You may well be right, but as an optimist I look hard for other explanations regarding our collective psychology. Depression is not the same as frustration. An

You may well be right, but as an optimist I look hard for other explanations regarding our collective psychology. Depression is not the same as frustration. And self limitation is not the same as confinement. The latter allow more for overcoming, whereas depresssion can be an inescapable existential state for Kirkegaardian reasons. As discussed in another thread today, on the rise of mental illness connected to technology [1], there is a sense of societal trauma. So many wars, recessions, pandemics and tragedies flow like water under the bridge, never giving us time to grieve, reflect or learn. We are, as Nietzsche said, forever tumbling, "plunging continually" into a future, with nothing to grab hold of [2]. Some years ago I gave a talk at Goldsmiths University in London at a conference "Against the Slow Cancellation of the Future" [3] on the role of technology in paradoxically limiting available futures. David Graeber and Peter Thiel [4] had more or less the same debate we had at Goldsmiths. Inevitably the much maligned Fukuyama, simplified into a sound-bite about the "End of History" [5] is brought out for a whipping. Part of the issue is the transformed role of capital as a closure around possibility, rather than an enabler of radical possibility. But that's not limited to Capital(ism) as such. Indeed, one possibly apocryphal story was the Chinese CCP banning stories about time travel and alternative futures. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268222 [2] Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Parable of the Madman" (1882) http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html [3] https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/178054/against-slow-cancellation-future-cfp-centre-cultural-studies https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/178054/a... [4] https://thebaffler.com/latest/graeber-thiel https://thebaffler.com/latest/graeber-thiel [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...