"این نیز بگذرد"

Attributed to Attar of Nishapur (1142-1221), who was beheaded by Genghis Kahn's Mongols. In one of Attar's fables, a powerful king gathered a group of wise men and asked them to produce a ring that would make him happy when sad, and sad when happy. After much consultation among themselves, the wise men presented the king with a ring inscribed "This, too, will pass".

- https://archive.org/details/quoteverifierwho00keye/page/160/...

We live now in bad days. This, too, will pass.

So housing and now cars are marketed to the rich and wealthy, we're losing things we took for granted.

Anonymity is basically dead on the internet. Worse being they don't just want my ID to participate but scans of my face, God knows who they are selling this data too.

We have less and less agency over anything. In the U.S both political parties are essentially the same. If you are an outsider like Massie, Planter or Omar they will successfully destroy your ability to represent the public. The game is rigged.

The bad times will continue and worsen until a cataclysmic global event resets the system. We'll see.

Side note: nobody else seems to have mentioned climate change yet in this thread. The fact that we are currently in the process of determining, through our CO2 emissions, what the medium to long term future of human society looks like seems...incredibly significant! And yet people don't seem to want to talk about it. Is it ignorance? Or resignation?

However, I think current tech leaders have betrayed society, and the system of corruption that allowed it has seen no equal in human history in terms of breadth and scale.

30 year industry veterans can't get a job, nobody can afford a house or a family, and once-proponents of possible stopgaps like UBI are deciding "nah".

I'm not actually sure there's any "democratic" means that can solve it (at least as defined by political/advertising lobbies buying power from an increasingly uneducated/mal-educated populace).

But I am hopeful that people won't stand for it and we will find a new way.

The automobile brought us mobility. Private property rights for individuals brought some security for a section of society. Awareness of children's risk from a small % of men led to some children avoiding uniquely awful mistreatment.

However, car culture, trespassing culture and unwarranted stranger-danger fears have eradicated key+critical parts of childhood: Particularly free ranging and regular hours of adult-free peer time.

When society examines the outcomes of this loss, they blame kids' screen time (the screens that kids use to compensate for what we took from them). This amps up my pessimism.

But I also see kids rise to the challenge of our increasingly complex society. I find modern youth to be broadly more capable than my generation and far more understanding than my parent's generation (WWII vets). I draw real optimism from this.

I think humans will be about the same in terms of happiness, due to how quickly to acclimate to our situation. But they'll look back on us with shock at how we ever lived like this!

If you look back you probably think in certain ages people were really miserable, but people knows how to adapt and eventually they got used to it.

None of this is an exaggeration. Everyone is outraged about it, and there are often riots but they’re put down with tear gas and rubber bullets. So every day the sun and GDP continue to rise.

To me this is the only realistic long term outcome of mass unemployment if the tech companies’ visions are realised. UBI is a fantasy. Everyone in the camps is on welfare, it just isn’t enough.

Rising inflation, especially in housing prices, is demoralizing, where one’s efforts to save is quickly evaporated thanks to a combination of bad fiscal/monetary policy and housing regulations that benefit existing homeowners over prospective ones.

Personal computing was one of the nice bright spots of modern society. I grew up during the rise of the personal computer, the Web, and mobile computing. Computing felt liberating, empowering, and enjoyable. Unfortunately major players have been able to gain oligopoly power over computing. Enshittification is the norm in modern software, and it’s difficult for upstarts to compete against entrenched oligopolies. The generative AI boom and the massive run on the RAM and storage markets have caused massive price hikes, which now threaten to price us out of personal computing. The one area that has long resisted price inflation has succumbed to it. It seems like we are getting priced out of living.

I think there will be happy people in the future, but it won’t be a straight line, nor will everyone be happy at the same time.

Though if you asked people this 25 years ago or 50 years ago, or 100 years ago they would say the same exact thing

The right scale is not years or decades but maybe centuries. I recently read the powerhouse book “Pandemic” by Sonia Shah, among whose amazing ideas is a history of the ideas of medicine and germ theory in the last few hundred years. As idiotic as the Covid responses have been, they were way way better, not only than the European response to Plague, but to European response to cholera from 170 years ago. We are as a group slow learners, but seem to continue handling each recurrent example of a problem slightly better; our Achilles heel is slow moving disasters than just happen once, e.g. the carbon burn.

(Offtopic, another fascinating idea from the book is that both sexual reproduction and death or individuals may be evolved responses to microbial attacks, mixing up the variety in the species so the microbes can’t over adapt to the genome).

To illustrate how far humanity as a species has come, I’ve posed this question a number of times to people:

If you had to be reborn as a random human somewhere on earth, and the only thing you get to pick is the year you’re born, what year would you choose? You don’t get to pick your country, race, gender, sexuality, intelligence, socioeconomic status, etc, only the year.

What would you choose?

The world's first trillionaire spent the day he became the world's first trillionaire celebrating by trying to incite a racial pogrom in a distant country.

I do not think people are optimistic about the future. Back in the late 90's/early 2000s yes, people were very optimistic. Everyone was so thrilled to get to the 21st century. Now, people seem clinically depressed, technology is no longer something designed to make you happy, or make your life easier. It is just a battle to control your attention and sell you garbage.

Will people be happier in the future? Honestly I don't know. Anyone can "decide" to be happy to some degree. As a large group/society, no I don't think people will be happy.

Yes I am optimistic.

I honestly have no idea. I strongly want to be optimistic and I am generally an optimist by nature. But recent events have made it hard to justify a lot of optimism. I have a fear that we are rapidly sliding into a straight-up cyberpunk dystopia to rival anything from sci-fi.

And sadly it's not just what's going on with technology that fosters my doubts. It's the apparent surge of enthusiasm worldwide - but particularly in the United States - for various brands of authoritarianism and fascism, the wholesale abandonment of Enlightenment ideals about individual freedom and the nature of justice, the loss of respect for science, logic, and reason, and the rising preference for various brands of mysticism, superstition, and magical thinking over rational thinking. Not to mention more overt nationalism, jingoism, bigotry, attacks on minorities of all flavors... Yeah, I gotta be honest, optimism is hard to come by right now.

All in all, this has led to me choosing to drop Facebook (which was the main place I was exposed to a lot of public discussion on this stuff) and to aggressively tune my Twitter feed to eliminate most political stuff. I had to do it to protect my own mental health. And while I feel guilty about the sense of abdicating my responsibility to be involved and to play a role in trying to improve things, I have had to accept that there's not a lot I can do as an individual - at least in terms of influencing other people. I still vote, donate to campaigns, donate to charities I support (EFF, for example) and so on though. I'm not completely checking out, but I was getting way too stressed before to keep dealing with this shit.

Anyway, sorry for the rant. But despite all that, I still hold out some hope for a better future. Time will tell, I guess.

Pay attention to the vibes and evidence in this thread.

Ask yourself how this community slots into your media diet.

Every year gets better than the one before. More technology, more opportunity!

Why would I have any fun believing that things have peaked?

If I were to make a comparison happiness is the sub 3 seconds 0-100 that you can achieve with your sportscar, or skydiving.

WHat you are referring to is the Concorde flying at 80000ft at mach 2.12

That's impressive but won't bring about the same limbic happiness and excitement as the aforementioned experiences.

And actually it's how evolution brings about improvement, everybody is trying to improve and collectively as humanity incredible progress happens over time but no individual can take joy or credit from it and thus everybody has to keep pushing to bring about personal improvement that would bring happiness that in turn on a large scale would produce large improvement at the societal level