I love to fantasize about having a nice life and getting old and all, but it seems like the future is cancelled both on a personal and on a social level. Inequalities are on the rise, buying your own property is almost unimaginable, let alone finding a stable and intellectually rewarding job without a STEM degree. It seems dubious that all the catastrophic effects of climate change can be ignored for another 50 years. In fact, I think we are already living in a dystopia, many people just don’t notice it since it is - unfortunately - way less cool than the one in Blade Runner, for example.
This is a feeling I share with others in my generation: according to the results of the 2021 Prince’s Trust Youth Index, 56% of young people aged 15-26 feel “always” or “often” anxious – the highest proportion since the start of their annual reports. Even before the pandemic, in 2019, 73% said their generation “is less certain about future employment than their parents”. Surveys show they were right feeling so: with the pandemic, a third of them have been furloughed, while only the sixth of prime-age adults. So here we are, worried and unable to imagine futures that are radically different than the present we already have. Western culture has spent the second half of the twentieth century in awe of possibilities on the way: as mankind made its first steps on the Moon and first satellites started orbiting around the planet, pop culture was invaded by spaceships, computers and cyber technology. But then, our relationship with the future changed. For some while now, it has almost felt like we’re seeing nothing radically new; most of the music sounds as if it was created before the turn of the century, and the biggest Hollywood productions are mainly just reusing content that was created over 40 years ago. Even fashion is undeniably cyclical. According to the late Mark Fisher, cultural innovation has stalled and contemporary culture is haunted by “lost futures”. While back in the sixties and the seventies social institutions were stronger and social needs thus better satisfied, now artists lack the necessary resources and safety to create freely. Back then, people had more security and more room to be creative. Working-class youth could go to art schools and there was enough social security not to worry too much even if one didn’t have a finance or IT job. Then the boring old days which produced the likes of Pink Floyd disappeared; and with Thatcher social democracy turned into the frightening world of neoliberalism, tuition fees and increasing rent prices. But culture is just one aspect. There are other problems as well. Last November, The Atlantic published an interesting article saying that although 2020 was for many an apocalyptic year, for an academic at the University of Connecticut called Peter Turchin, it was an indicator that his models predicting an “age of discord” around 2020 were working. Turchin based the hypothesis on social data from the last 10,000 years and argued that at the core of the unrest lies the fact that there is a periodic overproduction of elites – e.g., the number of suitable jobs for highly educated people lags behind the number of highly skilled intellectuals with degrees acquainted from top universities. These people are convinced from their early childhood that the key to a good life is the very degree they agree to go into debt for – only that there is such a large number of them that this does not happen. The desired good life fades away for many and they simply end up stuck in debt – hence the increasing fight for skilled jobs and the dissatisfaction with the current social order. Turchin has received a wide range of criticism. Many believe that human history is too complex to apply such crude methods to it in order to predict the future, while others do not even go such a length and just say that he is merely some charlatan, a 21st-century Nostradamus. Putting aside debates on whether the future is or is not mathematically predictable in a way Asimov put it in his Foundation series, it is still interesting to read predictions about the future, the inner workings of our current society and how it came about, or even to just scroll poll results for fun facts. Even if we are not convinced by Turchin, elite overproduction seems real, and it is unlikely that there is anything about it that could make people happy and strengthen social order. We also have to keep in mind that staying purely on a theoretical level when discussing society does not help either. In the end, it will not matter at all how good you understood Turchin or Fisher or even if you think you are not part of that anxious 56%. To create a better future, we all have to let go of childish hopes of electric cars or veganism or even Silicon Valley tech bros being able to change things substantially. We have to understand that not only does humanity’s current track lead towards greater suffering and an inhabitable planet but also that the future can be made better only by actively engaging in politics and fighting for what matters to us. There is hope, though. The same Prince’s Trust study I mentioned above says that 59 per cent of 16-25-year-olds pay more attention to the news than they did a year ago and 66% thinks that “the political events” of 2020 “have made them want to fight for a better future”. Let’s hope that this fight does not stop at being woke on social media — then we can indeed hope for things changing for the better and start to believe that we are going to have a future after all.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
CategoriesArchives
March 2021
|