Life expectancy has already lowered quite a bit from the pandemic we can't put a lid on, and when (if) that settles down cataclysmic climate change will continue its work. Sorry but the future seems quite bleak.

At any point of human history, one could convince themselves that the future is bleak. There had been pandemics and plagues, cold and hot wars, revolutions and dangerous technologies and -isms.

And yet in retrospect humanity's trend has been of greater ingenuity, connectives, safety and well-being. Sure, it's possible that THIS is the high point and it'll all go down-hill from here, but that's like being a broken clock - if you think every thing will kill you, you will eventually be right.

But I see no reason to think like that. For example, sure the pandemic sucks but relative to what it could have been, especially in such a connected world, humanity is handling it pretty well. There seems to be resilience in our economies, supply chains, and people - that when they are tested they have bent and strained but not broken. Like a ship that gets rocked but doesn't sink in a storm that's actually a GREAT sign.

I can related to your emotional state though. I remember walking in NYC a few days after 9/11, and seeing a half-completed building on 42nd street and thinking: this will never get finished. Nobody will ever dare come or invest or live in NYC - we're doomed and dead.

That building is worth a billion dollars now and that neighborhood is thriving. It's important to remember that feeling of gloom and realizing that it doesn't always (in fact, most of the time) pan out as we feared the worst.

>Sure, it's possible that THIS is the high point and it'll all go down-hill from here, but that's like being a broken clock - if you think every thing will kill you, you will eventually be right.

It's not about present society being a global maximum, it's about present society being a local maximum. The lessons from history are often that things can and do get worse, sometimes for generations, before improving again later. It is absolutely possible (and I would argue probable) that life will get worse for a long while before improving.

> (and I would argue probable) that life will get worse for a long while before improving.

Sure. Like I said, you can do this at any point in time and if enough people do that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy so it's better not.

Out of curiosity, I took a look at your submission history (which is vast!) and it's 90% doom and gloom across a vast array of topics. I do think living with such a negativity bias is very disempowering - and not to mention not fun. I don't mean to be stupid and blindly optimistic (I manage risk for a living among other things) but like I said, living with certainty that everything will be terrible will ruin your life.

Like I said, since dawn of man, people had reason to believe what you believe. And those who really believed it would have no reason to build anything, learn anything, invest in anything, have children etc - why do any of that if the world is ending.

But the world is inherited by those who DO do those things - everything we have, everything we are, everything we're investing in - is there because someone in the past believed that the future is worth the work. So just be careful how much of this your let into your psyche because it will lead to you to a dead end

In general I think low expectations for the (near) future of humanity and depression are correlated, but intriguingly to me, it's not an extremely tight correlation. Some people think the ship's going down and manage to party and have a good time. Others aren't particularly extreme in either emotional direction even as they evince extreme pessimism. And I imagine the reverse is true too, although I don't recall seeing it.

You're talking about human nature. You're seeing the problems only. But humans were "like this" forever.

EG: you're dismal about covid because some people won't get the shot. But in the 80s/90s you'd be dismal because people weren't practicing safe sex despite AIDS, and you'd draw that line to a depressing conclusion. And yet in reality, somehow the world moved towards a much better place despite those things.

Same with COVID - you are obsessing on a small number of people not getting vax and getting depressed, but you are ignoring for example super-fast vax development, global awareness, willingness of governments to move in and out of different disease control regimes, etc. Those are wildly optimistic things, but you don't let those things encourage you, instead you seem to seek out the bad stuff no matter how small and and form your view on that.

I'm generally an optimist but do think this time might be different. Never before have so many people had such access to information that they could become convinced they understand anything after a little research, and never before have producers of fake news had such reach. Yesterday's predominance of political apathy seems to have been much more stable than today's predominance of vehement polarization.

Conspiracy theorists used to be everywhere, but in small numbers and not very homogeneous; now they are plentiful and coordinated enough to lead to outcomes like the Jan 6 insurrection or the vaccine denialism gripping something like 30% of Americans.

>And yet in reality, somehow the world moved towards a much better place despite those things.

It's not "somehow", you're glossing over the very real losses and very avoidable tragedies (fed by bigotry and fear) that happened during the AIDS crisis, which is my whole point. Progress isn't free and by ignoring the real losses and avoidable tragedies we repeat the same mistakes. That's why we have to confront the uncomfortable parts of the past and present. If we only focus on the superficial elements of success and progress, we make problems more difficult to actually confront.

But isn't the point that despite the very real and avoidable tragedies along the way, things have continued to improve quite quickly? So as we continue, we can expect more preventable tragedies (whatever "preventable" actually means), but also more progress to benefit the vast majority of us who do make it?

I don't think we need to get bent out of shape about the aspects of human nature that cause horror and tragedy, since they seem so greatly overshadowed by aspects of the same nature which are driven to continuously improve. The good guys are winning, by a lot.

Thank you for explaining my post in different words - I agree with your summary of it.

I don't think you're living up to your name though!

>progress to benefit the vast majority of us who do make it

So what level of sacrifice should be required of those that don't make it? Going back to the AIDS example, government involvement was delayed because of bigotry, because it only affected people who didn't make it. Our economy is currently propped up by low wage workers both locally and globally who aren't making it. We don't do a good job at taking care of the sick and the poor. We're doing a terrible job at taking care of the environment. As you both have said, none of this is new, but it doesn't have to be this way. We know how to solve many of society's problems and we choose not to do so. If the core reason for these things is "human nature" and we shouldn't try to change, I don't think I have the defeatist attitude in that case. My attitude comes from seeing solutions that we aren't even trying to do, not that we -shouldn't- try.

>The good guys are winning, by a lot.

I don't see the good guys winning. The good guys currently have the high score, but the bad guys are on the upswing and scoring points on the good guys, who are just standing around.

> So what level of sacrifice should be required of those that don't make it

The same as it has always been for all living things: pain, suffering, and death.

> low wage workers both locally and globally who aren't making it

Pretty sure quality of life is up by pretty much every measure for "low wage workers" both locally and globally.

> none of this is new, but it doesn't have to be this way.

> We know how to solve many of society's problems and we choose not to do so.

You could have made this statement at any point in history, and people might agree with you. If this is the only way it ever has been, why do you think it doesn't have to be this way?

We know in theory. There is a vast, uncrossable gulf between theory and practice, as various communist experiments have shown. There is no known solution to ingroup/outgroup tendency, sociopathy or naked self-interest.

> If the core reason for these things is "human nature" and we shouldn't try to change

We should totally try to change! But we shouldn't expect to succeed, and we shouldn't be surprised or disappointed when awful things happen. We should instead realize that, looking at the past few centuries of history, this is an amazing time to be alive, by every metric. Better to accept humanity the way that it is, space rockets and genocides and all, and realize that it's still a net-positive, than despair that humanity doesn't hold up to some sort of fictional ideal.

> Wages are stagnant and certainly haven't kept pace with productivity

Wages have never been tied to productivity. They're derived from supply and demand for labour. Gold miners are very productive fiscally speaking, but they don't make any more than coal miners.

> Metrics don't capture "having to pee in a bottle" because of work demands.

Why do you think people shouldn't have to pee in bottles? Or be exposed to dangerous conditions? You seem to be operating from a moral ideal that gives a very clear idea of how things ought to be. Where do you derive it from?

> Was it true in 2500 BC that they had the resources to feed everyone on the planet consistently? 1500 AD?

You'd be surprised how much grain was hoarded by ancient Pharaohs and Medieval Lords. It was likely enough to prevent much of the starvation their populations experienced. We could always feed more people than we do, and people with wealth and power have always preferred expensive trinkets and shows of status to feeding the hungry.

The US is fundamentally build on individual liberty. This idea is in opposition to involuntary social obligation. If a person doesn't want to use their wealth/time/energy to the benefit of others, do they have to? Should you force them? To what degree? Are people entitled to be helped or should they have to ask? People disagree axiomatically on these things.

In absence of an oracle to tell us who is right and who is wrong, and given that we are all morally equal, it seems to follow that no one has a strong case to impose their answers to these questions on anyone else. Why are you so sure that helping people is "right"? Why do you think everyone has to work towards your idea of a "healthy society"?

> So why do we structure society to encourage and reward these behaviors instead of trying to mitigate their effects?

I'd say our current social structure is the best we've got for mitigating these effects. Entrepreneurship allows people to harness their self-interest to the benefit of others. Democracy limits the effects of corruption. This is why our society is able to innovate as much as it does, and therefore prevail in the ongoing competition with other societies and other ideas.

>The lessons from history are often that things can and do get worse, sometimes for generations, before improving again later.

The example I like to think about for this is imagine being born in the eastern European bloodlands - Eastern Germany, the Baltics, Poland, Byelorussia or Ukraine around 1895-1900. Things are pretty good up until the Great War starts, which back then you would be old enough to be considered an adult for, and then it is wars, famines, repressions and totalitarianism for the rest of your life as you likely die just short of the Iron Curtain falling. That's a pretty bleak life. Yet many people lived it, and found love and purpose and had families under it and those civilizations as a whole eventually recovered.

That love and purpose can be found in the bleakest of circumstances is indeed true and amazing.

That Belarus recovered is not obvious.

Yeah good point. Although I think it is pretty safe to say they are better then they were in the 1930's and 1940's. Are they better then they were in the 1960's 70's? Not as clear.

I think the tragedy of 9/11 is distinctly different from this one. That one was covered non stop by media networks and lead to titanic shifts in the US and to US foreign policy. Comparing emotional states between now and then seems pretty useless. And sure every new crisis can seem bleak but just considering climate change when the field of people studying it have observable depression I imagine things are a bit gloomier than the average person may imagine.

The pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of deaths just in the US hasn't had the same sort of coverage. Nor the fact that we haven't had hurricanes in the Gulf but massive flooding everywhere... my response doesn't come from emotion but from the lack of emotion I see in our leaders to the catastrophes.

We haven't even begin to cut emissions enough to slow down the climate catastrophe and I doubt we ever will. While I imagine the US will start protecting its own supply chains I imagine it will act as it always has, protect the wealthiest and best off and leave middle and lower classes to fight for scraps. Just look at our healthcare system, best in the world for the richest, and one of the worst in the western world for lower classes.

> The pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of deaths just in the US hasn't had the same sort of coverage.

Sorry, but where are you living/getting news from because I am jealous and I want to be that isolated.

Literally every new story, list of headlines, broadcast, tweet, and conversation today includes COVID. CNN used to have daily death counts and totals. Every single person's life, from the way we study, work, shop etc has changed because of COVID.

If your thesis is that somehow this big crisis hasn't been sufficiently publicized and people aren't aware, I just have a really hard time connecting to your perspective on the world.

* One of the worst in the developed world.

One human constant through history is that the future always seems bleak to most of it.

This seems like an understudied thing to me.