Being born in 1990, I had an unarticulated sense of techno-optimism up until my early 20s and even fantasized about living til the year 2100. Not to mention basic expectations of kids, retirement, and that things would basically trend towards vaguely nicer/convenient as the decades passed but now I'm keenly aware that it almost won't be in many respects. Humans probably have the ability to eek out an existence for a decent time to come by human standards of time but I'm pretty sure the base levels human misery is only going to increase for the foreseeable future. It'll be like the slowly boiling a frog idea, where things just slowly but steadily continue to suck for the decades to come and I'm just numbed by the prospect.
On the bright side, a lot of video games are set in a dark dystopian resource depleted and environmentally ruined world. Now you don’t have to buy the games anymore because you’ve got it all for free!
Shit even after 911 I was fairly optimistic about the US's & humanity's future in a general sense. Growing up in the deep south in an insulated white community I saw the writing on the wall for the cultural war tensions coming to a head even as a young teen but outside of that and a sense that the climate/global ecosystem was taxed I figured shit would be resolved slowly but surely if for no other reason than self preservation can be a lucrative market. Really it wasn't til the recession I started to think things might be getting more fucked than we are willing to7 handle but I was able to bury my head in the sand for a few years during college. Only to get out and survey the bleakness of the economic landscape followed quickly by cultural war bs taking the dumbest possible form all while in the background the scientific community started to increasingly ring the warning bell about us being on the edge of a cliff that no amount of techno-optimism can deus ex machina us off of if we keep the course.
42
u/dawr136 Sep 30 '23
Being born in 1990, I had an unarticulated sense of techno-optimism up until my early 20s and even fantasized about living til the year 2100. Not to mention basic expectations of kids, retirement, and that things would basically trend towards vaguely nicer/convenient as the decades passed but now I'm keenly aware that it almost won't be in many respects. Humans probably have the ability to eek out an existence for a decent time to come by human standards of time but I'm pretty sure the base levels human misery is only going to increase for the foreseeable future. It'll be like the slowly boiling a frog idea, where things just slowly but steadily continue to suck for the decades to come and I'm just numbed by the prospect.