October 25th, 2023 — Future Anxiety

I'm growing quite anxious for some time now. While I've always been subject to anxiety, I find myself reducing how far I look ahead as the future looks more and more daunting to me. In fact, I wonder how our societies are still functioning that well for some time now.

Since I was born we went through final crisis over and over again, at the point where I can't really say what happens when we're not living through one neither why they are that bad. My whole brain grew up in a fight or flight environment. And on a more personal note I feel like our future was stole and we're left with a mess.

We went through:

• market collapses (get ready for another one where we force you to work harder and harder with less and less means just for more profits to shareholders with short term vision)
• global pandemic (during which we were supposed to quietly work as usual)
• so many foreign wars I can't handle (and on which I'm supposed to take side every single time apparently)
• extreme society polarisation (where people get more and more angry to the point of breaking our democratic systems through anger)
• global warming that keeps getting worse and worse (on which we don't seem to act except by pushing the deadlines further and further away)
• tech monopolies that destroy our protection system piece by piece in search of short term profit while destroying our societies at the same pace.
• I won't even say AI because I don't think we'll still have anything left it comes to that, it will just have destroyed a lot of jobs in the meantime

And while I've grown up quite a techno-optimist — thanks to growing up reading the golden age of science fiction — I have real troubles imagining a bright future and finding myself more and more hoping that things just won't get too dire before I and all the people I love die. Meanwhile our generations is subject to more and more accusations as we try to be vocal about the pile of rotting mess we got left by those before.

Living in the present, with a short term vision, is the thing that keeps my sanity stable. Building things for the future on the other side is quite hard when it doesn't show you that much signs of improvements. I try my best to be kind, stay close to the people I love and create beautiful moments together, still it seems sometimes so trivial in the face of what's to come. But keeping hopes up is getting harder and harder in a world that seems to turn darker and darker.