I figure I have 20-25 years left on my life’s clock. By that time climate change will be wreaking whatever havoc it’s going to wreak, moreso than it is now. Not that rising sea levels are going to affect me in Missouri, but still, I imagine the economic implications of New York or Miami or Jakarta or wherever being underwater are going to make it to my pocketbook one way or another. Fortunately I won’t be around to care once the worst of climate change gets going.
Meanwhile, the country that I live in is becoming a theocratic dictatorship, and there’s not much I can do about it. Whatever damage the Trump regime is going to do will probably be done within the year, and the effects will last for decades.
About the best I can hope for is to run out the clock and die comfortably – viz, not in violence, not from starving to death, etc. I’m SO glad I don’t have children who are going to inherit this mess.
I feel like the crazy Irish guy on Braveheart. I’ve spoken to the lord and I’m pretty sure he can get me out of this mess but the rest of you are f**ked.
I’ve started to lose hope that what I’m planning for in the next 40-45 years is not what I should have been planning for.
I have a small military pension coming to me at 60. I never believed the “Don’t expect anything from social security” crowd, although I’ve definitely been in the “don’t count on it being as much as you expect” camp. I have a 401k which is the bulk of my retirement plan. I have a substantial amount of equity in my house, which I bought at the right time in the right area. I live in central Ohio, an area almost devoid of natural disasters and poised to be well insulated from major effects of climate change.
As of today, I have no faith that any of the above will be meaningful. I mentioned in another thread a post I read from a leftist prepper who said, "Y’all can’t consume your way into safety. Prepping is about learning how to live poor. Survive on bulk staples, eat seasonally, don’t rely on agribusiness for survival, etc. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t even know where to begin to start this. I don’t know if I’m better off staying in a city or moving to somewhere more rural. I don’t know if I’m better off staying in the US or trying to leave.
I’m financially doing well enough that aside from the war on my transgender son, I don’t expect anything of Trump’s corruption and mismanagement to personally affect me. But an overall decline in the viability of the US will hurt, and the long term effects of climate change have me doubting that I’m even on a correct path to protect myself and my family.
I couldn’t answer the poll because the thing I have given up hope on is ever being able to predict the future; especially as it relates to politics. 2016 was the year I stopped thinking I could predict the future. 2024 was the year I stopped thinking I could do anything about it.
I’m comforted by the fact that my generation has largely avoided the default norm of misery the average person has endured throughout History. I am nearly 62 and I have never been directly touched by war, famine, natural disaster, tyranny, or violent crime. If all of those things land on my doorstep before I die, my life is still an overall win.
I believe the great experiment in democracy is in its death spiral, and so is the ecology of the planet. They’ll go down together, and for the same reasons.
I have found a new resolve to help and protect my local community as far as my strength allows.
I’m reminded of the final episode of Buffy spinoff Angel (anyone remember that one?) in which the Forces of Evil and Darkness are going to take over the earth later that afternoon, and the band of evil-fighters are deciding what each of them will do with their final hours. Some wreak revenge on a personal foe, one goes to a poetry jam and reads his (terrible) poetry, and one goes to the homeless shelter and packs boxes of food and clothing.
I’m with that last guy.
It’s a good time to read or reread The Plague, by Camus.
I quit my job because of the current political situation and plan on using my few remaining years of good health by spending as much time out in nature as I can. There was never much long-term hope for our world. Everything dies. But I feel like the Earth has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and we have chosen to reject our traditional doctors who may have made our remaining years less painful and instead chosen the quack who will rob us of our wealth and time with fake cures and superstitions.
I think modern Western civilization is completely screwed, too few people believe there are actually problems to solve them, and by this point I’m just sitting back with popcorn watching the whole thing burn. Invade Panama. Annex Greenland. Blanket the sky with a hundred thousand satellites that end in a Kessler sydrome. Whatthefuckever.
Yes. Climate change will never get addressed. More fires, drought, famine, devastating hurricanes, rising sea levels doing massive damage on lots of populations, etc.
We live in a “safe” region that does have fire seasons, but personally we should be safe. We are old enough to retire and we are focusing on enjoying the rest of our lives. Glad we don’t have children.
My fear is we end up in a cyberpunk future where fascists control all the wealth and control all the AI. Everyone else is left to fend for themselves or, best case scenario, given poverty level UBI.
Best case scenario is that eventually christian white nationalism dies down as a national movement, and we get AI that creates wealth that improves everyone’s lives.
Sadly I see America going down the first path, but I think other developed nations will maybe go down the second path. But even thats hard to determine. The far right party in France went from winning 18% of the vote for president in 2002, to winning 41% of the vote in 2022.
The problem is that in a hundred years it may be forgotten because global warming has caused the breakdown of civilization, and the much smaller number of people remaining are too caught up with just surviving to try to make sense of the records this era leaves behind.
That’s the first thing that crosses my mind when people speculate about what historians, or people in general, will think about this era a century from now. Most of those speculations, even from people who usually seem to know better, are written as if global warming isn’t on their minds.
Despite that gloomy thought, I was a ‘no’ vote. I have known hopelessness: at fifteen, I was seriously considering suicide, not because of any crisis, but due to the buildup of years upon years of loneliness and isolation.
Fortunately, events came to my rescue at the time, and then most of a year later, I had the transformative religious experience that banished despair and hopelessness from my life forever.
That doesn’t mean I see the world through rose-colored glasses, though. Obviously I’m very worried that TPTB in this world will do too little, too late to forestall global warming on a scale that our civilization won’t be able to survive. (Though I expect the human race itself to survive pretty much anything, just that the possibility of its returning to the hunter-gatherer level seems to me to be uncomfortably great.)
But the presence and love of the Lord is my daily reality, and there’s no way I can cease to hope, for either myself or the world, as long as that is the case. It may be hope in the face of all evidence, but the love of the Lord is powerful stuff, that’s all I can say.
Not for myself, as whatever happens at the WDC level will likely not affect our lives. I do worry about what world my grandchildren are going to be living in, though. A whole lot of what the future holds will depend in large part on the next national election, IMO.
I keep reminding myself that the collapse of the Roman Empire was disastrous for some, but for many others, life improved considerably. So my sense is political and environmental collapse are likely, and it will be awful for many, but from the ashes something better may emerge. I do not know if this is hopeful or not.
It seems to me that evil people have all the money and the power now to hurt others. They’ve already begun. No one has stopped them because no one can. We can protest, we can obstruct, but it won’t matter. Yes, I’ve lost hope. I’m a woman, I have children and grandchildren. My daughter is gay. I’m afraid. I don’t even see what might change to ever make things right again. This is what people wanted/allowed/couldn’t prevent. What am I doing about it? Putting one foot ahead of the other for now. Waiting to see what happens next. Running away doesn’t seem to be an option.
I’m not trying to pick a nit with you but I see a lot of hopeful pleading about how AI is going to solve climate change or world hunger or eliminate political strife and so forth, and it all ends up just being a kind of childish appeal to magic, as if ‘AI’ will take over and apply novel solutions we haven’t thought of as a substitute for applying the actual solutions humanity could do today if we could produce a consensus and take action. ‘AI’ isn’t going to solve anything unless it is by eliminating all personal agency and maybe humanity completely if we object too strenuously, and then implement whatever objectives have been built into it in whatever way it finds to be most efficacious. “AI” can have many potential benefits as a tool, but as a master or even a ‘partner’ it is a destructive force that we really have no concept of how to align with our fundamental needs and values.
Agreed with everything except Donald Trump as President. Even though plenty of people were joking about it, it seemed a bridge too far outside of a Spitting Image parody or a Philip K. Dick story pitch. In fact, it still seems too absurd for reality and often leaves me wondering if I’m in a simulation produced by Paul Verhoeven…
As for me, I’m not worried about ‘the future’; we were always destined to be fucked, and the day of our collective reckoning has just come ever closer. Fortunately, the planet is fine; it’s just that the people are fucked.
I mean, that is a possible outcome, and one that I’m personally OK with. I would like to see a future (or at least a part of the future) where homo sapiens aren’t the only ones in charge. We’re not particularly good at either self-governance or stewardship of our habitat, and if we’re replaced by something else… I’m ok with that. It gives me hope that nature and/or robots might one day create a better society. Maybe we’ll still be around in some diminished form, and can learn from those non-human societies. Or maybe we’ll be altogether extinct. Shrug. I just hope life goes on in some other form.
Where natural selection failed, perhaps artificial selection and rapidly-evolving, self-learning AI will continue, and at some point it’ll probably have to interface and integrate with Earth’s biological systems too. I probably won’t be alive to see it, but the thought of, say, a fully-automated luxury gay space communism of plant-based dolphin cyborgs brings me a lot of joy.
Ultimately we’re just one animal species among many, and animals themselves are just one form of life. Maybe fungi are the future. Maybe some form of sentience altogether unknown to us. Who knows? I just hope that Earth isn’t the only place where lifelike-ness has evolved, or that if it is, we or our descendants (AI or otherwise) make it out of the solar system before we self-destruct entirely.
Undoubtedly. Maybe the robot bards will sing about our tragedy someday.
A problem for who/what, though? We’ll all be dead. The survivors will have grown up in that world; it’s all they know. For all our flaws, humans are supremely adaptable… we’ve lived through ice ages, dark ages, shitty emperors, shitty dictators, cyclical collapses, through violence and disease and starvation untold… but we’re still here. Will it be the same as today? No. But presumably some of the survivors will make it just fine, and maybe even find happiness. Maybe it’ll be a nightmarish authoritarian society with horrible inequity and rampant slavery… like much of our history. Maybe not.
You know what gives rise to rampant class & power differences like that? Population. Maybe smaller pockets of tribes is actually better for our mental and physical well-being… that’s the situation we evolved in & for. Sure, they may lack modern conveniences, they may live shorter lives, but are they less happy? Hard to say. There are still uncontacted tribes these days who reject the influences of the modern world. And who could blame them? If Musk tried to shove Twitter down my throat, I’d throw a spear at him too.
I don’t know that “recreate the modern world” should be the goal of any postapocalyptic society to begin with, but even if it were, presumably it’d be a lot faster the second time around if some of the basic principles could be remembered (steam power, electromagnetism, radio, etc.). It’s an exponential trajectory once those basic things are understood.
I voted “yes” but of course, with the usual reservations.
“Hope for the future” being left up to us to define by the OP is key. I have given up in living (the 20-30 years I figure I’m likely to live tops) to see the US, and for that matter, much of the world to return to looking to the future in a positive way rather than the past.
I see no future in which the USA will be trusted - Bush damaged it badly, and Trump’s killed it. At best, it’ll be a trust in an individual president’s term going forward. And I don’t blame the rest of the world for that justified feeling.
I figure even if Trump doesn’t end up getting more SCOTUS judges, that what has happened has doomed the USA to at least another 30 years of repression, regression and gridlock, if not out and out fascism.
And that means the US is not going to do enough, even if it’s possible at the late point, to turn around climate change. Not that we’re the only part of the problem, but we are a BIG part of it. And the rest of the world seems heading the same direction towards increasing authoritarianism. So, yeah, we’re all screwed.
What am I doing? I’m probably old enough and will possibly have enough inherited wealth to live quietly and unambitiously to the end of my days. I have and will continue to donate to things that try to make the world better, and do little things I can do myself. But mostly? I feel bad, but fuck humans. We did this ourselves, so mostly want to enjoy the time I have left with my wife and pets, and give money to various more virtuous efforts to save animals - they didn’t ask for this.
This picture was drawn about a ‘world’ of maybe 70 million people, almost all of whom were farmers. The capacity of the land was considerably greater than the population’s needs.
So, no, not odd, not even very relevant. It ‘looks like’ something we are familiar with because the world we live in grew out of it. The gigantic change is population and technology, which together negate any comparison with any other era because there has never been a time like this one, not on our Earth.
What I believe is the best case scenario is for there to be an enormous population crash of humans (and as collateral damage, most other species). This is quite easy to envision, frankly. Most of us will starve to death, die of plagues, and the rest will be killed by our own species more directly.
Not all of us will probably die in this cataclysm, there might be hundreds of thousands of survivors, scattered among the continents. In a hundred thousand years we might be ready to try to destroy everything again.
