Comment by brabel
4 days ago
Young people are always the ones protesting against whatever they consider the currently big injustices. They rarely achieve something, but I think it’s great that they do anyway. It shapes their priorities and experiences. In just 20 years, they will be the ones governing and by that time they will have the chance to see whether they were right about whatever they wanted. Most likely they will learn that what looked like the end of the world back then turned out to be just another overblown issue which eventually sorted itself out. And they will go on to mostly perpetuate the status quo with just a few changes that happen gradually, like the acceptance of LGBT and elimination of most institutional racism in my lifetime. When I was young we all thought that in the future , there would be too many people on the planet and not enough food for everyone. Job prospects were low due to tremendous competition as baby boomers made sure there had never been so many young people before. Some people believed pollution would get so bad that water would become as valuable as gold. This sounds ridiculous now but was dead serious back then.
This assumes the world is still trending in a positive direction. I'm not convinced of that anymore. The scientific consensus is climate change will get worse and make things hard on human civilization. Doesn't need to be the worst case scenario. Looking at geopolitics, we see a rise in authoritarianism and a breakdown in the western liberal order since WW2. Also a rise in the popularity of the far right, and some of the gains for LGBT and against institutional racism are being reversed. Wealth disparity is also increasing, so is polarization. We can't know whether there is a global conflict around the corner. It happened twice before. There were many positive people in the roaring 20s.
As for environment degradation in general, just because prior predictions were wrong doesn't mean the biosphere isn't still headed in the wrong direction for sustainability. Maybe we have the right governance and economics to adapt in time, but that's not a guarantee.
Being positive about everything seems like a really privileged position. It also maintains the status quo. If you're Ukrainian, how positive would you feel about your country's future? How positive is Europe about NATO and it's future with the US right about now. How are Canadians feeling about their neighbor to the South? Are they confident future US elections will self-correct?
Maybe over the long term it all works itself out and human progress continues to the stars or whatever. Or maybe we're going to be part of a Great Filter intelligent species face because of short sightedness and powerful technologies they unleash. Or maybe we'll just muddle along with some gains and then losses. Civilizations rise and fall, we really don't know how positive the future will be.
There are always people convinced that everything is dire. When I was a teen the popular one was that working for any kind of future goal was pointless because there was going to be a nuclear war that destroyed humanity.
There have always been wars and skirmishes around the world. Ukraine and Gaza are today's. There will be others tomorrow. Different tribes of humans just don't get along, never have.
If you think the environment is bad now, you should have seen it in the 1970s. Chemicals dumped everywhere, rivers on fire, cities choked in smog.
But the long term trend is always positive. Things are better now for more people than they ever have been.
I'll never forget one of my freshman "intro to engineering" courses in college the professor spent probably 15 min on the very first day going on about peak oil and how we were all doomed. He said this to a class full of kids enthusiastic about their future who want to build and make the world a better place. To this day, it was the single most toxic thing i've ever experienced and this was in the mid/late 1990's! If only one kid took his brain/soul poison to heart it would be a tragedy.
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There's a middle ground between doomerism apathy and optimistic status quo that problems aren't that bad so business as usual. People become pessimistic when they see societal structures that prevent actions dealing with serious problems. You don't have any justification or saying the long term trend is always positive. The future has many possibilities, not all good. The human past is a mixed bag. Trends are trends until they're not. Past wrong predictions are not guarantees those or similar predictions won't come true in the future.
We really don't know that democracy will always prevail, that capitalism is sustainable in the long term, and that our current global civilization is immune to collapse. We don't know there will never be a nuclear war or that climate change won't hit the wrong tipping point. We don't know that humanity's future will continue to be better off indefinitely.
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This is a repeating cycle however. The boomers where all hippies riding the wave of a future utopia where everyone is making art and dancing with each other all day. Screw the man, grass and love all day!
Getting older what I have realized is that the enthusiasm of the youth is born from the lack of experience, lack of responsibility, lack of anything to lose, and a position to really only gain from any changes. When you are young you are largely a spectator to the game, and just like any other game, your views will change when you become a player instead of an armchair expert.