The surge of authoritarianism is a response from people who, much like you, have tried to unplug but who realized closing their eyes does not stop the changing world around them.

Medicine is often times not only bitter, but outright toxic to the body. It needs to be, because it has a job to do.

I’m not saying you’re doing anything wrong, I’m saying there are people who have had a head start on your current conundrum and who could not, at their own time and place, find a way out. Will the same happen to you? I’m not an oracle, but I hope not.

Personal bias: I’m in slight favor of nationalism. The citizens of a country must put themselves, other citizens and the country first. Otherwise they will wake up tomorrow without it.

I am, pessimism is a choice and is fed by confirmation bias

I think this:

"این نیز بگذرد"

Attributed to Attar of Nishapur (1142-1221), who was beheaded by Genghis Kahn's Mongols. In one of Attar's fables, a powerful king gathered a group of wise men and asked them to produce a ring that would make him happy when sad, and sad when happy. After much consultation among themselves, the wise men presented the king with a ring inscribed "This, too, will pass".

- https://archive.org/details/quoteverifierwho00keye/page/160/...

We live now in bad days. This, too, will pass.

Deeply pessimistic. I'm of the view that the powerful are extracting less and less capital from the average person. It doesn't seem worth it to them.

So housing and now cars are marketed to the rich and wealthy, we're losing things we took for granted.

Anonymity is basically dead on the internet. Worse being they don't just want my ID to participate but scans of my face, God knows who they are selling this data too.

We have less and less agency over anything. In the U.S both political parties are essentially the same. If you are an outsider like Massie, Planter or Omar they will successfully destroy your ability to represent the public. The game is rigged.

The bad times will continue and worsen until a cataclysmic global event resets the system. We'll see.

Not at all. At this point, I don't see improvement in the future; I'm just hoping I'll be able to maintain my standard of living. We are hurtling towards an economic collapse, an unemployment crisis, and the risk of major war. I thought I was safely beyond conscription age, but the war in Ukraine has shown that when push comes to shove the max conscription age is mutable.

The remaining carbon budget for limiting warming to 2°C with 66% probability was estimated (in 2022) as equivalent to 23 years of (then) current CO2 emissions. It does not seem likely that we will be anywhere near zero CO2 emissions in 19 years. We are heading towards a hothouse Earth without the technology to reverse this on any meaningful scale. So no I don't think humans will be more happy, I think they will be hotter, more underwater and more hungry.

Side note: nobody else seems to have mentioned climate change yet in this thread. The fact that we are currently in the process of determining, through our CO2 emissions, what the medium to long term future of human society looks like seems...incredibly significant! And yet people don't seem to want to talk about it. Is it ignorance? Or resignation?

  > You say the ocean's rising like I give a shit
  > You say the whole world's ending, honey, it already did
  > You're not gonna slow it, Heaven knows you tried
  > Got it? Good, now get inside

Absolutely. We live in a time of unprecedented wealth, stability, health, acceptance, and knowledge. Don’t listen to the daily news, compare our situation to past generations and different times. If I had a Time Machine I would not use it to go to some earlier era

I'm hopeful for humanity and technology. They aren't evil, if it weren't for them we wouldn't be here.

However, I think current tech leaders have betrayed society, and the system of corruption that allowed it has seen no equal in human history in terms of breadth and scale.

30 year industry veterans can't get a job, nobody can afford a house or a family, and once-proponents of possible stopgaps like UBI are deciding "nah".

I'm not actually sure there's any "democratic" means that can solve it (at least as defined by political/advertising lobbies buying power from an increasingly uneducated/mal-educated populace).

But I am hopeful that people won't stand for it and we will find a new way.

I’m extremely optimistic for the future of humanity, despite the huge challenges we face.

To illustrate how far humanity as a species has come, I’ve posed this question a number of times to people:

If you had to be reborn as a random human somewhere on earth, and the only thing you get to pick is the year you’re born, what year would you choose? You don’t get to pick your country, race, gender, sexuality, intelligence, socioeconomic status, etc, only the year.

What would you choose?

My optimism is tied to social discernment - how well society evaluates our increasingly powerful changes.

The automobile brought us mobility. Private property rights for individuals brought some security for a section of society. Awareness of children's risk from a small % of men led to some children avoiding uniquely awful mistreatment.

However, car culture, trespassing culture and unwarranted stranger-danger fears have eradicated key+critical parts of childhood: Particularly free ranging and regular hours of adult-free peer time.

When society examines the outcomes of this loss, they blame kids' screen time (the screens that kids use to compensate for what we took from them). This amps up my pessimism.

But I also see kids rise to the challenge of our increasingly complex society. I find modern youth to be broadly more capable than my generation and far more understanding than my parent's generation (WWII vets). I draw real optimism from this.

I'm very optimistic. I think most diseases being cured, extended lifespans, physical abundance, and zero poverty are within reach in our lifespan, due to technology.

I think humans will be about the same in terms of happiness, due to how quickly to acclimate to our situation. But they'll look back on us with shock at how we ever lived like this!

The title and the description ask two different questions.

I do not think people are optimistic about the future. Back in the late 90's/early 2000s yes, people were very optimistic. Everyone was so thrilled to get to the 21st century. Now, people seem clinically depressed, technology is no longer something designed to make you happy, or make your life easier. It is just a battle to control your attention and sell you garbage.

Will people be happier in the future? Honestly I don't know. Anyone can "decide" to be happy to some degree. As a large group/society, no I don't think people will be happy.

People in the immediate future will be far less happy simply because there are enormous resources being spent to make them so.

The world's first trillionaire spent the day he became the world's first trillionaire celebrating by trying to incite a racial pogrom in a distant country.

corporate lobby is getting more powerful, needs of corporations put above human needs, people are getting laid off to boost stock price, even though company is still making billions, top 1% is getting even richer, housing is getting more expensive, government is doing nothing to punish people involved in child sex trafficking, foreign tiny state is dictating how to conduct diplomacy to a superpower.

if trend continues, I am not optimistic.

No, it feels like its game over for most people. No more lives left to play. Most people whose parents went from farming --> jobs now feel their parents made a fatal mistake. There is nothing for them to fall back on. It is hard to go back to farming. Which is made worse because there is no land, the lands for sold for a pittance, which now costs a substantial amount of money.

Probably more or less the same given enough to average things out.

If you look back you probably think in certain ages people were really miserable, but people knows how to adapt and eventually they got used to it.

Happiness is due to sudden improvement AKA going from 0 to 1 in a relatively short time.

If I were to make a comparison happiness is the sub 3 seconds 0-100 that you can achieve with your sportscar, or skydiving.

WHat you are referring to is the Concorde flying at 80000ft at mach 2.12

That's impressive but won't bring about the same limbic happiness and excitement as the aforementioned experiences.

And actually it's how evolution brings about improvement, everybody is trying to improve and collectively as humanity incredible progress happens over time but no individual can take joy or credit from it and thus everybody has to keep pushing to bring about personal improvement that would bring happiness that in turn on a large scale would produce large improvement at the societal level

My home country has a population that’s too big for the economy, so most people live in squatter camps and build homes out of scrap wood and sheet metal. The government provides public toilets (often portable because of land ownership issues) for about 100 people to one toilet. They eat subsidised (and fortified) maize for most meals and wash with buckets when it isn’t too cold. Meat is reserved for holidays where it’s typically a gift/bonus from employers. Emergency services can’t enter the camps safely because they’re attacked and robbed, so mob justice is the rule. Neighbours sometimes try to have one another arrested (or killed) so they can steal their shack and possessions. People commute from these camps into the suburbs to clean toilets for <$10 a day. There are waiting lists to work at McDonalds. Meanwhile 20km away is a gated community with private security where the business owners and ministers live in mansions.

None of this is an exaggeration. Everyone is outraged about it, and there are often riots but they’re put down with tear gas and rubber bullets. So every day the sun and GDP continue to rise.

To me this is the only realistic long term outcome of mass unemployment if the tech companies’ visions are realised. UBI is a fantasy. Everyone in the camps is on welfare, it just isn’t enough.

I’m not optimistic about the near future. It seems that the post-WWII order in the developed world is disintegrating. It seems that the political and business elites of America and some other developed countries have forgotten the concept of noblesse oblige, that elites have a responsibility to serve the general public. Greed and power have gone unchecked. This has negatively affected the lives of many in the developed world, and many are justifiably angry. Unfortunately, anger can either devolve into uncontrollable rage or be misdirected as a controlled weapon. Demagogues have been able to capture some of this anger and use it for their own aims, which is making matters worse by increasing the number of angry people.

Rising inflation, especially in housing prices, is demoralizing, where one’s efforts to save is quickly evaporated thanks to a combination of bad fiscal/monetary policy and housing regulations that benefit existing homeowners over prospective ones.

Personal computing was one of the nice bright spots of modern society. I grew up during the rise of the personal computer, the Web, and mobile computing. Computing felt liberating, empowering, and enjoyable. Unfortunately major players have been able to gain oligopoly power over computing. Enshittification is the norm in modern software, and it’s difficult for upstarts to compete against entrenched oligopolies. The generative AI boom and the massive run on the RAM and storage markets have caused massive price hikes, which now threaten to price us out of personal computing. The one area that has long resisted price inflation has succumbed to it. It seems like we are getting priced out of living.

Optimistic! There is so much to learn, invent and discover.

Depends on the individual mental health, happiness not comes from outside, it comes from our mental state

There will be good times and bad times in the future, just as there have always been. Those times also vary by region on a macro level, and vary still at a micro level.

I think there will be happy people in the future, but it won’t be a straight line, nor will everyone be happy at the same time.

I believe that all light and darkness coexist.

On an individual level there's always opportunities to find happiness, but in aggregate seems like the future is pretty bleak for a handful of preventable yet unavoidable reasons and most people will be adversely impacted.

Wildly optimistic about the future!

Every year gets better than the one before. More technology, more opportunity!

Why would I have any fun believing that things have peaked?

No i am not optimistic.

Though if you asked people this 25 years ago or 50 years ago, or 100 years ago they would say the same exact thing

>Are people optimistic about the future?

The knee-jerk response: What else is there to be optimistic about?

Optimism won't help you much with the past, sometimes not even the present.

I think humans will find happiness in whatever is within reach that is most rewarding.

Whether that will always be enough to overcome the certain amount of despair that will never disappear, standing by to make a resurgence of its own, seems to depend most strongly on the amount of energy people actually put into making each other happy. Why wouldn't direct cause and effect be as excellent an indicator as it should be?

At one time those "calories" of humane energy added up daily to more fossil fuel than was burned, even if we were cave dwellers back then. For most of history you probably can't say that "human energy" exceeded "inhuman energy" for very long, when you take into consideration livestock and other forms of progress. But definitely for most of pre-history, as far as energy goes, when the "human energy" wildly exceeds the "inhuman energy" is when the whole bunch of humans thrive as far as the eye can see. Otherwise if it's too spotty there's no telling how much backsliding there's going to be or where it's going to come from.

Keep in mind, for modern man, prehistory is the vast majority of all time, which made us what we are. Recorded history is merely a recent snapshot, exclusively after all that prehistory was forgotten.

If there really is that strong of leverage today, where humanity could continue to increase faster than the rate-of-increase from the inhumanity component, isn't that what it took to get through periods of some of the most animalistic behavior? When you do the math, probability is, some of those regressive periods lasted eons. Think of how bad it's always been when inhumanity is known to get the upper hand and has the energy to grow faster than humanity can keep up with. And those are the few occasions we know about, which are insignificant in number, since by comparison almost everything happened before recorded history. But there's more concentrated energy now than ever, and it's being leveraged sometimes to no good whatsoever like never before possible, it's going to require a whole lot more human effort put toward pure happiness. Or you might end up with one of those unhappy eons if malaise or worse is what turns out to be scaled up more than anything.

I guess with the cave men in mind you can be as "optimistic about the past" as you can be and it's no guarantee of future performance any more than it was for them :\

What is "everybody's" energy being leveraged for and what could it be doing to spread more happiness anyway?

It doesn't have to be profound to sum up quite nicely.

"Be excellent to each other."

This just doesn't compute for some people.