I had some green tea, ate some self-made bread with strong cheese, some salad consisting of feta cheese, cucumber, bell peppers, carrots, aceto balsamico, olive oil, pumpkin seed oil, and lots of small stuff: almonds, poppy seeds, sunflower seeds, hemp seeds. We ate standing in the kitchen because we sit at the desk all day.
Sometimes I see an impressive piece of machinery, like the suction excavator I see right now, and I no longer think to myself: “imagine how glorious the future will be!” 🤩
Instead, I think to myself: “I wonder how people will do this in the future – when the slow collapse is here.” 😰
I think about the movie Winter’s Bone (2010) a lot. This is the collapse arriving slowly, unevenly. People without jobs, infrastructure decaying, meth cooking, slow violence, domestic violence, poverty, the shrinking of options. It comes very slowly and it never says “post-apocalypse”. It’s just shit, and it goes on forever.
The film explores the interrelated themes of close and distant family ties, the power and speed of gossip, self-sufficiency, poverty, and patriarchy as they are influenced by the pervasive underworld of illegal meth labs. – [Winter’s Bone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter's_Bone)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter's_Bone
#Philosophy #Economics
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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Debra Granik is one of my favourite filmmakers. Her recent film Leave No Trace is probably the best film I’ve seen in the last decade.
– rnkn 2021-12-09 06:03 UTC
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I’ll put it on my list, thanks for the recommendation!
– Alex 2021-12-09 09:35 UTC
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Same here, Alex. Europe (not the Union, the geological unit) will be facing a dark, dark future. Time to get out of here.
– Norbert 2021-12-10 18:18 UTC
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I have an inherent skepticism of world-views and ’general perceptions.’ We can be quite wrong about the direction various things in the world are going. For example, 52% of people (N=26489, worldwide) believe that global poverty has increased over the last 20 years, when the opposite is true <https://ourworldindata.org/wrong-about-the-world>. When we zoom out and look globally and at long scales (100+ years), there are still many terrible problems, but lots of quantifiable things have improved massively. The poorest today live like the richest 200 years ago, and progress before then was much, much slower. Of course, things could always get worse, but I don’t think that’s a certainty at all.
https://ourworldindata.org/wrong-about-the-world
– Tom 2021-12-10 23:34 UTC
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This is a good point. But Our World In Data also needs to be read carefully. You can point to the income inequality page and say things aren’t that bad, but the question of wealth inequality and accumulation is tricky and therefore when Our World In Data talks about wealth it talks about the inadequacies of the gross domestic product instead. Other thoughts that make me cautious: even if the poorest are getting richer, there is the dispute of how you look at it. Do you include China? With so many people, the global improvements are important. But if the remaining countries are not faring as well, then that must have implications for policies. The fact that in the aggregate poorer people are doing better is not a reason to stop worrying. We say that people are better off, but you can also say The poverty rate in Africa has gone down, but the number of African people living in poverty has increased. Similarly, we might say that at last the dominance of white men from the former colonial powers is falling, and the world is now fairer, it’s OK if Europe and North America fall back for a bit, but at the same time, it’s where I live so of course I also take the local perspective. Things are not good, and I don’t actually care if my grandparents before the Second World War were worse off. And let’s not forget all the arsenals we own. If the Great Depression in the USA and Germany was solved by the Second World War, where does that leave us? And finally, in the blog post I wrote about my impressions, and a movie, but that doesn’t mean I don’t read Le Monde Diplomatique or Die Wochenzeitung, or the occasional web page online. I wrote a longer blog post with a more political point of view a while back: 2020-08-03 The rich. But what I really want to focus on is the discrepancy between general assumption in my circles that we’re doing OK and yet it seems that we are regressing in some parts. Perhaps you are right and it’s just falling victim to fear spread by the media. And yet! Even if on average we are doing better, and even if the bad news we hear today affect fewer people than the bad news we didn’t year in the generations of our parents affected more people, the bad news still remains.
about the inadequacies of the gross domestic product
– Alex 2021-12-11 12:37 CET
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I agree, there are nuances and these are all important considerations. Thank you for expanding on your thoughts. I left my comment in an effort to generally “spreading the word” about some of the measurable progress going on. I am glad to see you are well-informed 🙂
(Also, I apologise but I had to remove a URL from your comment as it contained the string “/file”, which seems to be BannedContent (even though I can apparently post it).)
– Tom 2021-12-12 00:15 UTC
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Yeah, sorry about all the banning going on in order to stop the spam. I unbanned “file” in URLs but I’m too lazy to put the link back in. The comment still makes sense as is, I hope.
– Alex 2021-12-12 11:15 UTC
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I have the same general anxiety. From my point of view, society is really hanging on by a thread. Multiple factors are at play and could tip the balance on way or another : Energy, Social/Political and probably others I can’t think of right now.
– SomeRandomDude 2021-12-12 20:17 UTC