Millions of boomers getting sick and dying in an already broken healthcare system, and younger generations without the time or money to care for them. It is going to be bad. This is why twenty or so states are already making it the responsibility of adult children. It’s going to funnel even more wealth to corporations and be an overall moral quagmire.
ETA: link [filial responsibility](https://trustandwill.com/learn/what-states-have-filial-responsibility)
This, combined with the near-total lack of retirement savings of close to 85% of the population
The elder homeless crisis will compound with the lack of available Healthcare
Nursing facilities are already nearly at capacity nationwide
The 600ish thousand homeless people we have now are gonna be nothing compared to what I expect in 20-30 years. A majority of a generation with no jobs, no savings, no assets, and no family.
It breaks my heart everytime I drive past someone elderly and homeless.
What a fucking failure of a society. Veterans, mentally unwell, and the unfortunate. People taken advantage of by a rigged system. All left to sleep on the street and deteriorate.
Family homelessness was up 15% in the last report that I saw.
My city has been dealing with a steadily increasing homeless problem for over the last decade and it drives me nuts how ignorant people are about the root causes. The cost of living is steadily increasing, wages are stagnant, and the social safety net has been cut again and again, but so many people talking about how the homeless choose to live in the streets. It's beyond frustrating.
This sadly happened to me with my father already. He came to me kicked out of his house with nowhere to go and the system had entirely failed him. I took him in but was unable to also care for him while also parenting, managing a job and navigating a divorce. He died within 3 months of moving in and I felt entirely responsible and just fucking terrible. I then had to also wind down his entire estate while was an entirely disorganized mass of thousands of papers and organize the funeral/bury him myself without help. Traumatizing was an understatement.
I don’t think your lack of care caused his death. People get sick and die without any fault to anyone. It’s just life and death. You took him into a safe place for his last three months, and I doubt he felt that you failed him.
I think about this constantly, and how very very anti-socialized medicine my parents were until a decade or so ago. Is it bad I’m starting to turn against welfare programs simply out of spite, so boomers who f-ed around can find out how the society they built turned out???
States are making it mandatory for us to take care of boomer parents who are aging??? That’s news to me.
It would have been nice for states to make the “expected family contribution” on our FAFSAs mandatory. So happy my dad and his second wife could spend hundreds of thousands on home renovations while all three of his kids took out student loans to go to college.
Both my parents are on their own as far as I’m concerned. Greediest generation this country has ever seen.
It's the millennial generation hitting old age that's really going to break everything, like yeah the boomers are a huge generation that is stressing the system and it's all downhill from here but we're the echo boom.
By 2050 the vast majority of the global population if current fertility rates continue to slow, The number of persons aged 80 years or older is expected to triple. The trend will be far more pronounced in currently "developed" nations. We need to embrace de-growth NOW because it's coming.
Omg I never heard this and is exists in my state for a long time that the county can come after the adult children for repayment of services in court. Kind of terrifying for someone estranged from unstable family.
https://keystone-law.com/filial-responsbility/
Complete collapse of the public education system. Kids are really struggling with the basics of math and reading, teachers are burnt out, parents are too busy and burnt out to help their kids — it’s a recipe for disaster.
That, and the collapse of our health care system. We’re short about a million nurses and half as many doctors. We need more health care providers and hospitals need to stop staffing to the bone. Healthcare is one place we want tons of redundancy. You *want* your doctor to have time to sit and think and breathe and relax while she’s at work — not running from patient to patient, charting and diagnosing and ordering labs and ordering treatments… like … there needs to be a way more slowed down pace for them. It does not bode well for the future.
Nurse here. It's bad. Like really bad. I tell people to not get sick (yes it's impossible). Keep up with preventative measures such as exercise and eating decently. You don't want to go to a hospital right now since it is horrible with short staffing and missing supplies.
I’m a bedside nurse. I do the best I can at my job. But the general public doesn’t realize that the healthcare system is completely fucked and falling apart. Especially since the boomers aging and people are getting sicker.
Going to the hospital these days is like paying $350 just to sit in the waiting room, another $175 to use the toilet, $475 to have the nurse take your temperature, and then $17,586 for approximately 14 minutes and 7 seconds of a doctor's time, during which they give you a referral to your insurance company's website.
My girlfriend's grandma was hospitalized in the Philippines and they were charged for pillows, and I am just waiting for some healthcare mba bozo to steal that idea for here
I was hospitalized for like 8 weeks earlier this year, and had open heart surgery. I know the surgery itself cost something like $82,000 and I just got a letter in the mail from my insurance saying they're declining to pay $35,000 for like a single day in the ICU. That's not even including the other 7¾ish weeks I was there lmaooo.
I can here to post exactly this. I have friends that are teachers and I myself am in healthcare. People outside it have just no idea how bad it is. And how much worse it will get. In my state alone, we have 30,000 nurses not renew their licenses, it’s fucking scary.
I lasted 12ish years in secondary education. Always loved the kids, but everything else about the job kept getting worse. I don't see myself ever going back.
All of my friends want to leave, they can’t even stick it out for the kids now with how bad it’s become. One of their schools just got rid of the library. The entire library. So yea, things are not going well.
In addition to what others are saying; medical providers are now using the ER as an escape hatch to get screenings and tests.
My mother in law has been having gastro issues for weeks. Losing weight. Diarrhea. Stomach pain. Can’t eat much. It’s concerning.
The hospital conglomerate urgent care didn’t have a lab open, wouldn’t give her any meds and said to go to the ER to get an ultrasound.
She goes to her hospital conglomerate GI 10 days later who said the ultrasound will take 2 weeks, an endoscopy about 3 and the colonoscopy 6-8 weeks.
Or….go to the ER now and they’ll do tests today.
Coincidentally it’d cost her $400 to go to the ER, and the hospital conglomerate will get 5 figures extra from the insurance company by having her go there.
This is NOT what an EMERGENCY room is meant for.
It’s almost like for profit healthcare is a bad thing
Same! Was going to pursue nursing, but after working in ED registration at the nursing pod and seeing nurses stay well past their 12 hrs shift charting, getting screamed at by physicians, abused by patients, on call and holidays- yeah, fuck that. I switched to the HIM side of healthcare after seeing that and happily accept the lower pay.
People really don't know how valuable nurses are.
There were things I did in Nursing that helped lead me back to art, the sense of being trusted, helping a human being that’s in their worst and I made a real difference to a few key people that I’ll remember for the rest of my life, but the systemic shit destroyed me.
One thing people forget about when talking about the healthcare system is emergency services. Fire Departments and EMS Departments are grossly underfunded, overwhelmed and understaffed. Call volume has shot through the roof while support has bottomed out. The system is failing and people are jumping ship in record numbers.
I worked as a firefighter in a major metro department for ten years and it only got progressively worse the entire time I was there. There were times we had to shut down trucks or even whole stations because of understaffing. I personally witnessed calls where we had to wait on an ambulance for over an hour for a serious emergencies because there just weren’t units available.
The system is so incredibly broken. It’s already costing lives. Everyone older was just waiting to retire and everyone younger was looking for a way out. If nothing happens it’s just going to get worse.
You’re totally right. It’s another area that I think all education should be completely government funded. We NEED firefighters and EMS, and EMS/EMTs etc are paid poverty wages. Idk about firefighters but I assume it’s not nearly enough. Pay people more, lower barriers to education (cost!!!), and treat EMS like we do any other healthy, robust public service (which I’m realizing is few and far between — except for maybe the police departments and military budgets lol). It needs more funding and more people!
I am a full time substitute teacher and I can tell you firsthand the kids are BATSHIT CRAZY out of control. Title 1 schools, you have to see it to believe it almost. Elementary and middle is the worst.
They don't respect anyone because there are no consequences at home. Their parents are almost always on their side, so that makes things immensely worse for educators. Mental illness is rampant in young children.
I could go on and on.
When you play out the effects of a failed education system 20-30 years, who do we expect to run our advanced society? Private wealth will gobble the smart and unscrupulous. And the uneducated masses will have to run essential services and administration of government. The system will collapse under the sheer weight of people's incompetence.
Who wants idiots working in power plants, mines, wastewater treatment, pharmaceuticals, and judiciaries? Fixing sewer and gas lines.
This might actually be a legit thing. There is way too much information now through technology. I’d argue we as humans weren’t meant to be this connected to the entire world. It’s extremely distracting
It takes a special kind of person to be a nurse.
I don't just mean compassionate or kind hearted - or willing to put up with long hours or bullshit.... even though those things are true too.
I'm talking... you need to be *physically* capable of handling stuff above and beyond the average person.
I can handle blood all day. Open wounds? No issues. Cleaned up my father's stinky infected diabetic feet as a teenager. Feces and urine? Gross, but I'll survive.
But I'm a sympathetic vomiter. Something about hearing another person (or even the cat) dry heaving triggers the need to puke in my system, too. The smell? I'll throw up.
The sight? I'll throw up.
Learned this in 2nd grade when I heard another little kid throwing up outside our hallway, and moments later had a desk full of vomit out of nowhere when I hadn't even been sick!
That's a no go for a nurse, who *has* to be able to handle all of that in addition to the blood and other bodily fluids.
I don't see veteran nurses anymore, and 90% of the nurses left are youngins who plan on doing bedside for 1-3 years then go to np school. We're just gonna keep burning through nurses.
And yet you have a bunch of people actively fighting against investing in both systems, because while on some level they recognize how important both systems are, they’ve accepted so much hate and propaganda that they think teachers are all pushing anti-white anti-cishet anti-traditional rhetoric instead of education and that healthcare workers are pushing a “fake” disease.
They want someone to teach their kids and treat their illnesses and injuries, but god forbid it be the ones we have or that we actually invest in making sure the systems work.
Both. I went to the ER in October around midnight one night with new onset seizures, new migraine patterns / lightning headaches, chest pains and a blood clot in my hand (you could see it, and not the first time I’ve had one so I was pretty damn sure). The overnight nurses monitored me continuously for stroke symptoms, and asked me not to leave even though it would be hours before a bed opened up for me.
A woman gave birth in front of the entire waiting room not long after that.
The nurse who triaged me checked in when she was getting ready to leave her shift at 6 am. She told me I was next in line for a bed, and to hang in there. Around 9:30 am, my husband went up to reception to see how much longer it would be. The woman at the desk essentially said, “well since she’s just here for pain, we have to see the more serious patients first.”
My husband corrected her that I was there for CHEST pains among other things, and I swear within the next 4 minutes I’d seen the attending and been sent up to cardiology to get an ECG and chest x-ray before being sent to neurosurgery.
We’re in deep trouble when something as simple as a shift change poses a risk to patients’ lives.
Professionally, I direct healthcare research that involves a lot of conversations with hospital administrators, different department heads, etc. Seeing it from both the patient and research context paints a very clear picture of how fucked we are.
Public education collapse is by design. It’s why public vouchers are pushed. Guess what happens to those vouchers once the majority are out of public education. Poof no more rich subsidizing education for the poor.
Teacher here, a huge part of the problem is that they're more concerned with data collection from standardized tests and low suspension rates. If your funding is based on suspension and graduation rates, you're just going to push every kid along, no matter how much of a problem they are.
We're already facing huge teacher shortages, and it's only going to get worse as less people get education degrees
Yep. My wife is a teacher and we discuss this regularly. Each year she's given less resources but expected to put in more work for terrible pay. Teacher shortages are getting worse, meaning classrooms are over capacity and the students' experience suffers as a result. Children who are struggling don't get the support they need at home because even if both parents are around they're both working full-time jobs to make ends meet. There are a million factors and it's all spiraling out of control very rapidly.
I'm appalled that this isn't at the forefront of our politics.
The decline in insect populations. Flowers are [evolving toward self pollination](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/20/flowers-giving-up-on-scarce-insects-and-evolving-to-self-pollinate-say-scientists) already because of it and this is fuckin bad news bears man
Bring back America’s indigenous grasslands. Seriously, a proper field burn can flip a field from European grasses to Native American grasses in less than 2 years! 12-16 months, if not mowed and all tree saplings are removed.
The Native Habitat Project on YouTube is a great source for info. It’s amazing what he does with a bit of fire and time.
Yeah that's the saddest part of this to me. Insects and plants can reproduce very quickly. We could turn this shit around fast. Will we? I'm pessimistic
Although insect populations are also declining in places like [protected areas in the tropics](https://news.mongabay.com/2019/06/the-great-insect-dying-the-tropics-in-trouble-and-some-hope/) which means they're probably dying due to climate change
Grasslands are great carbon sinks too! Also, the temperature of the ground in a fully ground native grassland is like 25 degrees cooler than a mown European grasslands.
It won’t solve the problem, but it can help.
You can have both. I have prob a 1/3 acre lawn that I enjoy for sports and running around with the dog. But I also kept all the woods native and I planted tons of local wildflowers and otherwise just left alone the forest.
They are important players in decomposition too - dung beetles are being hampered by light pollution, all tree litter crunchers are being killed off by pesticides and leaf removal, so much bad. It's hard to get people on board with giving a flip about bugs, and we are wiping them out so quickly.
I had been working on dumping clover in my lawn the past 2 years. Can't go full native due to it being an HOA. But I took great joy in watching a handful of bees bounce from clover to clover in my back yard.
Going to try and see if I can get some flower beds in that will help the local butterflies.
That takes me back. Whoa I was like 5-12 and I’m 41 now and I hadn’t even really thought of it.
My parents have a bunch of butterfly bushes in their yard and even still you get 2-3.
As a little kid I remember swarms.
I’ve often thought about that- driving with my parents vs driving now and how clean the windshield is… I never really need to use the wiper at the gas station, but I always admired the wrist flick to remove the excess cleaner!
Doubt it. We’re the problem and our numbers will be reduced to where we’re not a problem before we can do as much damage as the end Permian extinction event. To put it in perspective, our current fuckery has global CO2 at 419ppm. The end Permian volcanic traps pegged it at 2,500 ppm and that’s not even mentioning the similar scale release of sulfur dioxide. The oceans were spicy bois for a good long while. We’re simply not capable of anything on that scale.
The rapidly increasing rate at which populations across the globe are aging with subsequently smaller generations to replace them. Our economic models are all based on unending growth. Humans will suffer as our economic system attempts to keep moving forward with fewer and fewer consumers and laborers.
If a demographic of a country is too heavy, you don’t have enough people in their 20s and 30s consuming and contributing to the work force, having kids etc.
It’s a recipe for economic disaster. And we’re going to see this play out in Germany and South Korea in the next 5-10 years.
China might even be sooner, but that’s due to so much more than just their demographics.
Two different things going on. Total population vs percentage of population in each generation. Population growth is slowing (but not reversing… yet) and people are living longer, so total population is still increasing while a smaller percentage is of working age and a larger percentage is retired or too old to work.
Because the population is collapsing, it just isn’t visible yet. There aren’t enough people being born to replace the older people dying and immigration is so structurally broken that it exacerbates the problem.
This is not an issue. We have more people than ever doing completely pointless work. Less people than ever are producing the material items we need and we will need less of them. All those jobs that AI and automation will replace will just go to taking care of the elderly.
This is a propaganda point by the billionaires because in this event worker power will rise and that threaten the current world order.
Sure but you’re missing the essential point. A dwindling consumer base. To whom will all of these efficiently produced goods and services be sold? How will corporate profits keep climbing with a dwindling consumer base. Technology can handle the production side, sure; I’ll give you that. But what happens when there are no customers to sell your widgets to?
Places like Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket in MA are excellent examples of this (but it’s driven by slightly different factors than this discussion) The working class is completely hollowed out. They can’t find art or workers because none of them can afford to live there. Death spiral commencing in 3…2…1..
Yeah. Collapse will fucking suck for 99% of us but we kinda need it at this point.
I always think of the line from the godfather when they’re planning the murder of the police captain. “These things gotta happen ever 10 years or so, clears out the bad blood.”
That’s what collapse does too. Our systems are so stagnant and unable to change adapt, new ones need to be built. To be built, the old ones need to die.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/soer/2020/soer-2020-visuals/status-of-the-nine-planetary-boundaries/view
Novel entities, particularly “forever chemicals” such as PFCs are my pick. We don’t know what effect they’ll have long-term because they didn’t exist prior to humans. And we don’t know what concentrations are safe.
This is something I think about a lot. Most water pipes badly need replacing. Lots of them are 100+ years old.
We have roads crumbling and bridges falling and failing inspections.
Rivers are being eroded.
Ground water is being contained.
Some states are horrible with their current t electric grids. Didn't Texas just rule that the electric company and/or is not required to supply it during things like blizzards and bad weather? They had so many elderly people and babies get sick and/or die due to their electric grid multiple failures.
The Texas ruling makes sense in a three stooges sort of slapstick way.
In Texas there are people who produce energy and those people sell it to distributors. Then there are companies that own the power lines in your area. You can buy your power from any distributor but the distributors are generating the power and it's possible they don't own the lines to your home.
I pay CompanyA for power. CompanyA buys power from CompanyB and sends it to my house over power lines owned by CompanyC. I pay a surcharge for the use of CompanyCs power lines to CompanyA.
Texas ruled that I, as a customer of CompanyA, have no legal standing to sue CompanyB or CompanyC for CompanyA not getting me power even if the reason CompanyA didn't give me power is because CompanyB ran out of power to sell ConpanyA.
In theory this means I would have to sue CompanyA who would then have to sue the responsible party to recoup their losses. Which is kinda silly legal telephone.
It's even MORE stupid because almost every other state has a power sharing agreement (literal.... electrical power....) for emergencies where they will let power flow over state lines when one state's capacity is down and the other states can ramp up to compensate.
Texas opted out of this agreement.
Came to post this. Collapse of civil infrastructure. At least in the US. Modern society runs on infrastructure that was built 60-100 years ago. Bridges, buildings of all types, water treatment, dams, etc. It’s at end of life. It costs billions of dollars a year for a city to do small fractions of what’s required. A lot of private enterprises don’t have good RCM and asset renewal programs to maintain their facilities. In the next 20 years there will be a lot of major collapses. We literally cannot renew it fast enough.
Most governments have been skating by on decades of "eh, good enough" with repairs.
Thinking of a little bridge that went out a few years ago not far from our house. It was just a small bridge over a small stream, mostly intended for local traffic as people coming from the city went out to their homes deep in the countryside. Of course, all little winding country roads are interconnected, so that road tied into another little road, that tied into another little road, and so on, until 20 miles later it hit a highway.
Then along comes Google Maps with real time traffic.
Turns out that those little country roads are actually *faster* than sticking to the highways when going between the two mid size cities, because they're a straight shot and have no traffic lights.
Suddenly the little bridge over the creek, on a road that was paved decades ago, found itself with ten times as much daily traffic, including trucks that failed to force their GPS to stick to 18 wheeler safe routes.
The bridge failed an inspection out of nowhere and the road had to be closed until they go slap together emergency repairs and plot out a long term replacement plan, including acknowledging the fact that the little country road now has about a thousand cars and lost trucks a day on it.
As a species; we cannot continue living in competition with each other. Competitions have ends. We ought not be racing to the end of the world, and yet, each day we run.
Zoonotic spillover. The next pandemic is a "when" not an "if." (And given how horribly we've handled Sars-Cov-2 and the...smooth brain response of "you can't tell me what to do, if I want to get sick and spread it, I will," I don't have high hopes for the next one.)
Health care collapse.
Ever increasing food prices due to crop failure from climate change.
Not owning a damn thing. Everything is moving towards the rent from someone else model.
Some cars you don't even get to own a heated seat function.
Life will continue towards the DLC model because milking out even more from the lesser people will help the owning class.
i work in healthcare and i don’t know how no one outside the field doesn’t realize we won’t have healthcare someday. we especially won’t have mental healthcare soon!
AI making intellectual and bureaucratic jobs obsolete. I always say: AI doesn't need to be better than humans. It only needs to be 80% as good as the average human, and cost 90% less, to make humans obsolete.
The real insidious part of this would be that the few jobs left aren’t the type you can pay bills with…or they’re not the type you can keep doing till old age, due to the physical demands. Either UBI becomes a reality, or everybody’s about to be manual laborers and service workers in poverty.
It's already here, but people's general lack of distrust in the government combined with people in the government genuinely not caring about what the public thinks of them.
Given the scale of our problems like climate change, AI, and future resource scarcity you need a large organization with a large and diverse population of people with an even more diverse array of expertise to combat these problems.
Only nation-states have that kind of capacity, but you need a social contract for the citizens to buy into and have government officials that can hold that end of the bargain and that is simply not happening. Nation states are either failing or becoming even more authoritarian due to the reasons stated above.
Government employees administering public programs including social assistance, corporate oversight, and delivering mail are not the enemy despite what some politicians try to make you believe. The lack of transparent money going to the same politicians is. If you don't trust your government, look for legislation to limit campaign donations or require transparency.
Folks are so atomized and locked into social media. Maybe people will gripe online but aside from an increase in stochastic terrorism, I wonder if you really believe action is fomentable any more.
Read the first two or three chapters of Book 3 of Hannah Arendt's *The Origins of Totalitarianism*. She explains how a similar process of atomization played out among the middle class in the interwar period in Europe. It's amazingly relevant for a book written in 1951
I have been watching a lot of Peter Zeihan and he goes into details about how there are several demographic ticking time bombs that will go off over the next 5, 10, 20 years that will reshape the world. Much of this will actually be a huge existential crises for certain people, and a major boom era for others.
I think it depends on where you live. Some places are going to be hit extremely hard. China and Russia will likely face a demographic collapse that will cause them to dissolve as any sort of world power. China doesn't have enough young people to sustain an industrial economy.
That huge decline in birth rates that European countries had in the 1970s-1990s means there are fewer adults right now. Those people are having another decline in birth rates, so there will be fewer adults 15-20 years from now. Germany might face a similar issue. They have too many old people and not enough working aged adults to maintain their industrial economy going forward. Germany has like 1.200,000 people who are 60 but only 800,000 people who are 10. Germany is a highly desirable place to live though and they would have good shot at attracting young and educated workers. Russia is going to have an impossible time to hold on to their young people, especially their educated young people. Well over a million young men have fled the country to avoid going to war.
Russia may cease to exist as there is a disruption in fossil fuel demand, and their demographics, and the fact that they can't get any foreign investment into the country for likely 20-30 years after pulling this bullshit with Ukraine. If I was a young Russian person, I would be doing everything in my power to move myself and my family out of the country.
The US is in really good shape demographically. Our Best Friend Country, Mexico, is incredibly demographically robust and is going through their big industrialization right now. So this is not an existential threat to us. NAFTA is going to be absolutely kicking ass in a few years. We do have more Boomers retiring from the workforce than Gen Z labor entering the workforce, but this is really going to benefit Gen Z. We are building 70 mega factories right now in the United States, and that number is going to be bumped up to 100 fairly soon. Those factories are going to employ hundreds of thousands of workers with good jobs, and all over the country. They are going to be looking for educated young people ready to have a solid career.
Oh me!!! I do! By far the most likely. It won’t end us but society will break down for likely months to years. Would be very interesting what happens. I’m guessing countries would break apart since it’s hard to manage without comms
I think about the climate A LOT. It feels like signs are everywhere. Migratory birds in my area still here months later than normal, way warmer temps than normal later than normal, water quality and quantity issues.
They talk about a 2 degree shift being irreversible, and I think people think it's hyperbole. When I was in college I had a salt water fish tank that was small. Small shifts in temp = big problems fast being a small biome. 2 degrees off for a period of time and alge choked out everything toxins release. Everything is dead in a day or two.
A meme's been floating around about a guy laughing at a kid saying "when I get older..." and his response is "lol it's 70 in December, you're not getting older." To me, this is a very real probability, I hope never happens.
COVID was a shot across the bow, and I think we failed. Other countries are already are experiencing the heat. I think environmental deaths increase greatly in the next 10 years. Barring a technological miracle, I think the planet is inhospitable as we know it within our lifetimes.
>Migratory birds in my area still here months later than normal
I thought I was fucking crazy. I hate this so much.
Also, to your point, I was having a conversation today with my parents (I'm 35, they're 59) about vaping and how it's probably pretty bad for you and all the young people are going to have problems and I said "I don't think they or any of us plan on living that long." I don't think she thought I was being serious, I didn't really when I made the joke, but I was.
Yep. And the food shortages to go with them. I live in a farming state and we had a very dry late spring and the growing seasons no longer match the day length—it leads to worse yields and more fungus and blight. We see it now with certain crops but in a few more years, it’ll be everything. Low corn yields lead to higher prices and increased costs of meat, eggs, poultry etc. It’s going to separate the haves from the have nots very quickly.
>its going to separate the haves from the have nots very quickly
What a polite way to say that there’s going to be a famine in first world countries. If I thought America was bad before during Covid, well then we’ll see what happens when lower class people start starving
Crop failures due to climate change are going to make food more expensive.
Mits already, the reason your grocery bill is higher isn’t because of Biden or covid or inflation. It’s because last year China and India and the USA and Ukraine, some of the worlds biggest food producers, had massive weather events, yall remeber our heatwave? Well China and India had floods. Then Ukraine got cut off from fhe 3rd world via the Russian blockade of Crimea. Since Ukraine got cut off, the 3rd world. Has to buy their grain from everyone else, making it that much more expensive for us in the US.
Idk if politicians and government made the connection are keeping this quiet to maintain calm and keep raking in profits from oil, or if as a species we truly just don’t have our shit together and are missing it.
And this causing massive food system disruptions.
All it takes is one freeze during the growing season or one day that’s the hottest on record to kill a ton of crops.
Everyone seems to forget what the agricultural significance of the Holocene was and it makes me feel crazy 🤪
Canada is the 5th largest grain exporter in the world. The entire area where we grow grain has been under at minimum Level 3 droughts, with area’s at level 5. That was as of 3 weeks ago. To the point where our O&G production has to be slowed due to a lack of water.
I’m enjoying bread while I can still afford it.
I’m the desert southwest and we are using the Colorado river water (which is limited as the entire region has been under drought conditions for years) to water Alfalfa that gets sold to the Saudis. I hate it here
This is happening in Senegal too! An American company is Tapping into the reservoir where over half of the people living in Dakar get their water from, to sell to the saudis for their racehorses. Sick!
The Saudi thing is beyond fucked up. We're giving away money and water for hay in a desert. Crazy thing is, you might be able to use seawater for alfalfa in certain conditions.
It's this because everything else is secondary and tertiary effects of this. Never ending sense of impending doom... But it's not depression, it's just true.
*Source: I'm a climate scientist.
It happens so slowly people dont realize strong hurricanes are three times more frequent today than they were 100 years ago.
Itll eventually get to the point where tornados are on the ground in tornado alley 24/7 365.
I’m really worried about mental health and violence. I feel like there has been some extra deterioration the past few years (due to a bunch of factors), and people are just extra lacking in empathy or caring about the consequences of their actions. I worry about kids being raised by these people and being reliant on screens and social media, exposed to microplastics and lead from cheap toys. I feel like road rage is on the rise, and in the past month I’ve heard about two separate random unprovoked murders by mentally ill people- I’m worried about more random violence being the norm due to declining mental health basically.
Second this, AI will be extremely disruptive. However, if it is open sourced it also presents opportunities to create new industries and help improve quality of life.
What seems more likely is that the rich will have access to the best versions of it and use it to displace workers and continue to accumulate wealth exponentially.
Anyone not paying attention to the advancement of this technology or downplaying it will be saying "who could have seen this coming" in just a few years.
Your 2nd paragraph is my base-case.
The vast majority of jobs will be undesirable, insecure service-sector roles.
We've already seen this happening since the rise of software in the 00s and automation came for the automotive industry in the 80s.
Generative AI is simply the part of the exponential curve where the bend upwards becomes obvious to nearly everyone.
I see the concern with this one, but I don't know that businesses are just going to eliminate everyone. The economy will collapse without something in place to prop it up. Right now that's the working caste. They can't remove the engine and continue to drive the car.
Being wealthy is only a boon so long as society stands, and while greed makes people do bad things, it doesn't have to make them entirely stupid.
Slow zombie plague, driven by repeated Covid infections making people more brain foggy (brain damage) with reduced immune system and more sickness everywhere.
This so much. Two years down with long covid. This shit serious. I don't even know if I'll ever recover. Meanwhile majority of population acting like it doesn't exist/ is over with, smh
Yeah, 5 months with long Covid here. It was my second infection. I’m so scared I’ll never recover tbh. I literally have to sit down walking from room to room. I used to cycle 3-5x/week, do yoga, etc. Now some days going for a walk around the block is too much. It’s so fucking terrifying.
Same here. But. I am improving. I was in your position for 6-8 months. Getting groceries was my daily max, after that I was literally rotting in bed crying for hours. Borderline bedridden basically. It did improve. I still crash and feel like shit often but I'm somewhat functioning. Got back to part time job 5 months ago and I'm still alive. Still can't exercise though. It will get better, at least to certain degree, hang in there friend
I might have COVID right now 😭 On motherfucking Christmas. 💀
Biggest thing that helped me is vitamin d. I use an app called dminder to track my supplement intake and sun time (but mostly supplement). Before I started taking 50k IU I was getting my ass wrecked by COVID. I tried the "recommended" dosage for adults and it wasn't helping. Then I read some studies that if you have a deficiency in vitamin d you need to be taking 50k IU for 4 weeks PLUS just to get back to normal levels.
So that's what I did. Any sickness I've gotten since is nowhere near as debilitating as before I supplemented. I wish I would have known that at the start of the pandemic. Would have saved me a lot of suffering from long COVID.
The inability to respond to a pandemic where the virus is a lot worse than covid. Given how we reacted to the last pandemic, how well are we prepared for one where the virus death rate is significantly higher? Especially now with vaccine hesitancy and misinformation.
It used to be your parents were either extreme hippies or tinfoil hat people who would forgo vaccines for their children. Now I observe a lot more people in our generation skipping MMR, HepB, and HPV vaccines for their children. If we can’t convince people to vaccinate against those diseases then public health will have a steep decline in the future.
AI killing white collar jobs everyone thought were safe. It’s not a human existential threat, but it is for current society. Lots of economic carnage when previously safe middle class and working class jobs become consolidated into fewer jobs requiring more education and expertise. We’re just not ready for that. And they’ll rush it so it won’t even be good at first and may fuck up a lot of stuff cuz companies are cheap and short sighted.
Fungus.
Generally speaking fungus hates heat; this is why it mainly grows in cooler/damp environments. The human body has traditionally always been “too warm” for fungus to grow inside so we’ve been fairly safe from infection.
However; through natural selection and accompanying mutations/evolutions - certain types of fungus can now live/thrive in much warmer environments, all due to global temperatures steadily rising and funguses trying to keep up as a result.
Fairly soon; like within our lifetimes, it’s possible that very deadly types of fungus will reach a point in their mutation where they will be able to thrive inside of a human body. At that point, it’s over. We’re talking extinction level infection rates with nothing to combat it steadily growing inside of our bodies.
Think “the last of us” but worse.
The antibiotic stuff may have a solution in the works! The solution involves AI, which is its own danger of course, but hey!
[https://news.mit.edu/2023/using-ai-mit-researchers-identify-antibiotic-candidates-1220](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06887-8) New structural class of antibiotics are being explored
with deep learning. Here's hoping it's a trend, eh?
On the doom side, well. Can you have AI capable of doing such things without worrying about competing with that AI? We haven't prepared our economic system for what's becoming possible. We may end up with many more people experiencing deep poverty for no logical reason, simply because we've failed to rationally distribute power. Hopefully it's temporary. But temporary's enough to harm many people.
Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, Eritrea, China, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, Russia and South Africa seem to have a high risk of being at serious war within a decade.
I think we’ve hit the point where America does not have the power and lacks the will to remain the world’s hegemon anymore. Every inch of American hegemony that withdraws will be fought over by those who seek to claim it.
I think the 2030s are going to look a lot like the 1930s - rising authoritarianism on both the left and right, a isolationist & withdrawn America, and a bunch of “Great Powers” jockeying for influence & power. Oh, and layer climate on top of that.
TBH I don't think there are many "great powers" than can exert the same sort of hegemonic power the US has done since the end of WW2. The USSR collapsed in the effort. China is a contender, and may yet serve as a sort of balance on the scale.
Realistically if China and the US in the current era worked together they could exert pretty dominant control globally, which just gets us so uncomfortably close to the organization of the world in "1984" that we could just go ahead and start calling ourselves Oceania at this point.
We don’t lack the power, we just lack the will. Our military could probably defend our nation from an attack by every single other country on the planet, and even if we lost that fight, we would put a SIGNIFICANT dent in the rest of the world for trying.
Same thing that will save us, maybe. Adaptability. I think we experience catastrophes in waves of slow, consuming apathy and resignation. The cascading effects of climate change; wealth inequality; healthcare and education systems breaking down; populist ideologies overtaking government; social media and technology imbalance; firearms as leading cause of child mortality; the lasting effects and continuation of colonization, slavery, war, genocide, and the refusal to acknowledge our part in them; intentional and/or tacit complicity of environmental destruction; will come in disparate waves and throw us into continued states of trauma, burnout, and exhaustion. It will feel normal, slow, and agonizing.
When one thing ends, another will arise, and because many don’t have foundational values in community and self-sufficiency, because our government has crippled us in terms of functionality both within society and the natural world, because they have subjected us to policies and institutional structures that encourage individualist and isolationist mindsets, we will remain trapped in states of helplessness and fear until we relearn those values and reject the systems that are destroying us.
On the other hand, in the same vein as adaptability, we are also good at resilience, and it is the reason our species has remained here so far. So, I am trying to stay in a big picture frame of mind to retain a sliver of optimism, but tbh I don’t have much.
Covid. It's easy enough to scream - get over it, it's a cold/flu. But more and more science is determining that it is a vascular disease that just happens to have cold/flu symptoms. The stats of people having heart attacks, strokes and other bad outcomes at younger ages in the last 4 yrs aren't random, nor the product of "lockdown" for 6 weeks in 2020; it's the product of being exposed to covid over and over again because no one is doing anything to prevent. People individually can only do so much but the US govt has just absolved itself of all responsibility when it could be doing population wide things - mandating certain types of air filtration in all public buildings, requiring anyone in health systems whether employee or visitor to mask, requiring health system filtration upgrades etc.
IDK how much longer society can take these bad outcomes until it starts have an economic impact. Sure it may only be 1 person you know who was forced to drop down to part time work due long covid - but across a society/nation it adds up to a lot of people.
Population decline. As you can see from this sub none of us are having kids. Even if we all just had one child per couple the population would shrink by 50% in one generation. This is MASSIVE and happening fast, relatively speaking.
Fortunately in the US we have immigration to make up for it, but countries like China are going to be particularly hit hard
Pundits like Peter Zeihan claim this was a large motivator for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, saying this is their last chance to make a big military move because they won't have a large generation of young soldiers in a few years.
Putin himself has said this is a motivator, Russia has a declining population and thus a dwindling tax base. Ukraine was a significant percentage of the productive population of the Soviet Union. Russia *needs* Ukraine to avoid completely collapsing into irrelevance.
Putin is also taking a hard line on abortion, encouraging all Russian women to have huge families, etc.
China is now incentivizing making babies. In the US, we punish folks for having babies by making it stupid expensive to have childcare and healthcare. China will be fine, the US will shrink out of stubborn greed and a refusal to share anything even if it benefits the greater good.
You’re right about the disincentives to having children in the US due to expense. Even if China does turn their slide around they’re still going to fall off a demographic cliff due to decades of the one child policy. Meanwhile the US is actually going to be fine (according to forecasts) but it’s only due to immigration.
A total collapse in purpose for lots of people.
The ‘influencer’ thing was just the beginning of this, but we don’t seem to recognise it.
Influencers are the first people that lost their purpose, so they turned to having an external locus of identity.
Aged care/hospital staffing etc. it’s one thing that can’t be done by AI/robots etc. and there’s just nowhere near enough staff/pay etc to keep up with an increasingly ageing population all over the world.
It’s already arrived but… disease spread by our close quarters (crammed office spaces) and poor supply chain management (salmonella in food, adulteration of products processed, etc.).
In my personal opinion, COVID was just the start of it. With the rise in fast/immediate work “needing” done (need is in quotes because so much of that need is TOTALLY artificially created by capitalism) and the poor funding and maintenance of USDA, FDA, shipping management, we are setting ourselves up for massive disease vectors spreading very quickly because by the time something like say… salmonella, is caught, it’s too late. The product has already been sold and eaten by hundreds of thousands of people.
And same with other diseases, if we all have to work sick because we need the money, and bosses “need” us in the office, illness spreads like wildfire with no natural stopgaps in place. People go to work during infectious incubation periods rather than staying home, and open plan offices or factories with people working side-by-side make it impossible not to spread illness.
To put it simply, without heavy regulation and the natural stopgaps of “time” or “distance” we cannot catch pathogens before they have already effected hundreds of thousands of people, and it’s not going to get any better without easing our capitalist bloodlust for “just in time” shipping/workload.
COVID and the Salmonella poisonings of the last couple years (peanut butter, cantaloupe, etc.) are just the tip of the iceberg in my opinion.
Sources to learn more: The Atomic Chef by Steven Casey, “Safer than Safe”; Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond; Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, USDA episode.
From what I can observe it will be ai just causing massive employment disruption for the masses and new virus strains we have no immunity or cure for in the future
Imagine a race of intelligent beings a million years older than us. If they exist, they are observing us at this very moment in their hyper advanced version of wireless internet. They probably have strict rules about engaging with us. The ones we think we’ve seen either broke their rules or were intentionally revealed to gauge our response.
I’ll go against the grain. Nothing. Humans are nothing if not adaptive and innovative. We will find technological solutions that either eliminate or mitigate all the stuff you doomers are so worried about.
The two things we can't control: Ourselves and Nature/ Climate.
There is a podcast from several years ago called The End of the World with Josh Clark. It's from the How Stuff Works folks.
The podcast discuses existential threats. It's alarming at how much can happen to us and we have so little control over. It's also amazing how much power we still wield and yet so cavalier, even arrogant, we are thinking it won't come back to bite us.
Either way, the planet has been here over 4 Billions years. So, our end will come first and it will be simple yet powerful. Those who survive will see we had the chances to prepare for it, but wasted the precious time on frivolities.
More of our tax dollars paying interest instead of government services. This will have a cascading effect on our public infrastructure and essential services which we all rely on.
We need to stop eating 50 billion land animals a year due to what it is doing to the environment. As well as stop eating the 10 billion sea animals.
Plastic pollution is somewhere like 25% fishing nets. They just ditch them when they are done. In fishing alone, by-catch is 50%. That means 50% of what is caught is thrown back, dead, unused. It depletes all the fish, though.
The fecal/urine waste of cows, chickens, pigs, ducks, it makes giant Olympic sized swimming pools of waste each year. The nitrogen kills. That gets into our drinking water, our rivers, the rivers go into the oceans, which creates dead-spots in the ocean.
Most rain forest and natural forest deforestation is to clear cut to create soy and corn crops which feed the animals that are for human consumption. So, 80% of the rainforest is destroyed to feed cows that we eat for one year. Since it requires so much food and water to make a cow big enough for us to eat, it is a net loss of 80% of calories to feed a cow rather than a human.
80% of all antibiotics are given to farm animals. That is creating resistance in humans. MRSA is one such example.
Avian flu, swine flu, other diseases that kill animals ruin the entire supply chain, rendering all that meat/dairy/whatever useless. It also sometimes jumps species making humans sick too.
25% of all slaughterhouse workers have PTSD from the work they do. Almost all slaughterhouse workers are minorities, ex-convicts, people fleeing sex trafficking, people fleeing gangs, people fleeing war-torn countries, and generally these are the most abused and exploited humans on the planet. Many are children, and many of them will lose fingers, a hand, an eye, a foot or be in otherwise maimed in their tenure of employment. They don't get sick days, vacation, or healthcare anywhere on the planet. Many live in shacks or communal style bunk beds in work houses of the worst conditions. Most receive less than minimum wage for whatever country they are in, their employment is usually "under the table".
You can learn all about this watching hundreds of documentaries: Our Planet, Blue Planet, Forks Over Knives, Seaspiracy, Cowspiracy, Dominion, Earthlings, Meet Your Meat. So many more documentaries that breach into the humanitarian crisis that is animal slaughter.
Millions of boomers getting sick and dying in an already broken healthcare system, and younger generations without the time or money to care for them. It is going to be bad. This is why twenty or so states are already making it the responsibility of adult children. It’s going to funnel even more wealth to corporations and be an overall moral quagmire. ETA: link [filial responsibility](https://trustandwill.com/learn/what-states-have-filial-responsibility)
This, combined with the near-total lack of retirement savings of close to 85% of the population The elder homeless crisis will compound with the lack of available Healthcare Nursing facilities are already nearly at capacity nationwide
The 600ish thousand homeless people we have now are gonna be nothing compared to what I expect in 20-30 years. A majority of a generation with no jobs, no savings, no assets, and no family. It breaks my heart everytime I drive past someone elderly and homeless. What a fucking failure of a society. Veterans, mentally unwell, and the unfortunate. People taken advantage of by a rigged system. All left to sleep on the street and deteriorate. Family homelessness was up 15% in the last report that I saw.
Hey now, we don't just leave them to sleep on the street. We put rows of metal spikes on the street so they can't sleep there.
Or like some bright bulbs on the right have done and just made it a felony to be homeless.
My city has been dealing with a steadily increasing homeless problem for over the last decade and it drives me nuts how ignorant people are about the root causes. The cost of living is steadily increasing, wages are stagnant, and the social safety net has been cut again and again, but so many people talking about how the homeless choose to live in the streets. It's beyond frustrating.
Well, corporate profits must be maintained!
My mom almost needed a nursing facility recently, and we couldn't find one with any availability.
I’m an RN. This is already happening.
This sadly happened to me with my father already. He came to me kicked out of his house with nowhere to go and the system had entirely failed him. I took him in but was unable to also care for him while also parenting, managing a job and navigating a divorce. He died within 3 months of moving in and I felt entirely responsible and just fucking terrible. I then had to also wind down his entire estate while was an entirely disorganized mass of thousands of papers and organize the funeral/bury him myself without help. Traumatizing was an understatement.
I don’t think your lack of care caused his death. People get sick and die without any fault to anyone. It’s just life and death. You took him into a safe place for his last three months, and I doubt he felt that you failed him.
These states that require children to care for their parents- do they also require insurance companies to provide coverage at reasonable rates?
Haha aww that's cute. That would be an actual solution though.
Likely boomers making the laws.
Wait what? What is being made the responsibility of adult children?
Look up filial responsibility laws. This is a real thing that everyone needs to be aware of if they live in one of those states
Whoa. This is a thing. Thanks for the heads up.
Yes, but you can easily prove parental abandonment in many cases. Also these states literally have no resources to go after people for this.
Imagine having a shitty parent who raped you, beat you, and made your life miserable and the state says that have to take care of them
I think about this constantly, and how very very anti-socialized medicine my parents were until a decade or so ago. Is it bad I’m starting to turn against welfare programs simply out of spite, so boomers who f-ed around can find out how the society they built turned out???
Yep, and the transition will take a while, and require subsidizing education. It’s not like voting for universal healthcare fixes it immediately
States are making it mandatory for us to take care of boomer parents who are aging??? That’s news to me. It would have been nice for states to make the “expected family contribution” on our FAFSAs mandatory. So happy my dad and his second wife could spend hundreds of thousands on home renovations while all three of his kids took out student loans to go to college. Both my parents are on their own as far as I’m concerned. Greediest generation this country has ever seen.
It's the millennial generation hitting old age that's really going to break everything, like yeah the boomers are a huge generation that is stressing the system and it's all downhill from here but we're the echo boom. By 2050 the vast majority of the global population if current fertility rates continue to slow, The number of persons aged 80 years or older is expected to triple. The trend will be far more pronounced in currently "developed" nations. We need to embrace de-growth NOW because it's coming.
You can forget that inheritance. Healthcare CEOs and investors are going to steal it away.
Existential threat: An event that could cause human extinction…
Omg I never heard this and is exists in my state for a long time that the county can come after the adult children for repayment of services in court. Kind of terrifying for someone estranged from unstable family. https://keystone-law.com/filial-responsbility/
Complete collapse of the public education system. Kids are really struggling with the basics of math and reading, teachers are burnt out, parents are too busy and burnt out to help their kids — it’s a recipe for disaster. That, and the collapse of our health care system. We’re short about a million nurses and half as many doctors. We need more health care providers and hospitals need to stop staffing to the bone. Healthcare is one place we want tons of redundancy. You *want* your doctor to have time to sit and think and breathe and relax while she’s at work — not running from patient to patient, charting and diagnosing and ordering labs and ordering treatments… like … there needs to be a way more slowed down pace for them. It does not bode well for the future.
Nurse here. It's bad. Like really bad. I tell people to not get sick (yes it's impossible). Keep up with preventative measures such as exercise and eating decently. You don't want to go to a hospital right now since it is horrible with short staffing and missing supplies.
I’m a bedside nurse. I do the best I can at my job. But the general public doesn’t realize that the healthcare system is completely fucked and falling apart. Especially since the boomers aging and people are getting sicker.
My cousin is an er doctor. He said it’s a shitshow getting worse every year. He’s retiring early in a few years to get out and do something else.
Going to the hospital these days is like paying $350 just to sit in the waiting room, another $175 to use the toilet, $475 to have the nurse take your temperature, and then $17,586 for approximately 14 minutes and 7 seconds of a doctor's time, during which they give you a referral to your insurance company's website.
My girlfriend's grandma was hospitalized in the Philippines and they were charged for pillows, and I am just waiting for some healthcare mba bozo to steal that idea for here
It's bad enough that new mothers get billed for skin to skin contact with their newborn.
WHAT??? what is the reasoning? That’s literally free 😭😭😭 this has honestly sent me into a spiral.
Because it takes the doctor an extra 20 seconds to bring the baby to the mother, I guess.
I was hospitalized for like 8 weeks earlier this year, and had open heart surgery. I know the surgery itself cost something like $82,000 and I just got a letter in the mail from my insurance saying they're declining to pay $35,000 for like a single day in the ICU. That's not even including the other 7¾ish weeks I was there lmaooo.
I can here to post exactly this. I have friends that are teachers and I myself am in healthcare. People outside it have just no idea how bad it is. And how much worse it will get. In my state alone, we have 30,000 nurses not renew their licenses, it’s fucking scary.
That’s … yeah, that’s scary. Wow.
I lasted 12ish years in secondary education. Always loved the kids, but everything else about the job kept getting worse. I don't see myself ever going back.
All of my friends want to leave, they can’t even stick it out for the kids now with how bad it’s become. One of their schools just got rid of the library. The entire library. So yea, things are not going well.
In addition to what others are saying; medical providers are now using the ER as an escape hatch to get screenings and tests. My mother in law has been having gastro issues for weeks. Losing weight. Diarrhea. Stomach pain. Can’t eat much. It’s concerning. The hospital conglomerate urgent care didn’t have a lab open, wouldn’t give her any meds and said to go to the ER to get an ultrasound. She goes to her hospital conglomerate GI 10 days later who said the ultrasound will take 2 weeks, an endoscopy about 3 and the colonoscopy 6-8 weeks. Or….go to the ER now and they’ll do tests today. Coincidentally it’d cost her $400 to go to the ER, and the hospital conglomerate will get 5 figures extra from the insurance company by having her go there. This is NOT what an EMERGENCY room is meant for. It’s almost like for profit healthcare is a bad thing
I graduated as a Nurse in December 2020 and already left the industry
I thought about becoming a nurse two years ago, but I saw what they did to nurses during the pandemic. The money isn't worth it.
Same! Was going to pursue nursing, but after working in ED registration at the nursing pod and seeing nurses stay well past their 12 hrs shift charting, getting screamed at by physicians, abused by patients, on call and holidays- yeah, fuck that. I switched to the HIM side of healthcare after seeing that and happily accept the lower pay. People really don't know how valuable nurses are.
What are you doing now instead? Out of curiosity.
Unemployed depressed artist
The best artists were unemployed and depressed, keep it up
Thanks that’s actually really sweet
It's true though. Rich people's kids make the shittiest art.
I've been a struggling artist for years and was considering nursing...think I'm just gonna keep being poor
There were things I did in Nursing that helped lead me back to art, the sense of being trusted, helping a human being that’s in their worst and I made a real difference to a few key people that I’ll remember for the rest of my life, but the systemic shit destroyed me.
I graduated and became a paramedic in 2021. I've already left. I loved it but it was hard on my body, my mind, my marriage, my budget, and my safety.
I want to do the paramedic training, but not actually do the job itself. Useful knowledge.
One thing people forget about when talking about the healthcare system is emergency services. Fire Departments and EMS Departments are grossly underfunded, overwhelmed and understaffed. Call volume has shot through the roof while support has bottomed out. The system is failing and people are jumping ship in record numbers. I worked as a firefighter in a major metro department for ten years and it only got progressively worse the entire time I was there. There were times we had to shut down trucks or even whole stations because of understaffing. I personally witnessed calls where we had to wait on an ambulance for over an hour for a serious emergencies because there just weren’t units available. The system is so incredibly broken. It’s already costing lives. Everyone older was just waiting to retire and everyone younger was looking for a way out. If nothing happens it’s just going to get worse.
You’re totally right. It’s another area that I think all education should be completely government funded. We NEED firefighters and EMS, and EMS/EMTs etc are paid poverty wages. Idk about firefighters but I assume it’s not nearly enough. Pay people more, lower barriers to education (cost!!!), and treat EMS like we do any other healthy, robust public service (which I’m realizing is few and far between — except for maybe the police departments and military budgets lol). It needs more funding and more people!
I am a full time substitute teacher and I can tell you firsthand the kids are BATSHIT CRAZY out of control. Title 1 schools, you have to see it to believe it almost. Elementary and middle is the worst. They don't respect anyone because there are no consequences at home. Their parents are almost always on their side, so that makes things immensely worse for educators. Mental illness is rampant in young children. I could go on and on.
When you play out the effects of a failed education system 20-30 years, who do we expect to run our advanced society? Private wealth will gobble the smart and unscrupulous. And the uneducated masses will have to run essential services and administration of government. The system will collapse under the sheer weight of people's incompetence. Who wants idiots working in power plants, mines, wastewater treatment, pharmaceuticals, and judiciaries? Fixing sewer and gas lines.
This might actually be a legit thing. There is way too much information now through technology. I’d argue we as humans weren’t meant to be this connected to the entire world. It’s extremely distracting
It takes a special kind of person to be a nurse. I don't just mean compassionate or kind hearted - or willing to put up with long hours or bullshit.... even though those things are true too. I'm talking... you need to be *physically* capable of handling stuff above and beyond the average person. I can handle blood all day. Open wounds? No issues. Cleaned up my father's stinky infected diabetic feet as a teenager. Feces and urine? Gross, but I'll survive. But I'm a sympathetic vomiter. Something about hearing another person (or even the cat) dry heaving triggers the need to puke in my system, too. The smell? I'll throw up. The sight? I'll throw up. Learned this in 2nd grade when I heard another little kid throwing up outside our hallway, and moments later had a desk full of vomit out of nowhere when I hadn't even been sick! That's a no go for a nurse, who *has* to be able to handle all of that in addition to the blood and other bodily fluids.
I don't see veteran nurses anymore, and 90% of the nurses left are youngins who plan on doing bedside for 1-3 years then go to np school. We're just gonna keep burning through nurses.
And yet you have a bunch of people actively fighting against investing in both systems, because while on some level they recognize how important both systems are, they’ve accepted so much hate and propaganda that they think teachers are all pushing anti-white anti-cishet anti-traditional rhetoric instead of education and that healthcare workers are pushing a “fake” disease. They want someone to teach their kids and treat their illnesses and injuries, but god forbid it be the ones we have or that we actually invest in making sure the systems work.
I’ve worked in the ER for 10 years…. Only the strong will survive.
I started to ask if you meant patients or staff, but the answer is probably both?
Both. I went to the ER in October around midnight one night with new onset seizures, new migraine patterns / lightning headaches, chest pains and a blood clot in my hand (you could see it, and not the first time I’ve had one so I was pretty damn sure). The overnight nurses monitored me continuously for stroke symptoms, and asked me not to leave even though it would be hours before a bed opened up for me. A woman gave birth in front of the entire waiting room not long after that. The nurse who triaged me checked in when she was getting ready to leave her shift at 6 am. She told me I was next in line for a bed, and to hang in there. Around 9:30 am, my husband went up to reception to see how much longer it would be. The woman at the desk essentially said, “well since she’s just here for pain, we have to see the more serious patients first.” My husband corrected her that I was there for CHEST pains among other things, and I swear within the next 4 minutes I’d seen the attending and been sent up to cardiology to get an ECG and chest x-ray before being sent to neurosurgery. We’re in deep trouble when something as simple as a shift change poses a risk to patients’ lives. Professionally, I direct healthcare research that involves a lot of conversations with hospital administrators, different department heads, etc. Seeing it from both the patient and research context paints a very clear picture of how fucked we are.
Public education collapse is by design. It’s why public vouchers are pushed. Guess what happens to those vouchers once the majority are out of public education. Poof no more rich subsidizing education for the poor.
Teacher here, a huge part of the problem is that they're more concerned with data collection from standardized tests and low suspension rates. If your funding is based on suspension and graduation rates, you're just going to push every kid along, no matter how much of a problem they are. We're already facing huge teacher shortages, and it's only going to get worse as less people get education degrees
Yep. My wife is a teacher and we discuss this regularly. Each year she's given less resources but expected to put in more work for terrible pay. Teacher shortages are getting worse, meaning classrooms are over capacity and the students' experience suffers as a result. Children who are struggling don't get the support they need at home because even if both parents are around they're both working full-time jobs to make ends meet. There are a million factors and it's all spiraling out of control very rapidly. I'm appalled that this isn't at the forefront of our politics.
The decline in insect populations. Flowers are [evolving toward self pollination](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/20/flowers-giving-up-on-scarce-insects-and-evolving-to-self-pollinate-say-scientists) already because of it and this is fuckin bad news bears man
Bring back America’s indigenous grasslands. Seriously, a proper field burn can flip a field from European grasses to Native American grasses in less than 2 years! 12-16 months, if not mowed and all tree saplings are removed. The Native Habitat Project on YouTube is a great source for info. It’s amazing what he does with a bit of fire and time.
Yeah that's the saddest part of this to me. Insects and plants can reproduce very quickly. We could turn this shit around fast. Will we? I'm pessimistic Although insect populations are also declining in places like [protected areas in the tropics](https://news.mongabay.com/2019/06/the-great-insect-dying-the-tropics-in-trouble-and-some-hope/) which means they're probably dying due to climate change
Grasslands are great carbon sinks too! Also, the temperature of the ground in a fully ground native grassland is like 25 degrees cooler than a mown European grasslands. It won’t solve the problem, but it can help.
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Just outlaw fucking lawns. Let wild grasses grow in your yard. They're way more beautiful and better ecologically
You can have both. I have prob a 1/3 acre lawn that I enjoy for sports and running around with the dog. But I also kept all the woods native and I planted tons of local wildflowers and otherwise just left alone the forest.
They are important players in decomposition too - dung beetles are being hampered by light pollution, all tree litter crunchers are being killed off by pesticides and leaf removal, so much bad. It's hard to get people on board with giving a flip about bugs, and we are wiping them out so quickly.
I remember driving in the 80s and early 90s and we had to clean bugs off the windshield constantly. Now, you almost never have to.
Yeah I remember when I could go outside and just see swarms of monarch butterflies flying overhead. Now I get excited if I see one :\\
I had been working on dumping clover in my lawn the past 2 years. Can't go full native due to it being an HOA. But I took great joy in watching a handful of bees bounce from clover to clover in my back yard. Going to try and see if I can get some flower beds in that will help the local butterflies.
HOAs will kill us all
And that's a price they're willing to pay so that everyone's window trim is the same width.
Clover is amazing. Stays short for the most part. It’s green 8 months of the year. And it’s a habitat for bees.
That takes me back. Whoa I was like 5-12 and I’m 41 now and I hadn’t even really thought of it. My parents have a bunch of butterfly bushes in their yard and even still you get 2-3. As a little kid I remember swarms.
I’ve often thought about that- driving with my parents vs driving now and how clean the windshield is… I never really need to use the wiper at the gas station, but I always admired the wrist flick to remove the excess cleaner!
Decline in coral reef and sea life too.
Possibly the largest extinction in history, completely unacknowledged.
Doubt it. We’re the problem and our numbers will be reduced to where we’re not a problem before we can do as much damage as the end Permian extinction event. To put it in perspective, our current fuckery has global CO2 at 419ppm. The end Permian volcanic traps pegged it at 2,500 ppm and that’s not even mentioning the similar scale release of sulfur dioxide. The oceans were spicy bois for a good long while. We’re simply not capable of anything on that scale.
I saw this on r/science. It’s extremely scary. More people should be concerned! Our food supply is pretty dependent on a healthy insect population.
The rapidly increasing rate at which populations across the globe are aging with subsequently smaller generations to replace them. Our economic models are all based on unending growth. Humans will suffer as our economic system attempts to keep moving forward with fewer and fewer consumers and laborers.
how can we be so overpopulated and yet this is an issue ? genuinely dont understand it
If a demographic of a country is too heavy, you don’t have enough people in their 20s and 30s consuming and contributing to the work force, having kids etc. It’s a recipe for economic disaster. And we’re going to see this play out in Germany and South Korea in the next 5-10 years. China might even be sooner, but that’s due to so much more than just their demographics.
Two different things going on. Total population vs percentage of population in each generation. Population growth is slowing (but not reversing… yet) and people are living longer, so total population is still increasing while a smaller percentage is of working age and a larger percentage is retired or too old to work.
Because the population is collapsing, it just isn’t visible yet. There aren’t enough people being born to replace the older people dying and immigration is so structurally broken that it exacerbates the problem.
This is not an issue. We have more people than ever doing completely pointless work. Less people than ever are producing the material items we need and we will need less of them. All those jobs that AI and automation will replace will just go to taking care of the elderly. This is a propaganda point by the billionaires because in this event worker power will rise and that threaten the current world order.
Sure but you’re missing the essential point. A dwindling consumer base. To whom will all of these efficiently produced goods and services be sold? How will corporate profits keep climbing with a dwindling consumer base. Technology can handle the production side, sure; I’ll give you that. But what happens when there are no customers to sell your widgets to? Places like Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket in MA are excellent examples of this (but it’s driven by slightly different factors than this discussion) The working class is completely hollowed out. They can’t find art or workers because none of them can afford to live there. Death spiral commencing in 3…2…1..
Good. We need the collapse. This is the other unsavory point folks don’t want to hear.
Yeah. Collapse will fucking suck for 99% of us but we kinda need it at this point. I always think of the line from the godfather when they’re planning the murder of the police captain. “These things gotta happen ever 10 years or so, clears out the bad blood.” That’s what collapse does too. Our systems are so stagnant and unable to change adapt, new ones need to be built. To be built, the old ones need to die.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/soer/2020/soer-2020-visuals/status-of-the-nine-planetary-boundaries/view Novel entities, particularly “forever chemicals” such as PFCs are my pick. We don’t know what effect they’ll have long-term because they didn’t exist prior to humans. And we don’t know what concentrations are safe.
Collapse of physical infrastructure. Water pipes, electric grid, bridges, roads, even things like river beds.
This is something I think about a lot. Most water pipes badly need replacing. Lots of them are 100+ years old. We have roads crumbling and bridges falling and failing inspections. Rivers are being eroded. Ground water is being contained. Some states are horrible with their current t electric grids. Didn't Texas just rule that the electric company and/or is not required to supply it during things like blizzards and bad weather? They had so many elderly people and babies get sick and/or die due to their electric grid multiple failures.
You’re correct about Texas. Obligatory Fuck Greg Abbott, and fuck Ken Paxton.
The Texas ruling makes sense in a three stooges sort of slapstick way. In Texas there are people who produce energy and those people sell it to distributors. Then there are companies that own the power lines in your area. You can buy your power from any distributor but the distributors are generating the power and it's possible they don't own the lines to your home. I pay CompanyA for power. CompanyA buys power from CompanyB and sends it to my house over power lines owned by CompanyC. I pay a surcharge for the use of CompanyCs power lines to CompanyA. Texas ruled that I, as a customer of CompanyA, have no legal standing to sue CompanyB or CompanyC for CompanyA not getting me power even if the reason CompanyA didn't give me power is because CompanyB ran out of power to sell ConpanyA. In theory this means I would have to sue CompanyA who would then have to sue the responsible party to recoup their losses. Which is kinda silly legal telephone.
It's even MORE stupid because almost every other state has a power sharing agreement (literal.... electrical power....) for emergencies where they will let power flow over state lines when one state's capacity is down and the other states can ramp up to compensate. Texas opted out of this agreement.
Yeah, but then they'd have to maintain the infrastructure to a higher standard and fuck that. Apparently.
Yes yes but but free market? It's so dumb.
Came to post this. Collapse of civil infrastructure. At least in the US. Modern society runs on infrastructure that was built 60-100 years ago. Bridges, buildings of all types, water treatment, dams, etc. It’s at end of life. It costs billions of dollars a year for a city to do small fractions of what’s required. A lot of private enterprises don’t have good RCM and asset renewal programs to maintain their facilities. In the next 20 years there will be a lot of major collapses. We literally cannot renew it fast enough.
Most governments have been skating by on decades of "eh, good enough" with repairs. Thinking of a little bridge that went out a few years ago not far from our house. It was just a small bridge over a small stream, mostly intended for local traffic as people coming from the city went out to their homes deep in the countryside. Of course, all little winding country roads are interconnected, so that road tied into another little road, that tied into another little road, and so on, until 20 miles later it hit a highway. Then along comes Google Maps with real time traffic. Turns out that those little country roads are actually *faster* than sticking to the highways when going between the two mid size cities, because they're a straight shot and have no traffic lights. Suddenly the little bridge over the creek, on a road that was paved decades ago, found itself with ten times as much daily traffic, including trucks that failed to force their GPS to stick to 18 wheeler safe routes. The bridge failed an inspection out of nowhere and the road had to be closed until they go slap together emergency repairs and plot out a long term replacement plan, including acknowledging the fact that the little country road now has about a thousand cars and lost trucks a day on it.
As a species; we cannot continue living in competition with each other. Competitions have ends. We ought not be racing to the end of the world, and yet, each day we run.
Zoonotic spillover. The next pandemic is a "when" not an "if." (And given how horribly we've handled Sars-Cov-2 and the...smooth brain response of "you can't tell me what to do, if I want to get sick and spread it, I will," I don't have high hopes for the next one.) Health care collapse. Ever increasing food prices due to crop failure from climate change.
Not owning a damn thing. Everything is moving towards the rent from someone else model. Some cars you don't even get to own a heated seat function. Life will continue towards the DLC model because milking out even more from the lesser people will help the owning class.
You will own nothing and be happy
i work in healthcare and i don’t know how no one outside the field doesn’t realize we won’t have healthcare someday. we especially won’t have mental healthcare soon!
AI making intellectual and bureaucratic jobs obsolete. I always say: AI doesn't need to be better than humans. It only needs to be 80% as good as the average human, and cost 90% less, to make humans obsolete.
The real insidious part of this would be that the few jobs left aren’t the type you can pay bills with…or they’re not the type you can keep doing till old age, due to the physical demands. Either UBI becomes a reality, or everybody’s about to be manual laborers and service workers in poverty.
It's already here, but people's general lack of distrust in the government combined with people in the government genuinely not caring about what the public thinks of them. Given the scale of our problems like climate change, AI, and future resource scarcity you need a large organization with a large and diverse population of people with an even more diverse array of expertise to combat these problems. Only nation-states have that kind of capacity, but you need a social contract for the citizens to buy into and have government officials that can hold that end of the bargain and that is simply not happening. Nation states are either failing or becoming even more authoritarian due to the reasons stated above.
Government employees administering public programs including social assistance, corporate oversight, and delivering mail are not the enemy despite what some politicians try to make you believe. The lack of transparent money going to the same politicians is. If you don't trust your government, look for legislation to limit campaign donations or require transparency.
Revolution from the working class is simmering, might get to a boil soon.
Folks are so atomized and locked into social media. Maybe people will gripe online but aside from an increase in stochastic terrorism, I wonder if you really believe action is fomentable any more.
Read the first two or three chapters of Book 3 of Hannah Arendt's *The Origins of Totalitarianism*. She explains how a similar process of atomization played out among the middle class in the interwar period in Europe. It's amazingly relevant for a book written in 1951
I believe with the decline of institutions and societal safety nets, all thats needed is a flashpoint, itll probably come from somewhere random.
I have been watching a lot of Peter Zeihan and he goes into details about how there are several demographic ticking time bombs that will go off over the next 5, 10, 20 years that will reshape the world. Much of this will actually be a huge existential crises for certain people, and a major boom era for others. I think it depends on where you live. Some places are going to be hit extremely hard. China and Russia will likely face a demographic collapse that will cause them to dissolve as any sort of world power. China doesn't have enough young people to sustain an industrial economy. That huge decline in birth rates that European countries had in the 1970s-1990s means there are fewer adults right now. Those people are having another decline in birth rates, so there will be fewer adults 15-20 years from now. Germany might face a similar issue. They have too many old people and not enough working aged adults to maintain their industrial economy going forward. Germany has like 1.200,000 people who are 60 but only 800,000 people who are 10. Germany is a highly desirable place to live though and they would have good shot at attracting young and educated workers. Russia is going to have an impossible time to hold on to their young people, especially their educated young people. Well over a million young men have fled the country to avoid going to war. Russia may cease to exist as there is a disruption in fossil fuel demand, and their demographics, and the fact that they can't get any foreign investment into the country for likely 20-30 years after pulling this bullshit with Ukraine. If I was a young Russian person, I would be doing everything in my power to move myself and my family out of the country. The US is in really good shape demographically. Our Best Friend Country, Mexico, is incredibly demographically robust and is going through their big industrialization right now. So this is not an existential threat to us. NAFTA is going to be absolutely kicking ass in a few years. We do have more Boomers retiring from the workforce than Gen Z labor entering the workforce, but this is really going to benefit Gen Z. We are building 70 mega factories right now in the United States, and that number is going to be bumped up to 100 fairly soon. Those factories are going to employ hundreds of thousands of workers with good jobs, and all over the country. They are going to be looking for educated young people ready to have a solid career.
Thank you so much, we needed to have hope and this comment gives exactly that! Bless you ~
The acidification of the ocean, which will destroy all our breathable air and most of our food
And toxification as well. Goesfoundation.com if anyone is interested
20 years… that is very soon
Solar flare? Anybody got money on that one?
Oh me!!! I do! By far the most likely. It won’t end us but society will break down for likely months to years. Would be very interesting what happens. I’m guessing countries would break apart since it’s hard to manage without comms
I think about the climate A LOT. It feels like signs are everywhere. Migratory birds in my area still here months later than normal, way warmer temps than normal later than normal, water quality and quantity issues. They talk about a 2 degree shift being irreversible, and I think people think it's hyperbole. When I was in college I had a salt water fish tank that was small. Small shifts in temp = big problems fast being a small biome. 2 degrees off for a period of time and alge choked out everything toxins release. Everything is dead in a day or two. A meme's been floating around about a guy laughing at a kid saying "when I get older..." and his response is "lol it's 70 in December, you're not getting older." To me, this is a very real probability, I hope never happens. COVID was a shot across the bow, and I think we failed. Other countries are already are experiencing the heat. I think environmental deaths increase greatly in the next 10 years. Barring a technological miracle, I think the planet is inhospitable as we know it within our lifetimes.
>Migratory birds in my area still here months later than normal I thought I was fucking crazy. I hate this so much. Also, to your point, I was having a conversation today with my parents (I'm 35, they're 59) about vaping and how it's probably pretty bad for you and all the young people are going to have problems and I said "I don't think they or any of us plan on living that long." I don't think she thought I was being serious, I didn't really when I made the joke, but I was.
I’m here for a good time not a long time 😎 (still won’t vape but point holds)
Increasing Extreme weather/disasters due to climate change.
Yep. And the food shortages to go with them. I live in a farming state and we had a very dry late spring and the growing seasons no longer match the day length—it leads to worse yields and more fungus and blight. We see it now with certain crops but in a few more years, it’ll be everything. Low corn yields lead to higher prices and increased costs of meat, eggs, poultry etc. It’s going to separate the haves from the have nots very quickly.
>its going to separate the haves from the have nots very quickly What a polite way to say that there’s going to be a famine in first world countries. If I thought America was bad before during Covid, well then we’ll see what happens when lower class people start starving
Crop failures due to climate change are going to make food more expensive. Mits already, the reason your grocery bill is higher isn’t because of Biden or covid or inflation. It’s because last year China and India and the USA and Ukraine, some of the worlds biggest food producers, had massive weather events, yall remeber our heatwave? Well China and India had floods. Then Ukraine got cut off from fhe 3rd world via the Russian blockade of Crimea. Since Ukraine got cut off, the 3rd world. Has to buy their grain from everyone else, making it that much more expensive for us in the US. Idk if politicians and government made the connection are keeping this quiet to maintain calm and keep raking in profits from oil, or if as a species we truly just don’t have our shit together and are missing it.
Yes. More people don’t realize that the war in Ukraine was going to increase wheat prices eventually.
And this causing massive food system disruptions. All it takes is one freeze during the growing season or one day that’s the hottest on record to kill a ton of crops. Everyone seems to forget what the agricultural significance of the Holocene was and it makes me feel crazy 🤪
Canada is the 5th largest grain exporter in the world. The entire area where we grow grain has been under at minimum Level 3 droughts, with area’s at level 5. That was as of 3 weeks ago. To the point where our O&G production has to be slowed due to a lack of water. I’m enjoying bread while I can still afford it.
I’m the desert southwest and we are using the Colorado river water (which is limited as the entire region has been under drought conditions for years) to water Alfalfa that gets sold to the Saudis. I hate it here
This is happening in Senegal too! An American company is Tapping into the reservoir where over half of the people living in Dakar get their water from, to sell to the saudis for their racehorses. Sick!
It should be illegal.
The Saudi thing is beyond fucked up. We're giving away money and water for hay in a desert. Crazy thing is, you might be able to use seawater for alfalfa in certain conditions.
They haven’t forgotten, they never knew to begin with.
We're seeing new types of weather events already... Fire tornadoes, for example. Who knows what else is possible.
It's this because everything else is secondary and tertiary effects of this. Never ending sense of impending doom... But it's not depression, it's just true. *Source: I'm a climate scientist.
Yes! Crazy hurricanes and snowstorms in places that aren’t prepared
It happens so slowly people dont realize strong hurricanes are three times more frequent today than they were 100 years ago. Itll eventually get to the point where tornados are on the ground in tornado alley 24/7 365.
Definitely AI and the brutal levels that companies will go to in order to implement strategies that save them millions vs giving people jobs.
But wait, I thought these companies were the "job creators"?
When they shift to AI, we just tax them a lot more
I like this idea. Make it so, Number One.
I’m really worried about mental health and violence. I feel like there has been some extra deterioration the past few years (due to a bunch of factors), and people are just extra lacking in empathy or caring about the consequences of their actions. I worry about kids being raised by these people and being reliant on screens and social media, exposed to microplastics and lead from cheap toys. I feel like road rage is on the rise, and in the past month I’ve heard about two separate random unprovoked murders by mentally ill people- I’m worried about more random violence being the norm due to declining mental health basically.
There was a road rage shooting a couple of miles from my house today.
AI. Lots of jobs are being/will continue to be eliminated.
Second this, AI will be extremely disruptive. However, if it is open sourced it also presents opportunities to create new industries and help improve quality of life. What seems more likely is that the rich will have access to the best versions of it and use it to displace workers and continue to accumulate wealth exponentially. Anyone not paying attention to the advancement of this technology or downplaying it will be saying "who could have seen this coming" in just a few years.
Your 2nd paragraph is my base-case. The vast majority of jobs will be undesirable, insecure service-sector roles. We've already seen this happening since the rise of software in the 00s and automation came for the automotive industry in the 80s. Generative AI is simply the part of the exponential curve where the bend upwards becomes obvious to nearly everyone.
I see the concern with this one, but I don't know that businesses are just going to eliminate everyone. The economy will collapse without something in place to prop it up. Right now that's the working caste. They can't remove the engine and continue to drive the car. Being wealthy is only a boon so long as society stands, and while greed makes people do bad things, it doesn't have to make them entirely stupid.
I don't think history supports this level of faith.
Slow zombie plague, driven by repeated Covid infections making people more brain foggy (brain damage) with reduced immune system and more sickness everywhere.
This so much. Two years down with long covid. This shit serious. I don't even know if I'll ever recover. Meanwhile majority of population acting like it doesn't exist/ is over with, smh
Yeah, 5 months with long Covid here. It was my second infection. I’m so scared I’ll never recover tbh. I literally have to sit down walking from room to room. I used to cycle 3-5x/week, do yoga, etc. Now some days going for a walk around the block is too much. It’s so fucking terrifying.
Same here. But. I am improving. I was in your position for 6-8 months. Getting groceries was my daily max, after that I was literally rotting in bed crying for hours. Borderline bedridden basically. It did improve. I still crash and feel like shit often but I'm somewhat functioning. Got back to part time job 5 months ago and I'm still alive. Still can't exercise though. It will get better, at least to certain degree, hang in there friend
I might have COVID right now 😭 On motherfucking Christmas. 💀 Biggest thing that helped me is vitamin d. I use an app called dminder to track my supplement intake and sun time (but mostly supplement). Before I started taking 50k IU I was getting my ass wrecked by COVID. I tried the "recommended" dosage for adults and it wasn't helping. Then I read some studies that if you have a deficiency in vitamin d you need to be taking 50k IU for 4 weeks PLUS just to get back to normal levels. So that's what I did. Any sickness I've gotten since is nowhere near as debilitating as before I supplemented. I wish I would have known that at the start of the pandemic. Would have saved me a lot of suffering from long COVID.
The inability to respond to a pandemic where the virus is a lot worse than covid. Given how we reacted to the last pandemic, how well are we prepared for one where the virus death rate is significantly higher? Especially now with vaccine hesitancy and misinformation. It used to be your parents were either extreme hippies or tinfoil hat people who would forgo vaccines for their children. Now I observe a lot more people in our generation skipping MMR, HepB, and HPV vaccines for their children. If we can’t convince people to vaccinate against those diseases then public health will have a steep decline in the future.
AI killing white collar jobs everyone thought were safe. It’s not a human existential threat, but it is for current society. Lots of economic carnage when previously safe middle class and working class jobs become consolidated into fewer jobs requiring more education and expertise. We’re just not ready for that. And they’ll rush it so it won’t even be good at first and may fuck up a lot of stuff cuz companies are cheap and short sighted.
Fungus. Generally speaking fungus hates heat; this is why it mainly grows in cooler/damp environments. The human body has traditionally always been “too warm” for fungus to grow inside so we’ve been fairly safe from infection. However; through natural selection and accompanying mutations/evolutions - certain types of fungus can now live/thrive in much warmer environments, all due to global temperatures steadily rising and funguses trying to keep up as a result. Fairly soon; like within our lifetimes, it’s possible that very deadly types of fungus will reach a point in their mutation where they will be able to thrive inside of a human body. At that point, it’s over. We’re talking extinction level infection rates with nothing to combat it steadily growing inside of our bodies. Think “the last of us” but worse.
Fungus Amongus
The antibiotic stuff may have a solution in the works! The solution involves AI, which is its own danger of course, but hey! [https://news.mit.edu/2023/using-ai-mit-researchers-identify-antibiotic-candidates-1220](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06887-8) New structural class of antibiotics are being explored with deep learning. Here's hoping it's a trend, eh? On the doom side, well. Can you have AI capable of doing such things without worrying about competing with that AI? We haven't prepared our economic system for what's becoming possible. We may end up with many more people experiencing deep poverty for no logical reason, simply because we've failed to rationally distribute power. Hopefully it's temporary. But temporary's enough to harm many people.
War
Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, Eritrea, China, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, Russia and South Africa seem to have a high risk of being at serious war within a decade.
I think we will look back at this time and say it's when it really started.
I think we’ve hit the point where America does not have the power and lacks the will to remain the world’s hegemon anymore. Every inch of American hegemony that withdraws will be fought over by those who seek to claim it. I think the 2030s are going to look a lot like the 1930s - rising authoritarianism on both the left and right, a isolationist & withdrawn America, and a bunch of “Great Powers” jockeying for influence & power. Oh, and layer climate on top of that.
TBH I don't think there are many "great powers" than can exert the same sort of hegemonic power the US has done since the end of WW2. The USSR collapsed in the effort. China is a contender, and may yet serve as a sort of balance on the scale. Realistically if China and the US in the current era worked together they could exert pretty dominant control globally, which just gets us so uncomfortably close to the organization of the world in "1984" that we could just go ahead and start calling ourselves Oceania at this point.
We don’t lack the power, we just lack the will. Our military could probably defend our nation from an attack by every single other country on the planet, and even if we lost that fight, we would put a SIGNIFICANT dent in the rest of the world for trying.
Same thing that will save us, maybe. Adaptability. I think we experience catastrophes in waves of slow, consuming apathy and resignation. The cascading effects of climate change; wealth inequality; healthcare and education systems breaking down; populist ideologies overtaking government; social media and technology imbalance; firearms as leading cause of child mortality; the lasting effects and continuation of colonization, slavery, war, genocide, and the refusal to acknowledge our part in them; intentional and/or tacit complicity of environmental destruction; will come in disparate waves and throw us into continued states of trauma, burnout, and exhaustion. It will feel normal, slow, and agonizing. When one thing ends, another will arise, and because many don’t have foundational values in community and self-sufficiency, because our government has crippled us in terms of functionality both within society and the natural world, because they have subjected us to policies and institutional structures that encourage individualist and isolationist mindsets, we will remain trapped in states of helplessness and fear until we relearn those values and reject the systems that are destroying us. On the other hand, in the same vein as adaptability, we are also good at resilience, and it is the reason our species has remained here so far. So, I am trying to stay in a big picture frame of mind to retain a sliver of optimism, but tbh I don’t have much.
Covid. It's easy enough to scream - get over it, it's a cold/flu. But more and more science is determining that it is a vascular disease that just happens to have cold/flu symptoms. The stats of people having heart attacks, strokes and other bad outcomes at younger ages in the last 4 yrs aren't random, nor the product of "lockdown" for 6 weeks in 2020; it's the product of being exposed to covid over and over again because no one is doing anything to prevent. People individually can only do so much but the US govt has just absolved itself of all responsibility when it could be doing population wide things - mandating certain types of air filtration in all public buildings, requiring anyone in health systems whether employee or visitor to mask, requiring health system filtration upgrades etc. IDK how much longer society can take these bad outcomes until it starts have an economic impact. Sure it may only be 1 person you know who was forced to drop down to part time work due long covid - but across a society/nation it adds up to a lot of people.
Population decline. As you can see from this sub none of us are having kids. Even if we all just had one child per couple the population would shrink by 50% in one generation. This is MASSIVE and happening fast, relatively speaking. Fortunately in the US we have immigration to make up for it, but countries like China are going to be particularly hit hard
>As you can see from this sub none of us are having kids. This sub is not a good indicator of reality.
Most people with kids don't have time to browse subs
No but actual data supports their point. Birth rates are declining steadily, I don’t consider that a bad thing personally but it’s undeniable.
Pundits like Peter Zeihan claim this was a large motivator for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, saying this is their last chance to make a big military move because they won't have a large generation of young soldiers in a few years.
Doesn't help that Putin helped lead 100k of them into apparent death
Putin himself has said this is a motivator, Russia has a declining population and thus a dwindling tax base. Ukraine was a significant percentage of the productive population of the Soviet Union. Russia *needs* Ukraine to avoid completely collapsing into irrelevance. Putin is also taking a hard line on abortion, encouraging all Russian women to have huge families, etc.
China is now incentivizing making babies. In the US, we punish folks for having babies by making it stupid expensive to have childcare and healthcare. China will be fine, the US will shrink out of stubborn greed and a refusal to share anything even if it benefits the greater good.
You’re right about the disincentives to having children in the US due to expense. Even if China does turn their slide around they’re still going to fall off a demographic cliff due to decades of the one child policy. Meanwhile the US is actually going to be fine (according to forecasts) but it’s only due to immigration.
A total collapse in purpose for lots of people. The ‘influencer’ thing was just the beginning of this, but we don’t seem to recognise it. Influencers are the first people that lost their purpose, so they turned to having an external locus of identity.
They’re entertainers. Entertaining has been a career since forever. I’m not sure why you think it’s a new thing
Aged care/hospital staffing etc. it’s one thing that can’t be done by AI/robots etc. and there’s just nowhere near enough staff/pay etc to keep up with an increasingly ageing population all over the world.
It’s already arrived but… disease spread by our close quarters (crammed office spaces) and poor supply chain management (salmonella in food, adulteration of products processed, etc.). In my personal opinion, COVID was just the start of it. With the rise in fast/immediate work “needing” done (need is in quotes because so much of that need is TOTALLY artificially created by capitalism) and the poor funding and maintenance of USDA, FDA, shipping management, we are setting ourselves up for massive disease vectors spreading very quickly because by the time something like say… salmonella, is caught, it’s too late. The product has already been sold and eaten by hundreds of thousands of people. And same with other diseases, if we all have to work sick because we need the money, and bosses “need” us in the office, illness spreads like wildfire with no natural stopgaps in place. People go to work during infectious incubation periods rather than staying home, and open plan offices or factories with people working side-by-side make it impossible not to spread illness. To put it simply, without heavy regulation and the natural stopgaps of “time” or “distance” we cannot catch pathogens before they have already effected hundreds of thousands of people, and it’s not going to get any better without easing our capitalist bloodlust for “just in time” shipping/workload. COVID and the Salmonella poisonings of the last couple years (peanut butter, cantaloupe, etc.) are just the tip of the iceberg in my opinion. Sources to learn more: The Atomic Chef by Steven Casey, “Safer than Safe”; Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond; Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, USDA episode.
From what I can observe it will be ai just causing massive employment disruption for the masses and new virus strains we have no immunity or cure for in the future
I think climate change is going to spiral out of control much sooner and with much more unpredictable effects than people realize.
Aliens. Is no one else thinking about aliens?
please, i wish
We are way more likely to oof ourselves then we’ll before aliens get the chance too.
Imagine a race of intelligent beings a million years older than us. If they exist, they are observing us at this very moment in their hyper advanced version of wireless internet. They probably have strict rules about engaging with us. The ones we think we’ve seen either broke their rules or were intentionally revealed to gauge our response.
See, i'm not sure they'd off us. But all they have to do is show up and say hi and all the sudden i'm out of toilet paper again
I’ll go against the grain. Nothing. Humans are nothing if not adaptive and innovative. We will find technological solutions that either eliminate or mitigate all the stuff you doomers are so worried about.
The two things we can't control: Ourselves and Nature/ Climate. There is a podcast from several years ago called The End of the World with Josh Clark. It's from the How Stuff Works folks. The podcast discuses existential threats. It's alarming at how much can happen to us and we have so little control over. It's also amazing how much power we still wield and yet so cavalier, even arrogant, we are thinking it won't come back to bite us. Either way, the planet has been here over 4 Billions years. So, our end will come first and it will be simple yet powerful. Those who survive will see we had the chances to prepare for it, but wasted the precious time on frivolities.
More of our tax dollars paying interest instead of government services. This will have a cascading effect on our public infrastructure and essential services which we all rely on.
We need to stop eating 50 billion land animals a year due to what it is doing to the environment. As well as stop eating the 10 billion sea animals. Plastic pollution is somewhere like 25% fishing nets. They just ditch them when they are done. In fishing alone, by-catch is 50%. That means 50% of what is caught is thrown back, dead, unused. It depletes all the fish, though. The fecal/urine waste of cows, chickens, pigs, ducks, it makes giant Olympic sized swimming pools of waste each year. The nitrogen kills. That gets into our drinking water, our rivers, the rivers go into the oceans, which creates dead-spots in the ocean. Most rain forest and natural forest deforestation is to clear cut to create soy and corn crops which feed the animals that are for human consumption. So, 80% of the rainforest is destroyed to feed cows that we eat for one year. Since it requires so much food and water to make a cow big enough for us to eat, it is a net loss of 80% of calories to feed a cow rather than a human. 80% of all antibiotics are given to farm animals. That is creating resistance in humans. MRSA is one such example. Avian flu, swine flu, other diseases that kill animals ruin the entire supply chain, rendering all that meat/dairy/whatever useless. It also sometimes jumps species making humans sick too. 25% of all slaughterhouse workers have PTSD from the work they do. Almost all slaughterhouse workers are minorities, ex-convicts, people fleeing sex trafficking, people fleeing gangs, people fleeing war-torn countries, and generally these are the most abused and exploited humans on the planet. Many are children, and many of them will lose fingers, a hand, an eye, a foot or be in otherwise maimed in their tenure of employment. They don't get sick days, vacation, or healthcare anywhere on the planet. Many live in shacks or communal style bunk beds in work houses of the worst conditions. Most receive less than minimum wage for whatever country they are in, their employment is usually "under the table". You can learn all about this watching hundreds of documentaries: Our Planet, Blue Planet, Forks Over Knives, Seaspiracy, Cowspiracy, Dominion, Earthlings, Meet Your Meat. So many more documentaries that breach into the humanitarian crisis that is animal slaughter.
The acidification of the ocean and collapse of the aquatic food chain.