Does the future fill you with an uneasy feeling? A creeping anxiety about matters which are seemingly beyond your control? To get a sense of the future, it’s good to have a sense of the past. As a precocious Gen X’er, up to now I have lived through various waves of disruption — banking, oil and housing crises, economic booms, and busts and of course, most lately the pandemic and a war on the European continent. Every crisis brings its own symptoms and discontents. Some become chronic.
I speak, of course from a position of privilege here in the first world. Nobody is dying of the plague or being obliterated by artillery where I sit writing. Nevertheless, it feels like the current cost of living crisis is yet another insult to the world in a long list of insults — particularly so to the barely haves and the have nots. Is there not a creeping but urgent sense that all the systems we have designed are teetering under the weight of forces too great for them to be sustainable? The only common factor in all this is human need, which as we know, is endless.
2022 was the year that humanity exceeded 8 billion souls on the planet — a record figure and one that Scientific American failed to predict correctly, even in 2011 suggesting it may take 14 years to reach eight billion (2025). In short, we have reached a new peak in hungry mouths to be fed and those will only increase up to as many as 10 billion in the coming decades — if that doesn’t fill you with unease, I don’t know what will. I’ve used the analogy before, but I think Bill Hicks’ description of humans as a ‘virus with shoes’ hits the spot about our species as we go forth, multiply and lay waste to the planet.
On the ground in the first world, already in 2022, amidst all this abundance, you can cast around any supermarket and hear a hundred anxious inner conversations about what must be foregone to meet a budget that isn’t making the cut. Christmas, that time of good cheer, feasting and goodwill to all men feels bleaker with every year passing. Less is increasingly more in future.
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is Dickens’ vision, not of happy prospects but one extending its bony finger towards death. OF course, one shouldn’t look at the future so bleakly, but winter tends to concentrate the mind and the short days of December are good companions to rumination and dark thoughts.
Another observation of the future is a world (or worlds) closely divided into two camps. You can already see it played out in politics across the globe with electorates and other collectives divided by the smallest of margins into two more or less equal camps. This division fuels tribalism and resentment as well as allowing agent provocateurs to sow further divisions. I’m not an arch conspiracy theorist but I am quite assured that this polarized world we presently witness has been cultivated by the last 30 years of social media, the rotten fruit of the digital age.
By default, it creates echo chambers and its addictive, monetized and politicized impulses using the very content provided free by its users forms the perfect petri dish for our algorithmic overlords to fashion the collective consciousness in their image. Luckily, if reports are to be believed, it is on the wane. This is a healthy sign, a disenchantment with artifice. Long may it continue.
The only solution, I am afraid, is to disengage, to give yourself some free mental space to form your own thoughts again, and hopefully to reach out in the real world to your friends and family. Let community be your savior.
When bad actors like Putin talk about a multipolar world, this is the reality on the ground — one where the US at once recedes from its world policeman role and key resources like armaments, energy and food are used as bargaining chips backed up by the ever-present threat of nuclear conflict — the cold war revisited in times of scarcity fueled by climate change as it were. All the portents are bad ones.
Christmas, that gift-wrapped turd under a fake tree offers one true gift — a time for pause and reflection. Look past the tinsel, the gluttony, the lure of toys and distraction and before the next year’s engine is cranked, think about the reality you want to live in. Even in the midst of dystopia you have choices. Take whatever opportunity you have for positive change and take that first step. Help everyone you can who is struggling and despite the odds, help to make 2023 a future we can all live in.
