Item — HN Reader

> Probably people have felt this way throughout all of history but this time seems different.

In my 30s and I make a habit of asking people in the generations above me if they felt the same when they were younger / my age. As in, did things always seem this futile, clogged, and broken?

The answer is always "no".

3 comments

Cold War? World Wars? There's been a ton of doom. Perhaps elder millennial and younger Gen X got to go through their 30s without some of this worry?

Today's situation is not very similar. Previously we worried about specific threats. The Axis Powers, the Soviet world and its influence, even nuclear war. We had a pretty good characterization of what the threat was, even if it was devastating, even if we didn't have a great plan to prevent it. We knew how it would manifest.

Today we are facing a sort of nebulous destabilization of social institutions and norms that seems to be related to digital computing and communication technologies but we can't nail down what particular aspects cause the problem or how it manifests. We are not sure if any particular problem is related to The Problem or not. Some people don't believe that The Problem exists at all. We have no idea what the consequences could be if The Problem is not addressed, nor do we have a good way to tell if it's currently getting worse, barring some kind of unexpected catastrophe like a bunch of high-ranking government officials accidentally inviting a journalist to an illegal chat room where they are planning air strikes.

Perhaps none of this means that The Problem is worse than anything we have faced before, or even as bad. But humans have always gotten through our problems by turning our intellect onto them, and it frightens us when our best weapon doesn't seem to be working.

What is the Internet doing to society? That's the trillion-dollar question.

Internet unites the world. It must be united, but there are two ways to do that: it can be a union of the free or it can be a tyranny of one. The two futures may happen simultaneously, but for different people, based on their preferences. This is what's fueling the feeling of doom for many. Moreover, the world must be united at three levels: mental, emotional and physical. The grand empires of the past tried to unite the world with armies at the physical level. The hierocraties of the mediaeval ages tried to do the same with religion at the emotional level. The Internet is trying to do this now at the mental level. Just like in the past, some want to inspire the people with a common ideal, while others want to unite the people by force, only this time it will be mainly applied to our thoughts.

The threats of the 20th century were not that specific. Unless you lived in a particularly sheltered part of the world, your neighbors (the people you knew) were the threat. They supported a different world order, and if the right (or wrong) situation arose, they were often ready to kill you to further their goals.

Capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization had left many people behind. Communism and fascism arose as responses to that, along with more moderate ideologies that ended up joining forces with capitalism. Today we have globalization and a different flavor of capitalism, with a new set of ideologies offering solutions to those who were left behind.

I remember being scared of nuclear war as a child in the 80s. But even though that cast a pall of fear, only 2 superpowers had them in world-ending capacity, and they were self-interested enough that MAD could maintain the precarious balance.

World War I was long and devastating but there would be an end to it; wars don't continue forever by default. WWII was potentially cataclysmic but we were fighting coherently with a unified front, throwing everything we had towards beating it. You could buy war bonds, grow a victory garden, ration your use of gasoline/rubber/steel; do your part and we'll get through this.

The modern issues like climate change are global, imminent, and increasingly present, and there's no contemporary feeling of solidarity and effort against them. We've been told annually that the window to save ourselves is closing rapidly, and yet carbon emissions are still increasing. That's right, they're not going down too slowly, they're still going up.

Pick another modern issue, like education (which is arguably a root solution to these other issues). It's getting worse, so are we trying like hell to improve it? Teachers are trying but can't seem to move the needle. And the US is about to dismantle its national Department of Education to improve "efficiency".

I've looked at the situation and despite a desire for optimism, I have to be realistic. All efforts against the current slate of problems are off by an order of magnitude. Please, tell me a story, any story at all, for how this gets better within our lifetimes, without science fantasy like colonizing Mars or limitless fusion power (as though either of those things would help anyway).

> World War I was long and devastating but there would be an end to it; wars don't continue forever by default. WWII was potentially cataclysmic but we were fighting coherently with a unified front, throwing everything we had towards beating it. You could buy war bonds, grow a victory garden, ration your use of gasoline/rubber/steel; do your part and we'll get through this.

This is a very American view. In Europe/China/Japan/USSR, you could do all those things, and you and your family could still die tomorrow in an aerial bombing or get rounded up by the Gestapo/Kempeitai/KGB and sent to a concentration camp/human experiment lab/gulag.

But, there was still a way to win overall, and we were organized and invested in winning.

This really highly depends on the person. Also, people always tend to view the past with more rose-eyed-glasses compared to how they actually felt at the time they are remembering.

Here is an interview with kids in 1966 about what they think life will be like in future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS8xX3usi4c

They were more worried about dying than getting likes on Instagram.