What makes you think modern hysteria about unprecedented times is overstated and things around the world will continue on as normal well into the distant future?
Very little as I disagree with the things continuing on.
We made it through the Cold War, but as any student of history will note, barely.
This has, I think, given us a false sense of confidence and it's like the drunk driver who claims that because they survived last night they will do so again tonight.
I don't 100% know things will go wrong but I do know that many different countries are A) pursuing nuclear weapons B) entering very politically unstable times and C) are just about to start hitting serious consequences as a result of climate change.
America went from the richest country in the world to the richest country in the world, freaked out and elected trump. How crazy will other, nuclear armed, countries get when food and water become serious issues?
There's of course a good chance we pull through, drunk drivers tend to survive or the issue would've self corrected long ago. But I dislike being forced to participate in a global game of Russian roulette.
We are living in unprecedented times thou. I don't know that it's hysterical to point out facts.
And this is by the definition of "unprecedented"
What do you mean?
Things will continue on as normal, gradually worsening, until life is no longer worth living. Sure, what people are hysterical about won't change your daily routine tomorrow, or the next day, or the next month, but many negative things are glaciers, slowly and inexorably moving forward and you are utterly powerless to stop it. Climate change, worsening inequality and wealth gap, and the rise of fascism are things we should be hysterical about. But instead, we'll just sit around, complaining about people freaking out, until it's too late.
Hearing from my parents about the shitty, uncertain times they've already been through. Like the threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold war, the division of Germany, various economic crises... everything was eventually followed by better times. Will everything work out in the long run? Who knows. But I don't think we're on some kind of linear path where everything will just get worse, forever.
It's not like everybody woke up one day and "ah shit, everything's fucked! How the hell did that happen. This is unprecedented!" The scale and tools might be new, but that's about it.
The problem is that "continue on as normal" basically means to continually get progressively worse. Greed and oppression will increase. Division and bigotry will keep growing. Science and logic will be ignored or manipulated by those seeking power. This will ultimately culminate in some sort of horrifically deadly breaking point. Then we reset a little bit and start the cycle all over again and again until the humans go extinct.
I know that this is an incredibly pessimistic take, but that's my view of current events.
It's pessimistic but it does help calibrate you on what to be grateful for. Say, somehow, we are on the brink of a utopia and we just don't know it. Except the people today won't be alive to experience it. For us, this would be as good as it gets.
I actually think thats ideal. None of us could function in a proper utopia. We could not live in Star Trek. We have been far too corrupted by society, capitalism, and bigotry to ever properly function in such a society. Some could adapt better than others, but at the end of the day we'd be antithetical to such an advanced society. As such, we should prepare the world to transition towards such a society with the knowledge that it will be our grandchildren who truly bear the fruits of our work. A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit under.
For all of the doom and gloom of that view of the big picture, I do see a lot of beauty and good in the little things. That's where I like to focus most of my energy.
Diseases that were once a death sentence are now curable like HIV and Hep C.
That one article claiming to have cured a person with type I diabetes. I don't really put stock into it but at one point HIV was thought to be incurable and they made breakthroughs like this, one at a time.
I think you're asking two different things here. You're asking if there's a lot of Hysteria about catastrophic times. Which of course there is, that's pretty common, throughout human history basically every couple Generations think they're in the end times.
However the other thing you're asking is if things will continue as normal. Which of course they won't. They never do. Things will just continue, in a new way.
Only true answer
Nothing.
I understand climate change, how fast state transitions happen, that I'm in my 40's and have already seen the climate change in every place I've lived.
I also know that the atmospheric carbon is higher then it has ever been during every other mass extinction event.
And I'm aware that we haven't even been able to slow the rate of increase of how much yearly carbon we put out.
I know times like these seem scary, friend, but it is about to get a lot worse.
I'll go. One thing that always gives me pause is crime rates are way down in the US.
Hysteria? Most of what I'm seeing is denial about climate change, about the worsening political climate, and about the growing inequality
The podcast "build for tomorrow"
That's basically the entire premise of the podcast, which they relate via hilarious stories from the past.
I recommend the episode on Teddy bears, or bicycles. (Both of which by the way threaten to unravel the very fabric of American society)
I think "end of history" is a bigger deal than hysteria or overreactions. People should be more concerned with things like climate change, fascism, capitalism, or systemic inequality. A lot of people have this thing in the back of their mind where they "know" nothing will ever change, and it poisons the way they think of the world over time.
Nothing. Nothing makes me think that. Why would you think that I think that?
Every generation experiences their own "unprecedented times" and we always seem to make it out to the other side.
It's overstated because this age is the end of ignorance. We now know about events from everywhere around the world almost instantly. At a global level something terrible is always happening. Even just 30 years ago that wasn't really the case, things still happened but it wasn't as widely known. Humans haven't learned how to process information across a global scope, which leads to increased panic and uncertainty.
Aside from climate, which IS FUBAR (fucked up beyond all reason), things will continue as they do. Life has survived previous extinction events, but it certainly changed between them (after millions of years of recovery and evolution)
Any thing that gets "gamers" enraged.
The media likes to blow those things out of proportion, and games love to have the media's attention.
The fact that literally every society in history has had some version of the same mythology. I mean, maybe for the first 8,000 years or whatever, you could excuse this particular cognitive bias, but at this point it's just embarrassing.
For sure. How many times has the end is nigh reared it's head in the last 40yrs
Its genuinely scary how close we've come to the brink on so many instances, though.
Like, there was concern that an atom bomb could set the entire atmosphere on fire by some of the scientists on the Manhattan Project.
Or the fact that we are not currently living out a nuclear holocaust survival fantasy due to the common sense of one soviet early warning radar operator.
the only thing more terrifying than how many times we've actually been on a legitimate brink, is how blase people are about dismissing it cause "bad things always happen, and then get better. no big whoop"
Hysteria*
Etymology
New Latin, from English hysteric, adjective, from Latin hystericus, from Greek hysterikos, from hystera womb; from the Greek notion that hysteria was peculiar to women and caused by disturbances of the uterus
First Known Use
1772
Apologies
