Our biased attention means we’ll always feel like we’re living in dark times, and our biased memory means we’ll always feel like the past was brighter.
Nostalgia: The amnesia of bad events in your past.
What about the fact that humanity faces extinction in our lifetime? GHG emissions are at the point where a vast majority of humanity is doomed within 50 years with even the most optimistic models, so why wouldn’t we have a pessimistic outlook on life?
@burgersc12 Can you provide a peer reviewed paper that makes that prediction about extinction?
The IPCC report says that 3.3 - 3.6 billion people live in areas that are “highly vulnerable” to climate change. It doesn’t outright say we’re all gonna die, but it paints a grim picture of the path we’re headed on. Even if we stop all fossil fuel usage today, in the next 50-100 years there would be an increase in temperature, more frequent natural disasters, food shortages, loss of animal and plant life, water wars, mass migration, sea level rising and, in all likelihood, a breakdown of our social, political, and economic systems
@burgersc12 So the answer is no, you can’t. “Extinction” is not a part of it. Let’s not use hyperbolic language. It hurts our cause, and gives the fossil fuel lackeys ammunition.
Well, I think Reddark is really legit dark. But I agree on the other points. Your brain stores negative stuff more than positive stuff. But the last line is the kicker:
As long as we believe in this illusion, we are susceptible to the promises of aspiring autocrats who claim they can return us to a golden age that exists in the only place a golden age has ever existed: our imaginations.
Here is their accompanying paper: The illusion of moral decline https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06137-x
I mean we just limped through a pandemic, have rising inflation (no wages haven’t keep up for decades), could see a recession/depression soon, kinda need to be worried about fascism again, and have climate change to deal with. I probably forgot about some stuff too.
The past is often tented in our minds either due to limited information of that time or because we were a kid at the time. It is also true that a lot of stuff is better. Still, people have good reason to worry about the current state of the world.
