[mindcrime]

Our children will be astonished and mystified - and furious - to see all the things we got up to instead of dealing with this thing that is the only thing that matters.

That's been happening since Generation X kids were old enough to understand what a mess our parents made of the world.

Unfortunately we haven't done a very good job of making a difference. Frankly I'm a little disappointed in my cohort in that regard. We knew things needed to be different, and we were mad as hell about how the preceding generations fucked everything up... and then we got so caught up in the drudgery of every day life that we kept perpetuating the same problems instead of fixing them.

I'm not terribly optimistic that any subsequent generation is going to do a much better job in general. It seems to be a fundamental human failing that we're not good at dealing with issues that span time-periods longer than our lifetimes. :-(

[smallnamespace]

To tackle big problems, you need the structures in place to organize people, lead them, figure out not just the grand goal but the sub-objectives to be met, and to reward those who contribute and punish cheaters, and also the money and resources to do all of those things above.

But at this point you're no longer talking about getting a diffuse group of people together who believe in the same thing, but building something like a corporation or an NGO. That can easily take half a lifetime and a lot of perseverance. Most people don't have the time, energy, or money to go that route.

[adverbly]

Except that the structures we have in place have time horizons even shorter than a human lifespan. Stock market runs on quarterly reports, governments run on election periods of a couple years. The organizations we give the most power to just don't operate using long term incentives. And then democratic processes don't even let everyone who is currently alive vote, much less those who aren't born yet. It's a problem that largely requires unselfish thinking which makes it extremely difficult to incentivize.

[munificent]

I am really optimistic about the younger generation, actually.

I'm a gen-Xer. Our mantra was "whatever". Instead of trying to solve problems, we just tried to detach from them. As long as we were self-aware and cynical about what we were being sold, we thought things would be fine.

But that's obviously stupid in retrospect. People in power love cynicism — why bother defeating other people when they'll defeat themselves?

Millenials, on the other hand, seem way more organized and engaged. For their generation "woke" doesn't just mean being aware of what's going, it means doing something about it. So I hope that they (and us too) can start changing some of the fundamental structural flaws in the current systems of power.

[gowld]

The woke generation before the Gen X was the....baby boomers. Remember civil rights and environmentalism? Perhaps the simplistic generational model is a poor fit for reality.