How I wish that were true. In fact, the marshland is disappearing at an alarming rate. Like, one football field each hour.
FWIW, a big factor in golf courses closing is that the sport boomed in the 1990s and 2000s, during Tiger Woods’ heyday; his popularity is believed to be largely responsible for the boom, and the US golf course market very likely got overbuilt during that time. Tiger’s fall from grace in 2009 more-or-less coincided with the 2008 recession, and a lot of courses (and courses under construction) went bankrupt. It also doesn’t help that the sport isn’t as popular among younger people as it was with their parents.
Bowling has been in decline in the US since around 1980, so that’s not any new news.
I don’t think we’ll ever reach a techno-utopia. I don’t think our destiny is that of an ultra high tech society of super-abundance. I think our destiny is to go medieval.
Imagine a reduced population toiling the long abused land to be able to eke enough out of it too survive through the winter. Consider a world where the electricity runs intermittently, and perhaps even not at all. Imagine a world where men and women once again function in different modes of labor and different social spaces. Imagine a world where ideologies such as feminism, Modern liberalism, etc are no longer viable. I think this world is far more likely than what the techno-fantasists have dreamed up for us.
Is that the world you hoping for? Are you a part of Moldbug’s crew?
Because–like in most of your posts–you seem to come off as being deeply clinically depressed, and can’t seem to stop projecting that depression onto everyone else.
I lived in flyover country for many years. The economy is struggling there and has been for a very long time. But the idea these places are all joyless deserts is inaccurate. Go to a town’s website and look at the calendar of events. Driving down Main Street isn’t going to tell you much. People are still flocking to local ballgames, bazaars, charity runs, auctions, etc. What I DO see that’s depressing is how many people are focused on their cell phones.
And it’s also correct that people have long noticed this sense of desolation. There was a popular song in the Sixties called “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon.” In the Fifties and Sixties people decried the ugly TV antennas on every roof and families huddled around the flickering screen instead of sitting on the porch chatting with passing neighbors. And it’s not like industrial towns back then were Norman Rockwell paintings.
I’m not claiming we live in wonderful times. We don’t. But this sense of desertion, decay, and alienation is nothing new.
I don’t think that’ll happen anytime soon. Humanity has more financial capital and human capital than at any other point in time, except the future when we will have even more. There is too much to gain by having a working society and our problem solving abilities have never been better. Even if a major disaster happens, it isn’t like we will lose all the knowledge we’ve spent hundreds of years building. Libraries will still work, and people will still be educated.
For example, most of our fertile land isn’t used efficiently. A lot is used with sub optimal technology (like in Africa), or it is used to grow crops used for animal feed or industrial purposes (about 80% of corn), or it is used to grow low calorie vegetables. In a true survival scenario land would be prioritized to grow high calorie staple crops like potatoes, wheat and corn for direct human consumption. Not to mention the fact that food can be obtained from vats full of bacteria fed on air, or from algae farms at sea, or eating insects.
Pollution and resource depletion are serious issues. But even if our lifestyle temporarily takes a step back, it won’t kill us.
Techno utopianism probably won’t happen until cognition is unlocked via AI, and we’ve figured out how to rewire our primate brains since they are evolved for suffering.
Yeah, you’re probably right. I’m sure the drug abuse epidemic, the election of Trump, persistent mass murder sprees, suicides, etc are happening because everyone is content and happy! Happy! HAPPY! and I’m just imagining things because I’m that one depressed guy.
I’m sure we could all point to some aspect of our lives that’s changed for the worse. For me, working in aviation, it’s that a lot of the joy of flying has been replaced by paranoia and officiousness. But the fact is, more people are flying today than ever before, so maybe that’s just me. I’m close to it. I live it every day, so I notice it more. That’s called confirmation bias, and luckily I’m aware of the effect.
As has been pointed out, there seems to be good evidence that a lot of things are much better than they were decades and centuries ago. Hard to notice on an individual level a lot of the time though.
Call me an optimist or a techno-utopia whatever, but around the time I was born federal troops were shooting college kids and in some parts of the country people were still being prosecuted for marrying someone of another race. We’re doing a lot better now overall.
You know, there is a middle ground between everybody being happy and everybody being miserable.
The idea that some parts of the country or some sectors of the economy or some groups of the population are more “real” than others is errant nonsense and is part of the tribalism that is creating unnecessary problems.
This is silly. The material from which buildings are made isn’t an indication of the health of the economy or the society. Wood became a standard building material because it was abundant. This is a freaking huge country. It would be insane to try to build everything from concrete, stone, and brick. Materials are chosen for their practicality.
The value of housing is largely dependent on location and demand, not building materials.
There are housing shortages in many places because supply doesn’t keep up with demand and local government Policies create the wrong incentives for builders and of course nimbyism.
I think Acsenray has had the best reply so far, though there have been many good points made.
I don’t agree, however, with posters who say, “Same as it ever was.” It’s not. We’ve seen huge technological and social change happen over the past 50 years, and a lot of it has been tough to absorb within a human lifetime.
One difference that everyone should take note of is cratering birth rates in every developed country. If things are just peachy, why would that be the case? (Short answer: people don’t feel they can afford to have kids and, in reality, it’s tough to do so. Longer answer includes things like easier birth control and a huge range of social reasons.)
A big example for me is Japan, where I lived for 8 years. I saw the country go from a still-happy post-bubble state in 1992 to a country that is genuinely depressed and dysfunctional these days. All this despite being one of the wealthiest countries in the world and most definitely the most socially cohesive, with nearly 100% literacy and incredibly low crime. You can watch 1950s and 1960s Japanese movies and the country was having an absolute blast, even though it had just been blasted to hell. Now, it has no real problems, but it’s pretty gray and bleak in mood.
I actually think that the reasons why things went south in Japan are the very things that lie behind the OP’s observations. See this great New Yorker article: The United States of Japan, which makes this point very well.
To wit:
- Capitalism requires growth to balance the books. It’s much easier to grow from a small base than a large base. E.g., in general, it’s much easier to grow a company 5% per year when you are starting at, say, $100,000 in sales (just $5,000 more!) than $1,000,000,000 in sales ($50,000,000–that’s like having to start a huge new company–every year).
We have grown our collective base of capital and now it’s much harder to grow in the traditional sense. We used to be able to depend on population growth alone to drive tremendous growth in the economy, plus we were plucking the low-hanging fruit of building up basic infrastructure, etc.
Every country eventually crashes into this wall. Every company does too.
- Human psychology thrives the most not when things are good but when things are getting better. Japan was really, really happy and booming in the 1950s despite having a fraction of what it does now because it was building from a very small base (a destroyed base, in fact–check out Marx’s comments on the destruction of capital as necessary to capitalism. I’m not a Marxist, but he still has many good observations…) and things were getting better all the time.
It’s a sad part of human nature, but it’s a big part of the explanation. Things are in many ways better than they were in 1965, but there was incredible progress happening in every field of human endeavor at that time. This was true in my lifetime as well (born 1971). My mother would talk about the incredible technologies that were coming, and we’d all be living to very old ages in great health because of the medical technologies coming down the pike. I mean, there would be flying cars, moon colonies, and all that.
Some will disagree, but I firmly believe that technological progress has flattened out, and…
- Progress is more “give-and-take” than “just give” these days.
Cell phones and the internet have been the big new technologies of my lifetime, IMO. I would not want to do without them, but they are both burdensome in their own way. Do I need to go into detail on that?
Any individual technology has always had its detractors, but I think we have simply forgotten the optimism that used to accompany most innovations and inventions.
- Everything has gotten sophisticated and commoditized in a very short period of time
This is similar to the “building from a smaller base,” but now expand that to qualitative matters.
For example, coffee was shit in the US until basically the 90s, with the rise of Starbucks and indie coffee joints. It was thrilling to learn about the good stuff, drink the good stuff, and continue to learn more and more. Other people get into it, so we’re sharing the fun. Fast forward a bit: Starbucks is soon everywhere (it now has more locations than McDonald’s and is second only to Subway). The Keurig cups come out roughly around 2008 (a coffee shop owner who recently shut down said his business took a very noticeable dive after the cups became common). Good coffee is everywhere, and now it’s no big deal.
And everything has been like that. Music, food, movies, you name it. There was room for sophistication and growth in every domain, and people were inventive and motivated and made tremendous progress in a tiny, tiny amount of time.
People crave the new, that excitement, just as much as they ever did–it’s part of human nature. But there just isn’t as much new to go around these days. Further, when you want to be creative and make your mark in any of these domains, it’s hard. Because everything feels as though it’s been done at this point, and largely it has.
That’s what I got. Tell me what you think!
Putting aside environmental concerns, farming and manufacturing are doing just splendid. Farming and manufacturing aren’t in disrepair. The issue is that farming and manufacturing no longer requires large numbers of small farmers/farm owners or Unskilled/moderately skilled factory workers.
This shouldn’t be a concern. This should be Good for everyone. The problem is that political trends are interfering with a smooth transition.
This is apocalypse fetishism. Provided we figure out how to fight environmental collapse, fascism, nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and other reactionary trends, the long term will be on an upswing.
There will never be a broad collapse resulting in an atavistic pre-technological hellscape. That’s a beloved fantasy of reactionaries.
When people claim that we’re living in some kind of dystopian nightmare, I always say…dude, spend 5 minutes reading about debtors’ prisons during the time of Charles Dickens, then say that again with a straight face. The PAST was the dystopian nightmare.
The Plague was kind of a drag, too. And iron lungs! Who remembers iron lungs?
Opiates, suicide… it has been often quoted that a deterioration in vital statistics for the “heartland” involves “deaths of despair”-- the transformation in the economy and society is happening and many communities just are being forced to deal with it with no parachute or airbag.
Then again you could have said the same thing about rustbelt towns and family farms in the 80s, or about inner cities in the 70s.
But at the same time it is not uniform or universal (I’ve seen places in Baltimore that still look like they did 30 years ago while similar places across town are now gentrified), many communities are doing well while others are not. But we have our lovely social networks to tell us* we are DOOMED, I TELL YOU, DOOMED! THE SHIT IS ABOUT TO HIT THE FAN!!!*, over and over 24/7.
Back when, you could count on your network – family, neighbors, congregation – to be there when you stumbled. Not so much now in a society that is connected online but atomized and scattered IRL (heck, myself when the MD says “the day of your outpatient procedure there’s got to be some person there to assume responsibility for you on discharge because you’ll be anesthesized” it’s a PITA to try and have someone disrupt their life for my sake, since my “network” of people with actual personal bonds to me is spread across a continent)
Oh, and yours is also an excellent set of observations. I remember when I took Intro to Economics that it gnawed at me, the assumption that you HAVE to have growth, that steady-state is undesirable stagnation. It just stayed at the back of my mind: wait, it is a finite world, you can’t have continuous fast growth forever.
Also my own experience coincides in that people are more sensitive to the rate of the change in the slope of the curve, than to the actual slope. This is also why we hear about “a cut” to this or that expenditure when it only means it will go up by 1.5% instead of by 3%.
Oh, and for sure, I read recently an article that posited the notion that it is extraordinarily rare to have an actual “civilizational collapse”, but rather it is *states *or politicoeconomic systems that collapse, but the people continue living more or less at the same level of development only under a different political system or in a smaller, less powerful state.
( And as long as we’re talking experiences from decades past: when I was 7/8 years old, I watched men travel to another world. Hell yes there were high expectations. )
I didn’t say that a medieval-style future was a certainty, just that it is far more likely than a techno-utopian future.