hearing about how we need to reduce our energy consumption to save our species, someone made an infinite energy pit that financially rewards people for throwing as much energy into the pit as possible. Bitcoin could not have come at a worse time. The modern LLM craze is not helping either but at least that isn't a literal infinite energy pit.
To quote the philosopher Robert Burnham:
> You say the ocean's rising like I give a shit
> You say the whole world's ending, honey, it already did
> You're not gonna slow it, Heaven knows you tried
> Got it? Good, now get inside"What would happen if we burned all known fossil fuel reserves?"
The results would be truly catastrophic. This framing leads one to understand that carbon-based fuel must end, no ifs ands or buts. I feel like that should be the question asked, as the answer is far clearer than a 1C vs 2C debate.
I used to expect that I wouldn't experience homeless retirement.
But with the shift toward a 4-income economy (and the shift among the powerful, from social good to austerity), it is increasingly unclear how my geriatric self will stay housed.
But (an important "but"), first, while resources are limited, there may be enough for all of the humanity (probably; at least that's what I think, maybe I'm wrong), so by using some resources to "just exist" you're not killing someone else because they still have some resources to just exist as well - so in terms of individuals this logic may, maybe, apply to billionaires but not to people who "just exist"; and second, it's not all that simple, and while there's some "grain of truth", the real world is a bit more complex.
Exactly what I think, personally.
To illustrate how far humanity as a species has come, I’ve posed this question a number of times to people:
If you had to be reborn as a random human somewhere on earth, and the only thing you get to pick is the year you’re born, what year would you choose? You don’t get to pick your country, race, gender, sexuality, intelligence, socioeconomic status, etc, only the year.
What would you choose?
However, I think current tech leaders have betrayed society, and the system of corruption that allowed it has seen no equal in human history in terms of breadth and scale.
30 year industry veterans can't get a job, nobody can afford a house or a family, and once-proponents of possible stopgaps like UBI are deciding "nah".
I'm not actually sure there's any "democratic" means that can solve it (at least as defined by political/advertising lobbies buying power from an increasingly uneducated/mal-educated populace).
But I am hopeful that people won't stand for it and we will find a new way.
The automobile brought us mobility. Private property rights for individuals brought some security for a section of society. Awareness of children's risk from a small % of men led to some children avoiding uniquely awful mistreatment.
However, car culture, trespassing culture and unwarranted stranger-danger fears have eradicated key+critical parts of childhood: Particularly free ranging and regular hours of adult-free peer time.
When society examines the outcomes of this loss, they blame kids' screen time (the screens that kids use to compensate for what we took from them). This amps up my pessimism.
But I also see kids rise to the challenge of our increasingly complex society. I find modern youth to be broadly more capable than my generation and far more understanding than my parent's generation (WWII vets). I draw real optimism from this.
I think humans will be about the same in terms of happiness, due to how quickly to acclimate to our situation. But they'll look back on us with shock at how we ever lived like this!
I do not think people are optimistic about the future. Back in the late 90's/early 2000s yes, people were very optimistic. Everyone was so thrilled to get to the 21st century. Now, people seem clinically depressed, technology is no longer something designed to make you happy, or make your life easier. It is just a battle to control your attention and sell you garbage.
Will people be happier in the future? Honestly I don't know. Anyone can "decide" to be happy to some degree. As a large group/society, no I don't think people will be happy.
The world's first trillionaire spent the day he became the world's first trillionaire celebrating by trying to incite a racial pogrom in a distant country.
The knee-jerk response: What else is there to be optimistic about?
Optimism won't help you much with the past, sometimes not even the present.
I think humans will find happiness in whatever is within reach that is most rewarding.
Whether that will always be enough to overcome the certain amount of despair that will never disappear, standing by to make a resurgence of its own, seems to depend most strongly on the amount of energy people actually put into making each other happy. Why wouldn't direct cause and effect be as excellent an indicator as it should be?
At one time those "calories" of humane energy added up daily to more fossil fuel than was burned, even if we were cave dwellers back then. For most of history you probably can't say that "human energy" exceeded "inhuman energy" for very long, when you take into consideration livestock and other forms of progress. But definitely for most of pre-history, as far as energy goes, when the "human energy" wildly exceeds the "inhuman energy" is when the whole bunch of humans thrive as far as the eye can see. Otherwise if it's too spotty there's no telling how much backsliding there's going to be or where it's going to come from.
Keep in mind, for modern man, prehistory is the vast majority of all time, which made us what we are. Recorded history is merely a recent snapshot, exclusively after all that prehistory was forgotten.
If there really is that strong of leverage today, where humanity could continue to increase faster than the rate-of-increase from the inhumanity component, isn't that what it took to get through periods of some of the most animalistic behavior? When you do the math, probability is, some of those regressive periods lasted eons. Think of how bad it's always been when inhumanity is known to get the upper hand and has the energy to grow faster than humanity can keep up with. And those are the few occasions we know about, which are insignificant in number, since by comparison almost everything happened before recorded history. But there's more concentrated energy now than ever, and it's being leveraged sometimes to no good whatsoever like never before possible, it's going to require a whole lot more human effort put toward pure happiness. Or you might end up with one of those unhappy eons if malaise or worse is what turns out to be scaled up more than anything.
I guess with the cave men in mind you can be as "optimistic about the past" as you can be and it's no guarantee of future performance any more than it was for them :\
What is "everybody's" energy being leveraged for and what could it be doing to spread more happiness anyway?
It doesn't have to be profound to sum up quite nicely.
"Be excellent to each other."
This just doesn't compute for some people.
Then there's zoning laws...
Perhaps not a common perspective (especially among NYC residents, city life offers a very different tradeoff), but just wanted to share that a real person does wish to be a “farmer” of sorts.
Also for the record, the vast majority of my social circle is outside NYC, mainly in the western part of the US.
If you look back you probably think in certain ages people were really miserable, but people knows how to adapt and eventually they got used to it.
I think there will be happy people in the future, but it won’t be a straight line, nor will everyone be happy at the same time.
Things can and will get better, no matter how bad you think it is now or will get. A change could take 1000 years, but change is inevitable. And all things considered, thing are pretty good now, especially if you turn off the news. I just watched some compilation videos of Europeans in the US for the World Cup talking about how amazing everything is in the US and how they’ve been lied to their whole life. Chowing down on Texas bbq, in awe of Costco and Walmart, loving the beaches, free refills and self-service on soft drinks, finally understanding the value of air conditioning, etc.
The bad stuff is there if you look for it, of course, but so is the good.
If I were to make a comparison happiness is the sub 3 seconds 0-100 that you can achieve with your sportscar, or skydiving.
WHat you are referring to is the Concorde flying at 80000ft at mach 2.12
That's impressive but won't bring about the same limbic happiness and excitement as the aforementioned experiences.
And actually it's how evolution brings about improvement, everybody is trying to improve and collectively as humanity incredible progress happens over time but no individual can take joy or credit from it and thus everybody has to keep pushing to bring about personal improvement that would bring happiness that in turn on a large scale would produce large improvement at the societal level
Optimistic : if surveillance becomes benign to good people and all bad people get caught and put away the future looks bright to me. But I doubt that will happen.
If robots and AI become a positive factor in our lives and economies maybe combined with 3d printing and scanning, tool making and so on will it empower us.
Maybe chinas dominance will be a good thing in the future and our fears will be in vain. Maybe democracy will prevail even in the east.
Pessimistic : surveillance will strangle all innovation and happiness out of society.
AI will take over and large corporations will own everything including political power and even countries.
Geopolitical struggle will lead to war and currency collaps.
I mostly think we are heading in the pessimistic scenario but I still hope.
None of this is an exaggeration. Everyone is outraged about it, and there are often riots but they’re put down with tear gas and rubber bullets. So every day the sun and GDP continue to rise.
To me this is the only realistic long term outcome of mass unemployment if the tech companies’ visions are realised. UBI is a fantasy. Everyone in the camps is on welfare, it just isn’t enough.
Rising inflation, especially in housing prices, is demoralizing, where one’s efforts to save is quickly evaporated thanks to a combination of bad fiscal/monetary policy and housing regulations that benefit existing homeowners over prospective ones.
Personal computing was one of the nice bright spots of modern society. I grew up during the rise of the personal computer, the Web, and mobile computing. Computing felt liberating, empowering, and enjoyable. Unfortunately major players have been able to gain oligopoly power over computing. Enshittification is the norm in modern software, and it’s difficult for upstarts to compete against entrenched oligopolies. The generative AI boom and the massive run on the RAM and storage markets have caused massive price hikes, which now threaten to price us out of personal computing. The one area that has long resisted price inflation has succumbed to it. It seems like we are getting priced out of living.
Every year gets better than the one before. More technology, more opportunity!
Why would I have any fun believing that things have peaked?
Though if you asked people this 25 years ago or 50 years ago, or 100 years ago they would say the same exact thing
Yeah there was poverty, and social issues and blabla, but we're talking average and trends here.
Outside of computing, Y2K was extremely hyped. We were entering the future!
if trend continues, I am not optimistic.
The right scale is not years or decades but maybe centuries. I recently read the powerhouse book “Pandemic” by Sonia Shah, among whose amazing ideas is a history of the ideas of medicine and germ theory in the last few hundred years. As idiotic as the Covid responses have been, they were way way better, not only than the European response to Plague, but to European response to cholera from 170 years ago. We are as a group slow learners, but seem to continue handling each recurrent example of a problem slightly better; our Achilles heel is slow moving disasters than just happen once, e.g. the carbon burn.
(Offtopic, another fascinating idea from the book is that both sexual reproduction and death or individuals may be evolved responses to microbial attacks, mixing up the variety in the species so the microbes can’t over adapt to the genome).
But my personal opinion is it depends on the timeframe. I don't think humanity will go extinct. I don't think all of society will collapse and everyone will end up back in some medival type situation until the world becomes uninhabitable or something.
Given enough time, I think society will recover, people will live happily for at least a while and things will look up again.
But I do worry about the short to medium term. More and more of the population seems like it's becoming unemployable due to increasing automation and usage of AI, prices in most areas have skyrocketed to the point that basic necessities are now almost a pipe dream, and the entirety of society seems like it's become like Hollywood or YouTube; a bitter dog eat dog situation where a tiny percentage at the top rake in oversized returns and everyone else fights for scraps. I genuinely worry that for many people, "hope you become rich and famous through being an influencer/artist (or even worse, gambling)" might be the most plausible way to get a decent middle class life.
And I definitely worry about the political situation. Feels like a major war is a decade or so away at this point, and that things like authoritarianism being on the rise is going to cause havoc in many societies.
Yes I am optimistic.
I honestly have no idea. I strongly want to be optimistic and I am generally an optimist by nature. But recent events have made it hard to justify a lot of optimism. I have a fear that we are rapidly sliding into a straight-up cyberpunk dystopia to rival anything from sci-fi.
And sadly it's not just what's going on with technology that fosters my doubts. It's the apparent surge of enthusiasm worldwide - but particularly in the United States - for various brands of authoritarianism and fascism, the wholesale abandonment of Enlightenment ideals about individual freedom and the nature of justice, the loss of respect for science, logic, and reason, and the rising preference for various brands of mysticism, superstition, and magical thinking over rational thinking. Not to mention more overt nationalism, jingoism, bigotry, attacks on minorities of all flavors... Yeah, I gotta be honest, optimism is hard to come by right now.
All in all, this has led to me choosing to drop Facebook (which was the main place I was exposed to a lot of public discussion on this stuff) and to aggressively tune my Twitter feed to eliminate most political stuff. I had to do it to protect my own mental health. And while I feel guilty about the sense of abdicating my responsibility to be involved and to play a role in trying to improve things, I have had to accept that there's not a lot I can do as an individual - at least in terms of influencing other people. I still vote, donate to campaigns, donate to charities I support (EFF, for example) and so on though. I'm not completely checking out, but I was getting way too stressed before to keep dealing with this shit.
Anyway, sorry for the rant. But despite all that, I still hold out some hope for a better future. Time will tell, I guess.
Medicine is often times not only bitter, but outright toxic to the body. It needs to be, because it has a job to do.
I’m not saying you’re doing anything wrong, I’m saying there are people who have had a head start on your current conundrum and who could not, at their own time and place, find a way out. Will the same happen to you? I’m not an oracle, but I hope not.
Personal bias: I’m in slight favor of nationalism. The citizens of a country must put themselves, other citizens and the country first. Otherwise they will wake up tomorrow without it.
I'm not really following your logic there. If the argument is that people choosing to disengage allows the rise of authoritarianism, I could buy some of that. And I'll accept whatever guilt I deserve. But I don't see how that could be the proximate cause of the surge of enthusiasm for authoritarianism. I believe it has more to do with macro-scale world events. And I'm sure one could construct a "just so story" to run the trail back as far as one wants, but I think an awful lot of it can be traced back to the 2008 financial crisis. That along with the continued deterioration of the middle class, rising wealth inequality, etc. And, as much as I kinda hate to say it, I think there's a hint of lingering White angst over having had a Black POTUS for the first time not so terribly long ago.
I’m not saying you’re doing anything wrong,
No worries. And for what it's worth, I'm not - for various reasons - going to elaborate on everything that's on my mind, or every action I still take, or hope to take, in the name of trying to support the aforementioned "freedom and Enlightenment ideals". I'm not trying to write an essay here on HN or anything. :-) My reasoning is in part that if I stop sending time engaging with people on Facebook / Twitter / etc. then I can spend that time on higher value activities.
That said, I'm just a regular Joe (er, "Phil") and I'm no hero. I figure I do what I can in the end I can live with that.
No, I am saying they tried the thing you tried, and realized they are no better off for it, and eventually landed upon the hypothetical that authoritarianism may be the thing that would make the difference. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong either, just that enough of people’s lives converged to such a conclusion that it has become an issue. Once upon a time, they too tried to take the high road.
There is absolutely nothing unprecedented about current downturn that history hasn’t seen before. And current life standards on average even in worst of the places are far higher than they were in same places in the past (probably with some exceptions).
Pay attention to the vibes and evidence in this thread.
Ask yourself how this community slots into your media diet.
There are many positive developments
- We have technology that could actually curb carbon emissions and decouple global economy from carbon. Clean energy is often cheaper than dirty energy, and getting cheaper.
- Trump oddly has helped decouple the world from carbon by being utterly incompetent in Iran
- the upper middle class in the US has never been larger [1]
- in 1981, 41% of the worlds population was in extreme poverty, now that’s down to 10% [2]
- Global infant mortality is way down compared to 1990 [3]
- life expectancy globally has gone from mid 60s to mid 70s [4]
I could go on. But holistically the world IS getting better in quite a few areas.
Follow subreddits like /r/PoliticalOptimism Or /r/OptimistsUnite if you want to
1- https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/upper-middle-class-income-u... 2- https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-in-ex...
3-https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/topics/topic-detail...
4 - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?utm_sour...