I feel like the biggest difference between growing up in the 90’s/early 2000’s compared to now is the sense of optimism about the future. Everybody felt hopeful that the future would be better than the past, that technological advancement would elevate the quality of life for everybody, that science would achieve great things beyond our imagination. What is there to be hopeful about the future of humanity today?

We are facing, on multiple fronts, at best a question-mark about our future, and at worst, a near total collapse of civilization (omnishambles is a word that should really make a comeback).

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Climate catastrophe

• Temperature extremes
  • Climate change will drive some places to become too hot to live, while others become too cold. Or, in the case of Western Europe, some sort of superposition of the two depending on the effects of the weakening AMOC.
• Natural disasters – fire/water/wind
  • Storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, mudslides; extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and intensity, causing death, destruction, and mass migration events. This will continue to get worse.
• Rising sea level
  • As polar ice, glacial melt, and other factors cause global sea-level rise, coastal populations will suffer. Currently habited areas will become uninhabitable, entire island nations will cease to exist, causing again, mass migration events.
• Depletion of fresh/drinking water
  • Global freshwater levels continue to decline, either as a result of climate change, or over-extraction. Without investment in alternate sources such as desalination technology, there will not be enough available to sustain the current water usage of the world.
• Depletion of topsoil
  • While claims on the timespan for total degradation of topsoil might be overblown, it is clear that intensive farming practices, combined with other factors, are degrading topsoil worldwide. This will reduce food yields, food security, and again could lead to famines, death, and mass migration events.
• Collapse of biodiversity – particularly pollinators
  • Biodiversity is reducing everywhere, be it coral bleaching, animal extinction, or the alarming decline in global insect populations. Linked to the previous item, a lack of pollinators has a direct impact on food production for humanity.
• Pollution – air, water, plastics, forever chemicals
  • Despite the feel-good effort of individuals sorting their waste into different coloured bins for collection in developed nations, recycling is not meeting global waste production; pollution is ever increasing. Plastic and other waste is increasingly shipped to poorer nations for disposal (out of sight, out of mind I guess!) and often ends up in the sea. Forever chemicals (PFAS) and microplastic are now ubiquitous in our drinking water, food, and other life. Air pollution continues to be a problem, and is getting worse. All of these cause illness, reduce lifespans, and are likely contributing to collapse in biodiversity.

Economic collapse

• Wealth inequality
  • After decades of decline, wealth inequality is rising again in western nations. We are showered with tales of how the rich keep getting richer while everybody else suffers. Given this trend, what is the end goal, the billionaire class own everything, and everybody below is in functional slavery?
• The façade of eternal growth
  • Companies are driven by eternal growth, economies rely on growth. What is the end state when there are diminishing returns in a world with finite resources?
• Subscriptions everywhere, the cost of living worsening
  • Perhaps as a result of the problem with eternal growth, companies are turning to ever more desperate ways to squeeze more money out of people. Either the price goes up, the size goes down, or subscriptions are added to products or services that didn’t have one before. Everything is increasing in cost everywhere, from food, to utilities, to rent, and wages are not keeping up. Again, what is the end state here? What happens when people simply can’t afford the cost of living? Food banks will not supply us all.
• Reduction in workers rights
  • While some countries are increasing some rights for some workers, globally the rights of workers has been under attack or declining for the past decade. In rich developed nations, corporations and the rich are relentlessly pushing for reductions in rights, return to office mandates, restrictions on union activity and other similar rights losses. Is the future for workers a return to feudal serfdom, but run by corporations?
• Aging populations testing the economic limits of social security
  • Western countries face long-term population decline due to falling birth rates. While this alone may not necessarily be bad, the impact of a disproportionately aged population is negative. There is growing pressure on public health services, growing pressure on social security such as national pension funds. If there are not enough working people to fund (via tax) the increase in aged people using these services, then they will simply not function at all. Is the future of social security a world where retirement age is pushed ever further back, or simply no longer exists until you’re physically incapable of working anymore?
• Key jobs (teachers, nurses, care workers) not paid well relative to other industries
  • Across western nations in both Europe and America, key worker salaries such as those of nurses/care workers and teachers have neither kept up with inflation, nor with jobs outside of those sectors. For such key jobs (especially taking into account the aforementioned aging population, and the yet to be discussed decline in education) there is no incentive for anybody today to choose those professions over for example, a career in a safe office job that often pays double, triple, or more, and has less of the stressful downsides. If we don’t incentivise or value these jobs, what will happen to society when nobody (not even migrant workers) wants to do them?

Social degradation

• Algorithm induced polarisation and fractal social bubbles
  • Social media is causing a massive detrimental impact on society through its polarisation effects. It is a mutually reinforcing feedback loop of algorithms recommending content driving people into bubbles or echo-chambers that only consist of that content, which subsequently leads people to seek out such content driving further algorithmic polarisation. The effects of this are being felt everywhere socially. The obvious example in political elections and the inability for one side to even be able to have a productive conversation with the other, let alone reach bi-partisan agreement or compromise. The other obvious example is radicalisation into terror groups (either domestically or otherwise).
  • However, it also has more insidious consequences: as people are driven into ever more niche social bubbles, the very social cohesion of physical societies fall apart. The social norms in one group may not be social norms in another. The social topics or hobbies in one group may not be in another. If everybody has their own unique social bubble that predominantly socialises online and likely is not geographically located together, how can people that are geographically located together be expected to interact in a socially cohesive way if they share no overlap? The social makeup and shared culture of people is shifting to shared online spaces rather than in-person, yet we physically are not. It is, therefore, inevitable, that there will be gaps in offline social cohesion (or the social cohesion of “countries”) as a result.
  • As an aside (and this is probably a topic for an entire essay), I use “fractal social bubbles” here to refer to the ever reducing size, or increasing niche-ness of such bubbles. For example, if we compare social overlap with regard to tv shows over time. In the era of terrestrial TV where only a handful of stations existed, a particular show could be expected to enter the national social awareness, allowing for shared conversations (whether positive or negative). Then, with satellite/cable TV and the early days of online streaming, we could still see this on occasion with shows like Game of Thrones entering widespread global social awareness. However, fast-forward to today, and the proliferation of channels, platforms, and quantity of content is vast, and the fandoms smaller, such that even having conversations about something watched on a streaming platform is increasingly likely to be met with “I’ve not seen/heard of that” from those outside of your own social bubble. This may be one cause of increasing feelings of social isolation (that end up mutually reinforcing online social bubbles).
• The post-truth era
  • It is clear we are entering into an era of post-truth, whereby the truth or actual facts spoken by our media, politicians, and even everyday people have become unimportant. Some are deceptive and outright lie or say things they know are false, but they don’t care, and the people that listen to them also don’t think truth is important. Where does this lead? What becomes of a society that shuns facts, science, and truth, and instead listens to only those that say what people want to hear, or say it in a way that makes people feel good?
• Decreasing attention spans in a world trying to capture an ever slimmer chunk of your time
  • Everything wants your attention. Notifications, short-form content, endlessly scrolling feeds, recommended content, gamification, adverts everywhere, and all the other predatory tactics being used to keep you engaged. All of this is resulting in attention being divided into smaller chunks across more things, and ultimately a measurable decline in attention spans. How many books do you, personally, fully read (not listen