The fact that literally every society in history has had some version of the same mythology. I mean, maybe for the first 8,000 years or whatever, you could excuse this particular cognitive bias, but at this point it’s just embarrassing.
Hearing from my parents about the shitty, uncertain times they’ve already been through. Like the threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold war, the division of Germany, various economic crises… everything was eventually followed by better times. Will everything work out in the long run? Who knows. But I don’t think we’re on some kind of linear path where everything will just get worse, forever.
Very little as I disagree with the things continuing on.
We made it through the Cold War, but as any student of history will note, barely.
This has, I think, given us a false sense of confidence and it’s like the drunk driver who claims that because they survived last night they will do so again tonight.
I don’t 100% know things will go wrong but I do know that many different countries are A) pursuing nuclear weapons B) entering very politically unstable times and C) are just about to start hitting serious consequences as a result of climate change.
America went from the richest country in the world to the richest country in the world, freaked out and elected trump. How crazy will other, nuclear armed, countries get when food and water become serious issues?
There’s of course a good chance we pull through, drunk drivers tend to survive or the issue would’ve self corrected long ago. But I dislike being forced to participate in a global game of Russian roulette.
Diseases that were once a death sentence are now curable like HIV and Hep C.
That one article claiming to have cured a person with type I diabetes. I don’t really put stock into it but at one point HIV was thought to be incurable and they made breakthroughs like this, one at a time.
I’ll go. One thing that always gives me pause is crime rates are way down in the US.
It’s not like everybody woke up one day and “ah shit, everything’s fucked! How the hell did that happen. This is unprecedented!” The scale and tools might be new, but that’s about it.
The problem is that “continue on as normal” basically means to continually get progressively worse. Greed and oppression will increase. Division and bigotry will keep growing. Science and logic will be ignored or manipulated by those seeking power. This will ultimately culminate in some sort of horrifically deadly breaking point. Then we reset a little bit and start the cycle all over again and again until the humans go extinct.
I know that this is an incredibly pessimistic take, but that’s my view of current events.
It’s pessimistic but it does help calibrate you on what to be grateful for. Say, somehow, we are on the brink of a utopia and we just don’t know it. Except the people today won’t be alive to experience it. For us, this would be as good as it gets.
I actually think thats ideal. None of us could function in a proper utopia. We could not live in Star Trek. We have been far too corrupted by society, capitalism, and bigotry to ever properly function in such a society. Some could adapt better than others, but at the end of the day we’d be antithetical to such an advanced society. As such, we should prepare the world to transition towards such a society with the knowledge that it will be our grandchildren who truly bear the fruits of our work. A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit under.
I’m trying man but all I see is hate and fear win. Like just now I was thinking we know trumps going to make another authoritarian grab for power. No matter the results. I know they put some protections in if he loses and they seem pretty decent.
What about if he wins, though?
He’s signaled his intent should we not warn our citizens about what to do when certain things happen?
When Trump exercises the new powers that the supreme court granted him, what should the people do?
When Trump expells anyone not loyal to him from the government? What do we do?
When he opens concentration camps to round up immigrants, what should we be doing?
It’s all but too late but how stupid it would be if the DNC left it all up to chance.
*Hysteria*
Etymology
New Latin, from English hysteric, adjective, from Latin hystericus, from Greek hysterikos, from hystera womb; from the Greek notion that hysteria was peculiar to women and caused by disturbances of the uterus
First Known Use
1772
Apologies
