[southernplaces7]

>People are stressed about the state of the world. Are we going to enter an era of greater political unrest? Is AI going to ruin the economic prospects of almost everyone? Is climate change going to ruin civilization? Most people I talk to are not hopeful about what the next 40 years are going to look like.

At least on this one I beg to differ on reality if not people's perceptions. You think that worry about the future was somehow lesser during, I don't know, the entire course of the 20th century with two colossal world wars, almost immediately followed by a cold war in which the superpowers were laden with planetary destruction machines and noisily, constantly on the brink of annihilating each other and everyone else? (in aggressive ways that aren't quite matched today I'd argue)

Maybe social media and the always-connected modern culture of publicly fetishizing nearly any social/personal anxiety you care to think of has made people more neurotic about the future, but we've never in modern history had a shortage of things to cause that, while still having plenty of babies for decades.