I remember my childhood mostly as a happy, oblivious one, affordable food, the usual disagreements between liberals and republicans, but nothing unhinged (say taxes, migrants or abortion). At least it looks reasonable today.
Now it’s like everything is unhinged: politics seem to be based on purely emotional reactions and the other side is hell bent on destroying the country: texas starts heavily gerrymandering to secure 5 extra republican seats at the next midterms? california starts lobbying for doing exactly the same and dismantling an independent redistricting commission texas never had.
When I was younger it seemed politics were more rational and cruelty never seemed to be the point of doing nothing. Now we execute people with nitrogen gas, meaning a conscious person has to breathe something he knows its going to kill him during 4 minutes. This is somehow not cruel and unusual. And nobody bats an eye.
I still don’t get how populists can be so popular now, they simplify complex issues most people without a degree in the matter, cannot grasp. This includes me.
I’m now 35 and wonder if I’m already talking like an old person who misses his young days so hard. I see that in people in their 60s and hoped never to become one of them, but here I am. To a younger person I may look like one of those old guys who lives to rant.
Am I going to feel even more detached and depressed with each passing day?
It is getting worse. Humanity is entering a deeper and deeper crisis. Alienation is growing with each passing year. The inner contradiction in every one of us is getting more intense, which manifests itself in more external conflicts: between people, between people and nature, between everything.
That being sad, this crisis just highlights the slow death of the previous, deeply troubled era and marks the transition to another way of living. The destructive aspect of things, that we all suffer from, is therefore not absolute. It is not going to destroy neither us nor the world around us. It is balanced off by the progress that we’re making.
Take 3d printing, for example. If you think of it, it is actually the (very) beginning of something fundamentally new: local automated production. Automation eliminates the routine part of producing goods, which makes the process creative again, while not compromising on efficiency. This leads to production becoming a means of self-actualisation rather than something that takes away all your freedom. And since the process of making new things gives you value instead of taking it, the need for charging others for using your creations vanishes, giving way to free exchange and collaboration. This, if applied globally, would solve the fundamental issue of our current society, where creating good takes away just as much, making any growth a form of self-destruction. And solving that would spare us of all different kinds of problems, ranging from pollution, wars to emotional abuse.
So I think by getting worse it’s also getting better and these difficult times we’ve happened to live in are still marvelous.
P.S. Apart from 3d printing, there’s, of course, free software movement as well, which in my opinion is also part of the global free production evolution