Today's reading gives you two troubling trends. The first piece below argues, fairly compellingly, that we're all becoming the same. The second wonders if the human species might've numerically already peaked. Both authors, one from data and the other from taste, are not-so-subtly telling us that what's happening isn't good. Both critiques rely on an unfavorable comparison the present has with the past.The immediate counter-argument to both is, yes, the future is different from the past. We're not expecting people to behave exactly as they did upon the invention of the automobile or the founding of the internet, are we? After a century of healthcare modernization and the near-complete virtualization of society, shouldn't we be unsurprised about lengthening lives and cratering birthrates? In this sense, both of this week's authors could be absolutely right about the newness of the challenges we face and yet wrong about the negative direction of these changes, or at least about their severity. Any number of futurists present the optimistic case: we're actually doing really well and our future is only brighter.
As longtime readers are well aware, I'm torn. On the one hand, I'm not inclined to enjoy reading the optimistic cases. Nothing grabs my attention like an observation of doom. On the other hand, the easiest kind of positive change to ignore is the one that immediately becomes part of your basic outlook. As anyone who's ever gotten that much-needed raise knows: your monthly budget will almost noiselessly absorb any increase in income shy of lottery-winning proportions. Maybe the way to balance this out is to first give the doomsters their nod: birthrates are cratering, all of the unweirding social indicators are real. After hearing them out, we should next listen to some of the glass-half-full thinkers for new ideas and solutions.
Please reply to this email with any good essays with the optimistic case, and I'll give them a read. In the meantime, here are the doomsters:
Reading
The Decline of Deviance
Where has all the weirdness gone?
Are We Doomed?
People are living longer than they used to. They are also having fewer children.