[bryanlarsen]

But is it substantially different? The writing from the 30's is extremely pessimistic. In the 50's and 60's everybody assumed that we were all going to die in a nuclear war. And going back in time you can find numerous examples of where the future was worse than uncertain, where an awful future for your children was guaranteed. As an extreme example, many children were voluntarily born into slavery.

I would argue that pessimism about the future is the rule, and the American optimism about the future in the 20th century was the exception.

[jauntywundrkind]

The future being grimdark isn't new, that's true.

But humanity had so much finding out to do. Average material conditions haven't moved steadily forwards, no, but humanity has been overall rising. Science and technology developing, insights to the natural world happening & spreading, cultural elements forming & flourishing. The powers that be in the world were quite regionalized, had their fingers in only small pies: there was similarities across the world but it was characterized more as many individual experiments rising and falling, a variance among societies where many things were being tried in many ways. The difficulty in survivng (for much of this time) was overall characterized by the difficulty of finding food in the world, which was brutal work but work against nature.

Today, things are so different. We all see (or can see if we want) the whole world. Progress has tapered down. The bold efforts for progress like the New Deal and international order (UN) have been worn down or unrepaired (notably the security council sotuation). But more than all that, we have lost the civilizational diversity that fed change and growth. We don't try new things, our systems don't shift: we are locked on course, path dependence amid the vast global network of international trade. The efforts to try new things are small tweaks, of limited scope: Obamacare (much protested), 4 day work weeks, some small scale UBI. We have seen so few attempts to house and feed the populations of the world, so few attempts to broaden education. The millions of enterprises across the world keep being hoovered up into ever larger companies with ever more high up and far off seats of power, the 0.1%'s ascent over us all and control of the world's money supply and markets extends and extends.

The stagnancy and unflinching singular trajectory we are all locked into is pitiful. Humanity feels so a long for the ride of a couple absolutely insane pathological freaks. That loss of diversity, the consolidation of many things into fewer and fewer, is an evolutionary stagnancy which even if unconsciously experienced weighs enormously heavy on the human souls of today. It feels terrible, feeling like as the wheel turns, it's not the rise and fall of civilizations, but now the plight of us all, enmeshed, and knowing that we do so very little have so few levels to pull, so few positions of any real power to steer this.

[bryanlarsen]

> Progress has tapered down.

Maybe you can argue that it's slower now than it was in the late 20th century. But it's still far faster than it was at any other point in history.

You may think we're locked on course, but we're far less locked on course than we were in medieval times or pretty much any other time in history. Changes in medieval times happened, but took centuries, and those advocating for change got burned at the stake.

Of course, it matters less what actually was than the way people thought. It's an almost universal constant throughout history that people thought the future was doomed.

[jauntywundrkind]

On the one hand you are absolutely right. The last was slower about change, probably in many many ways.

But the past was decoupled. There were many pasts, moving at different paces, in different ways. We don't know what most of these pasts were even a thousand years ago, for the majority of life on earth! We have such a eurocentric view of history, have such incredibly poor knowledge of how most of humanity (by area at least) lived, what was really happening, what life was like, how people saw the world and saw history & time.

Theres still many things happening, sure. But the dominant themes of the world today trace to Thomas Pikerty Capital in the 21st Century overarching economics, something he shows happening over a 250 year arch. The many free hands of the world are reduced to many many less hands than before.

The locality of power is gone. The availability of new lands and new resources to tap into has peaked. We have gobsmacking amounts of people and we don't know what to do to harness this bios-power, we don't have true missions available for people to get up to, and almost no governments are able to generate good causes and good trouble to get themselves up to. We devolve into shitty posturing and jingoism as purpose and exploration/expansion (and alas yes imperialism) fade away, after a time of great prosperity & strong social character.

We're at the end of a lot of curves. It's so so so unclear how incremental GDP rising is supposed to tide us over spiritually. Especially when such a lions share of the GDP is captured by such monsters at the top, when no government or system seems willing to set the sparks of motivation to get the populations excited and moving on their own.