I’m old enough to remember a time when the future seemed bright and optimistic. It felt like everyone was excited about what’s next, and we wanted to get to the future more quickly. In the late 80’s and part of the 90’s we had tv shows like “Beyond 2000” that painted this utopian future, and all the promises of the democratization of ideas and information were promised by the internet.
Now it’s just wealth gaps, social media poisoning society at large, climate change intensifying, and the consolidation of the social middle class into a uniform lower class. We don’t see the seeds of any positive change, and only expect things to get worse.
The one thing I can say is that the future also looked bleak around WW2. We had come off a world war, pandemic, the Titanic sinking, and then went right into WW2. I could understand why people back then had even more dire survival types of concerns. Not that it makes us feel any better today, because the catalysts for progressive changes back then were horrifying events.
If anything that makes me feel worse, as the true fix for today’s issues mean we have to be super-fucked before it’ll get better. Right now we’re just fucked.