It's easy to be swayed by the latest thing you read. Can someone please recommend an opinion or book that counters this doom-and-gloom view of the world future presented here. I'm not insinuating that this view is wrong, just that I need something to balance out this negative view of our current and future state.
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The view I hold is that, as bad as the situation is, it's not hopeless and there is a lot that can be done that will make the situation better. "All we can save". I've heard it said in the context of the polycrisis that understanding leads to grief, which leads to action which leads to (solidly founded) hope.
People (and so societies) are hard-wired to be loss averse, which means the facts about what is at stake are more effective drivers of action than the promises of techno-optimism.
Not saying that there are not good optimistic views out there, just that I personally find a realistic view renders many of them quite flat. I think embracing false hope leaves us with a myopic lens through which to frame decisions and probably underprepared to deal with the future.
I find https://polycrisis.org/library/ to be a good resource. Also Nate Hagens podcast.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but as a species we have basically stopped writing fiction that presents an optimistic outlook of the future. The solarpunk genre is the best we can do these days, which is to say, the best that humanity can possibly collectively imagine in the present era is stridently coping with the collapse as best we can. The center cannot hold. (More solarpunk would still be welcome, though.)
You might enjoy the Incautious Optimism Substack. Recent articles are paid but earlier ones are free and it’s full of fascinating technologies with an optimistic flavour.
You could try Pinker's book "The better angels of our nature..". It is older (2011) but gives the long view on how our species has become much, much less violent over the centuries. Its a hopeful trajectory, though one that is not guaranteed to continue.
Balaji's book "The Network State" doesn't refute Charlie's arguments directly but it does a great job of constructing an optimistic vision for the future. The techno-optimists definitionally don't have a doom-and-gloom view of the future, and I find their perspective useful for rounding out my own.
Nobody has all the answers. Humanity is profoundly and hilariously bad at predicting the future, and every generation has both doomsayers and prophets. Rather than getting caught in the emotional swings of siding with one or the other, I personally have focused on becoming as informed as possible so that I can make my own decisions.