I'm usually a glass-half-full of gin kind of person but I've been having an increasing number of gloomy thoughts about where we're headed as a society. It feels as though we're losing sight of the things that elevate us and I keep imagining us as being in the same position as other, equally dominant societies shortly before their decline and fall.
I'm thinking in terms of the endless cycles of violence from which we never seem to learn; a rising general distrust of experts and science and evidence (anti-vaxxers etc) leading to outbreaks of diseases that were under control; higher education increasingly seen as important only insofar as it can produce graduates as economic units, rather than the value of learning for its own sake; the funding of things such as libraries, galleries, museums dropping further down the priority list; the tacitly state-sanctioned dehumanisation of those perceived as somehow "lesser", be that because of race, disability, poverty or whatever; climate change and an energy crisis with no real solutions...put it all together and it feels very bleak and End-of-Dayish.
Of course I can see that good things happen too, and also understand on an individual level that whether your local art gallery stays open or is sold off for flats is of little significance when you only ever pass it on the way to the food bank, but at a broader, society level it matters...doesn't it? And I'm not suggesting we're two days from anarchy on the streets and the entire collapse of civilisation overnight, but then all the dinosaurs didn't die on the same day. It just feels like this is the end of a cycle.