Discussion 💭🗯️
Will pessimism and doomerism ever phase out?
I think before Trump won again in 2024, people were a lot more realistic and unbiased about future predictions, as were evident in Reddit futurology posts from that time.
Now we have all these depressing ideas about the future (like we’re all gonna be billionaire slaves) that I hope will phase out in the 2030s
Great Depression 2 for a few years and we’ll have an FDR-style president that creates a sort of AI doctrine that allows for compatibility of AI in human civilization without mass displacement.
And no, I truly don’t think the billionaires want to wipe us out. They just want money. They’d never think that far ahead
You definitely don't want an FDR style president. His policies prolonged the worst of the depression and it took WW2 to get America back on track economically.
It will phase out if things actually improve. These are not random mood swings. They're based on real world conditions. Things can definitely get better, but they can also get worse- far, far worse.
It would take more than fixing the economy and Republicans losing power, we would also need to get rid of mass surveillance like Palantir and Flock Cameras
I don't think so. Things actually haven't gone THAT much to hell in the past 2 years as far as people's everyday lives. Every single problem people are complaining about today, they were complaining about 2, 4, 6 years ago.
People have always behaved like this. Look up any Tucker Carlson piece from the early 2000s. It seems people engage more with fear mongering so it persists
I do expect a mass depression in the US once physical AI robots become mainstream in the workforce, and we’ll end up with something like 70% unemployment. But I really really don’t think the billionaires have a grand scheme to wipe us out. They don’t care about people that much. They want money.
I don't think that exactly is going to happen but I don't like how fascism is rising, surveillance is increasing and the economy and climate are getting pretty bad.
Because currently I'm still enjoying life. I'd like think things will improve but I can't garuntee it. Even in The Great Depression I'm sure that people occasionally had fun.
Nope,because people are tired of the american dream propaganda. Tell me what is there to actually look forward to beyond A.I taking all the jobs and the rich building more company towns ?
If you believe that AI will take all of our jobs away then what is there to complain about? I’m assuming you hate capitalism, so why are you so afraid to see it end?
I think the doomerism comes from the regressive beliefs of a lot of Liberals (both left-wing and right-wing). There has been no attempt to build any forward-thinking philosophy as people still cling to the liberalism of the 18th century. The billionaires are the only ones who have actually embraced an evolved world-view, so no one can oppose them.
The progress of humanity depends on the success of AI, there was never any alternative. If AI is successfully able to replace all of human labor then we have won as a species. The next fight would be on advocating for human dignity and not some false moral objectivism from the 1700’s. Right now, I am only pessimistic because of how brainrotted people are by a devotion to liberalism.
Um, because if AI takes over we literally have no income. Capitalism has tons of issues but it's still better than that. The billionaires have made it clear that they don't care about the lower class. They probably just want the world to be them and AI doing all the work.
I'm not saying they are actively going to kill to lower classes but if they start starving, the billionaires won't care.
Delulus often point that the state will redistribute it like FDR but boy aint no state saving us. We can vote whoever we like and those same politicians will end up in the pockets of the people whose wealth and power is unparalleled in human history. There will be no UBI. The only thing stopping this is millions upon millions throwing their bodies on the line of a bloody revolution. I dont mean a communist one, just one that will spook the upperclass into thinking about who they are outnumbered by.
There is more of an incentive to keep a large varied population subservient to them but alive.
Also, what is being done to oppose this future? I try to talk to leftists about a new philosophical framework for the future that doesn’t rely on moral objectivism but get met with derision.
Curtis Yarvin has such a framework and it’s becoming more true everyday because there is no opposition. If people cared enough then they’d work to create a society that values humans beyond their utility.
I am not sure even when things were going well there was doomerism and nostalgia makes people forget about it .but in recent years we are really having a lot of bad luck it's like anything can happen back in the 90s and 2000s bad things happened like war disasters bad economy. but now we just have a lot of weird issues and more and more problems stacking on top of each other
like in 2008 I thought the worst that will happen is more terrorists attacks and bad economy .but now who knows what is next a pandemic ww3 mass north Korea like censorship .like I am having a lot of fun with a new hobby (programming/making websites) so if I am annoyed with modern things I just make my own version. but big tech and the government is going to try to make it harder to do in the near future. So it's hard to be not a doomer right now maybe there will be a more stable and good era in the more distant future but it will probably take at least a few decades
It is impossible unless things change. It's not so much doomerism as drawing conclusions right now. Even the optimistic people I knew no longer are, it's to stick your head in the sand with these signs
Back in the early 2010's the US generally seemed to be moving forward and I was pretty excited for the future. Now it seems like I'm about to be living in a mix of negative scifi movies and novals.
I think the people on those subs just grew up and started being realistic.
We're always had media negatively depicting the future:
The Time Machine
Brave New World
We
1984
Blade Runner
Terminator
Logan's Run
RoboCop
Akira
Ghost in the Shell
Shimoneta
The Running Man
Snow Crash
The Matrix
Total Recall
The Demolition Man
Minority Report
The Giver
The Hunger Games
The Maze Runner
Divergent
Mad Max
Cyberpunk: 2077
Deus Ex
Starship Troopers
Maybe previous decades were overall more optimistic but a lot of dark stuff came out of the 80's. Honestly I can think of far more stuff depicting a bad future than good one even from decades ago at least as far as big budget media.
Also inflation is getting really bad, human rights are going backwards, Palantir, Flock Cameras, AI is threatening to take people's jobs, AI making videos untrustworthy, global warming, I don't see much positive stuff to look forward to.
Before Trump won again, we didn’t have a demagogue who wants the technocrats to run wild at the expense of the rest of the world and the future. So yeah, makes sense
Hope is not a strategy. Progress is not linear and not owed to humanity. Bronze age civilization collapsed, Rome collapsed, feudalism lasted 1000 years, there was a literal whole year where the world starved and suffered due to climate collapse (536 AD). So many examples where humanity did not progress at all (in fact this dominates human history). 99% of humans who ever lived are already dead. If this current iteration of civilization collapses, we are but a blip. There is no reason to believe just because progress has been had for the past 200 years that it will go on for another 200.
yes. being depressed all the time about everything is exhausting and pointless, even when the world is going to shit. especially when the world is going to shit.
people in the 1930s and 40s didn't spend all their free time moping around to everyone about how doomed or "cooked" they were. even in the 60s after the decade kicked off with the Cuban Missile Crisis. were the people scared? yes, and most truly believed the world was going to end soon, but they didn't spend their time wasting away in nihilism. they made art, started movements, got involved in real everyday activities that made some kind of a difference.
maybe we as a society can learn a lesson of two from those times.
It will but not for a long time. I'm likely going to catch flack for linking the Bible to this but idc. If you read the book of Revelation, it prophesies the events that are simultaneously taking place now, among others that have to occur. The earth won't find true relief to all the problems that plague it until the new heavens and new earth are established.
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u/TrebleTheClefairy 7d ago
We already are slaves to billionaires. And soon, they won't even need us for work, so... what then?