I’d say mine is worse, but far up from the darkest times of the last 4 years. And while I don’t know what the future holds, I have a vague optimism that it’ll be better than today (something I certainly didn’t 4 years ago)
Effectively every rich person has demonstrated conclusively that don't care for democracy or the well-being of others, while we give them yet more power.
The tech field - I started in the personal computing era of the 1980s - has been effectively taken over by three OS companies, all based in the US. National and state governments are walking into a golden trap of Microsoft services. My options of living without a smartphone are increasingly curtailed. Ad-tech and automated surveillance systems are fucking everywhere, and the former is 100% focused on getting us to buy more. "Voluntary" user agreements and permission fatigue are the bane of the modern digital era.
Local clubs (both bars and activity-oriented) have mostly disappeared as people stay home glue to their phones, so community bonds have faded away. The shift to apps, and the decontextualizing of labor, mean the only thing people get to decide on is sales price, not quality, nor environmental impact, nor the well-being of the employees.
Four years ago was the dark time of COVID, but the first vaccines were on the way, offering a light. We are now even less prepared for future pandemics, COVID or otherwise, as anti-masking has been entrenched as a moral right for some. Furthermore, the pandemic showed our health systems are underfunded and ill-equipped for black swan events, which the recent mpox outbreak reminds us are likely not as rare in the future as we've planned for.
Yet I somehow feel confident that we're in the process of turning a corner and things are on the upswing. Something I don't get the sense you have.
When tech companies say the need more power, and want more coal plants, and more nuclear reactors, and promise the techno-fantasy of working fusion power in 10 years, why should they be able to out-compete the de-carbonizing the rest of the economy?
When you look at the decades of promises to cut CO2 emissions, only to see them go by the wayside, what do you think has changed?
When you read about coral-reef bleaching, and the warming of coastal waters causing lobster, scallops, and clams to die off New England, and continued massive over-fishing causing billions of snow crabs to go missing off Alaska - what will make things better?
When there are only two main phone OSes, it's easy for the EU to consider requiring spyware on all phones ("ChatControl").
When there's tech lock-in to the US, such that reports from the UK and Germany are calling out the obvious data sovereignty issues, and even the US is saying Microsoft is too powerful to face real consequences for its security problems - how will that be fixed?
How do you solve the Florida insurance problem? When will the Ogallala go dry? How long until the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation collapses?
I could go on.
Not entirely, but as a Newyorker at least I can confidently say October 2024 seemed a lot more similar to October 2019 than October 2020.
After experiencing that, I feel confident that on a societal level most things can be overcome and most people in society will find ways to adapt. Not always all, but a majority.
Which is exactly the problem. We need to cut down on a lot of bad practices, which we've known about since the Kyoto Protocol back in 1992.
Instead, we continue our trend of producing more pollution (including greenhouse gasses), destroying the environment, killing species, and doing NOTHING to prepare ourselves for the future we know is coming.
Just like in October 2019.
I have young children. At this point I hope they have a society, fuck having a “better life”, that ain’t happening. But it does force me to focus on what’s important. If we regress to a lifestyle comparable to the first third of the 20th century, we can handle that. We’ll miss regularly working electricity and indoor plumbing but you gets used to it quick. Just go camping for a week
It certainly sucks, and it’s frustrating that it isn’t our fault.
Think more like Asheville, which has running water again, several weeks after the hurricane, but the water isn't yet potable and likely won't be until December.
Consumerism has hooked itself tightly around our hedonic treadmill. Capitalism since the environmental movement of the 1960s has figured out we mostly care about problems we see, so has done its best to hide all the environmental and labor problems and make it disconnected from a single person's actions.