MTZAn uplifting message for you.
TheDemonBuerI feel like our whole lives here in the US we’ve been told to expect things to just generally keep getting better, seemingly forever. Like, that’s the narrative of “progress.” The economy just keeps growing, the nation just keeps getting richer, technology just keeps getting better, living standards just keep getting better, so forth and so on. But, that was probably never realistic, or even feasible. I mean, no civilization progresses forever. Essentially every civilization that’s ever existed has followed a pattern of ascension followed by decline. Many of the most notable civilizations ascended very quickly and dramatically, and then collapsed just as quickly and dramatically. Why should we expect to be any different? What makes us think we won’t follow the same pattern as basically every other civilization in history?
mycodesucksIt would’ve continued if we’d left competent people in charge instead of handing the keys over to the absolute WORST people in the world. Now we’re about to lose:
All of the benefits of diversity Open computing and ownership of hardware/software on any consumer devices The open internet All of the momentum on the transition to alternative energy All the progress made on CO2 emissions Freedom of travel Free elections All rights to privacy Safe products and foods Ownership of housing
Humanity would be doing GREAT if not for the humans.
ChadGPT2Every individual civilization has followed that pattern with a few exceptions. Overall, however the previous view is correct historically speaking. As a species things do just keep getting better for us, except in periods of systemic transition.
As a species things do just keep getting better for us, except in periods of systemic transition.
I think that’s been generally true since the first agricultural revolution led to the emergence of civilization, 10,000 or so years ago. But, progress has not been linear, it’s been exponential, with most of the progress occurring in just the last few hundred years, since the industrial revolution. In that regard, the progress that we’ve experienced over the last few hundred years has been anomalous.
The way of life that we take for granted today is very different from how most of humanity has lived through the vast majority of history (and that was itself very different from how our species had lived through the vast majority of our existence, with humans living in small hunter-gatherer tribes for most of our time as a species).
Modern life has existed for only the blink of an eye, on evolutionary time scales. Yet, in that time we have used up an incredible amount of natural resources, and we have made significant, irreversible changes to the Earth’s biosphere and climate.
It took our species nearly all of the 10,000 years of civilization’s existence to go from a few million people on the planet to a billion, but it only took a little over two centuries to do from one billion people to over eight billion. That kind of exponential growth simply cannot be sustained indefinitely on a planet with finite resources. Even at maximum possible resource use efficiency, and even with the maximum possible environmental impact mitigation efforts, the Earth still wouldn’t be able to sustain our growth forever. We would reach some hard, physical limit to growth, eventually.
Have you ever considered that trans people are the reason that we don’t keep progressing forever? /s
I think the problem is that, at some point, the powers that be decided that “better” is synonymous with “more appended zeroes”. We (and presumably any society) could ostensibly have kept growing indefinitely, provided we agreed that the ever-increasing personal wealth of the few (to the detriment of the many) does not constitute growth.