Interesting how people who have been through acute hardship, meaning random and senseless death of their immediate community, are less apathetic. Ie your parents', my grandparents', generation. Something about the human animal does poorly with existential precarity but no actual hardship.
If you are any good at mechanical engineering or math, you can find a job in those fields. If you're not very good, learn Javascript. It works itself out.
I think you are on to something in your second sentence. To what extent do you perceive these social effects being a result of the cultural character of those places that your classmates or their parents have emigrated from? It seems that affluent (or at least professional class) immigrants of the past three decades are very attuned to status/conformity, and so your experience may well be outside the 'norm' of the US. Keep your mind open as you grow up and meet people from across this country, there is an exciting amount of thought/values diversity if one looks for it in good faith. Focus on the upsides in the hyper-competitive nature of your current peers, they will hopefully mellow with age and wisdom (and will be extremely capable!).
Maybe he thinks that this would be many separate conflicts because of the different powers that partook and over different decades? Does seem to be a big deal.
I think the ties that bind in the Anglosphere are pretty much done for. These countries are basically malls that people move-to to get stuff, I think we need a little more collectivism - at least on the state/provincial level to be better balanced (US perspective).
You should read 'The Storm Before the Storm' by Mike Duncan. It details the fall of the Roman Republic and highlights the role played by land consolidation and the social dislocation that gave rise to the empire. For better or worse, it was definitely less stable.
I lived in Vancouver, BC for three years having moved from Ames, Iowa. It was my first longish-term experience in a big city in which poor people are 'atomized' by their inability to make due in their current circumstances.The USA and Canada are big places, and I think that problems are more regional (varying widely intrastate/intraprovince) than the huge nets we draw around nation-states. My only takeaway from Van and Ontario are that Canada has a housing/employment location problem that needs addressing!
I can't really speak from experience on the Canadian mid-major metros, as I only experienced 'big' Vancouver. But there is a bevy of American cities where you can actually save and have little ones (Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Sun Belt, Des Moines). Maybe it's like that in Ontario? Anyways, looking over the next twenty years of my life, the opportunity cost of living in Vancouver was huge, and not just because of the exchange rate.
It's not quite that rosy on the guns and butter issues there. I moved to Van for grad school from the Midwest looking for opportunity, worked for two years after my degree and then moved back stateside. One makes so little money there, housing is really steep, and it's hard to responsibly start a family. But you do get to feel good about that other stuff.
The improved density and efficienty allows population that necessitates the use of factory farming, petrochemical based fertilizers, massive infrastructure, traffic congestion etc. Per individual the carbon footprint is smaller (until you get to the really rural poor), but overall the effect of this process is more consumption on net. It's just the way it is. If we really wanted to go green, we'd all be on mopeds and have one shirt.
I hear you, and agree. An individual human being living to increase the fitness of others would be considered extrememly mentally ill, possibly toxic in their inability to sustain themselves. When this is taken to a societal scale (ie many industrialized nations devouring themselves inside out for the benefit of a few at the very top and helping to pull many globally out of poverty) it is seen as somehow a sustainable thing. I'm not here to debate whether or not this is what should be done, but clearly the demographics of this way of being are the human equivalent of 'colony collapse disorder'.
Imo it is relative poverty within communities that is most damaging. This causes learned helplessness and deprivation of self respect. That is part of the reason the world is getting more unstable-- because it's shrinking and so people are comparing their lots to an unprecedented degree.