AIBU to be so pessimistic about the near and distant future

[Macrodatarefiner]

I'm a dreadful pessimist, I can't stop looking at the world today and trying to work out what the world of tomorrow will look like. But I do try and take solace in the fact there have been undoubted improvements. AIBU to be anxious about the future?

I feel living standards are falling, the cost of housing and living for me and my peers is worse than our parents generation, and we can reasonably expect things to be even worse for our children.

An new era of war which feels increasingly close to home and threatening has begun. Political polarisation, everyone hates each others guts. Climate change - unstoppable. Am I being unnecessarily pessimistic?

Maybe this post can be fun too? What future do you envision 20, 50, and 100 years from now? What do we do now that we will look back on in horror?

20 years from now, I imagine things will be not hugely changed. Fewer young people will be able to read and write. The NHS will be gone, or scaled right back, assisted dying will be the norm, we will have regular power cuts and brown outs, there might be periods of relative food scarcity and people will generally be more distrustful and hostile to one another.

100 years from now, warring city states? Some infinitely more attractive to live in than others but they'll all have tight border security. Countries won't have been a thing for 50 years or so.

I wonder how someone from 1925 would look upon our world today.

Am I being unreasonable to be so pessimistic?

I wonder how someone from 1925 would look upon our world today. Think of how amazed they’d be at our quality of life and even the smallest creature comforts we enjoy: central heating, reliable transportation, food everywhere. In 1925 only around 10% of people in the UK were homeowners. Two thirds of people still used outdoor toilet and washing facilities. I don’t they’d look upon our world today and think we had things badly off!

Pretty much every generation has people who feel that they’re living in an exceptionally difficult time and that their lives are objectively worse than before. In reality, things just change and we need to adapt to them.

I think a lot of people from 1925 would think we were truly blessed compared to them and what they had etc.

However, it's about improving standards not looking back at how awful things used to be. We live still in an unequal society where a tiny number have most of the assets.

The richest person a hundred years ago would envy the comforts and security of a relatively very poor person living in the UK today. But then there are non material things like loneliness.

I think mass unemployment is incoming and we'll need to work out what to do with all the bored spare people (assuming we can adapt the economy to keep everyone alive and fed).

I’m 38. My life is objectively massively better than that of my mother who is in her sixties and supposedly enjoyed the boom times. I have a career in the City. I have my own money and get to decide how I spend it. I own my own home, no man on the mortgage. All of those things were insanely difficult for women when she was a young woman. And if my boss touches me up at work I can tell HR and they’ll do something about it; I can freely tell people that I want to remain childfree, and that I’m bisexual; I can live how I want without having to worry about what society thinks about it affecting my literal freedoms. All of those things were insanely difficult when she was a young woman, too.

These threads often seem to focus on really base measures of “is life better now”, usually “can I afford to buy the big house that I want and the lifestyle I aspire to” (when actually, the majority of Brits even buying their own home in the first place is a massively recent trend, and not something time-old which has been ripped from the hands of young people) rather than the enormous social and cultural changes the vast majority of us take for granted.

You are being unreasonably pessimistic.
Since the dawn of homo sapiens species, life has been hard. For tens of thousands of years, the life expectancy was 26 years.
Around 8000 BC things began to look a bit better. But let's face it, for 99% of the population, life was basically shit right until the Industrial Revolution. Since then, we have a had a massive uptick in our live conditions.
Wars, having to bury half of your offspring (if you were lucky) due to children mortality, hunger, untreatable health conditions...If you live in the UK nowadays, you don't have to worry about any of those.
The only major concern is a potential WWIII. Not ideal, because it would be mean a massive cull of human population (I don't think we'd become extinct). If that were to happen, at least we will have had a good run.
That should give you some perspective.

Between 1930 and 1946 my great grandmother had 11 children. 7 of them died before reaching the age of 2. We now have contraception and maternal care. I'd say she would be grateful to have the same options we now take for granted.

I think mass unemployment is incoming and we'll need to work out what to do with all the bored spare people (assuming we can adapt the economy to keep everyone alive and fed).

I think we just adapt and develop our economy and society as we’ve always done. At the turn of the twentieth century, a third of the population was employed in agriculture; another third in manufacturing. Almost ten percent of the population was still in private service as housekeepers, cooks, nursemaids, butlers etc. When those jobs disappeared, we didn’t end up with millions of unemployed people with nothing to do - because we’d moved on and there were other jobs for them to do.

And even more recently than that, think of women of our own mothers’ generation. When my mum left school in 1972 (she was at grammar school, one of the “clever girls”) apart from the usual suspects for women’s employment like nursing and teaching, which of course we still have, she and her classmates were bound for jobs as call operators, secretaries, touch typists in the typing pool. All of those jobs have long since disappeared - but they were replaced.

I think the reason for a lot of peoples current unhappiness is the fact that most know that life will be worse for their children and grandchildren that it was for them.
There is something deeply depressing about knowing that the world you leave will be worse than the one you came into.
Obviously there will be plenty for whom this isn't the case, but they are in the minority unfortunately.