Maybe I just need to stop taking public transportation and walking the city. Perhaps suburbs feel further from the precipice.
Like I see that America is in decline and has a decent chance of falling apart in my lifetime (I'm 34), but what exactly am I going to do about it? Nobody in charge cares, they're too busy fiddling. If you can't stop the decline and have to live it, why not try to enjoy what you have while you have it?
However, my daily commutes through seattle runs me right into the Pioneer square station and I swear it’s like something from “the Wire”. It feels like hamsterdam, a hell on earth. So while I generally resolve to do whats best for myself I still run into the effects of the society I live in everyday and it’s depressing/demoralizing. This city is diseased with an aggressive malignancy.
The thing that's interesting about this is that human beings in acute distress are less adept at planning ahead and being creative. Which means that people in the doom cycle can't start building new institutions to challenge the old ones that are decaying and pillaging. The perverse incentives that got us to this point are also disincentivizing fixing the problems.
I don't even want to think about what Pioneer Square is like now. It was sketchy when I lived in Seattle and that was 10 years ago. I agree that even with some healthy distance/putting on your own oxygen mask first, it's very demoralizing. My trust in people is much lower than it used to be.
I'm not sure rural or suburban areas are much better. Most of the malignancy just happens in private.
I was part of this so-called doomerism group when I worked in a more traditional 9-5 job in IT about 8-10 years ago. Now I'm solidly in the homesteader/freelancer/homeschooler counterculture.
Maybe there's a natural progression where you begin to question your life/the system/who you're serving and then you do something about it. I'm sure many people get stuck and never make that transition because of the perceived risk in doing so.
Democracy does work. People do make a difference every day. Don’t let the internet get you down.
Public policy discussions that start with the assumption that the only possible solution is for the federal/state/county/local government to dictate policies from above are almost always non-starters for me. The higher up in the hierarchy the more evidence I need to support a solution at that level.
I'm not absolutist on this matter, there are concerns that are best addressed at all those various levels but I prefer to get there through bottom-up policy experimentation and iteration rather than top-down diktats. There are also ample lessons from history about the dangers of expansive government powers.
It says more about how we view the past than how the present is: we remember only the glorious good times, and forget nobody could read 200 years ago, or nobody could eat 400 years ago. They all said they were in decline, the values of their grandfathers diluted by a constant change.
But while I sit on my toilets, on the 44th floor of my hyper tower, writing to americans in a language nobody in my ascending family can speak, before tucking my trilingual kid to bed, well, I think the decline isn't so bad, if you zoom out a few decades.
Here’s a random example:
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/nj3z7ieVrCcgyQkq6myNZ.jpg
Doesn’t look like decline to me. I could cite dozens more examples and not just around technology.
Russia is a good example of a nation in decline: hemorrhaging young people, horrible corruption, cynicism, delusional leaders, and the use of imperial war and dramatic ideology to try to paper over it all.
We do have a lot of dumb problems like a homelessness epidemic that are due more to lack of political will than inability to fix them.
Some are also due to the high priority we place on individual freedom. We’d rather have freedom from detention and to move about than round up the homeless and force them into institutions. We’d rather have shootings than remove the individual right to bear arms. We’d rather have strong property rights than eminent domain people to build infrastructure. Etc.
I can only speak to the American (and somewhat the Canadian) situation. I don't know what on the ground sentiment looks like in France or Hong Kong.
