Well, I’ll take the other end of it, and feel free to ignore me as well because the pessimistic take is depressing. The web didn’t exist, but then neither did

Well, I’ll take the other end of it, and feel free to ignore me as well because the pessimistic take is depressing. The web didn’t exist, but then neither did social media, which apparently is driving record teenage depression and anxiety (and I’d guess it isn’t limited to teenagers either). You could actually disconnect from your work since you didn’t have PagerDuty ever ready to call you in. I loved the web of the 90’s to mid 00’s as well, but what we have today is not that. People don’t just marry later, they marry less (and as we’ve noted, have fewer children). You can choose to see this how you wish, but generally the pro-natalists see it as a bad thing; another sign of increased social fragmentation. Houses are bigger yes, but that means less affordable; homelessness is rising. The real kicker for me though is the falling life expectancy in the US. It’s literally been attributed to “deaths of despair”; drug overdoses, suicide, and other misadventure. That’s despite the advances in medicine. Cancer rates are increasing (I literally found out yesterday that my sister has a growth that may be cancerous; she’s got a biopsy scheduled, and a woman who I dated died of cancer before she turned 40). Reasons are unclear but record rates of obesity can’t help. On that one at least we may have turned the corner with some really revolutionary drugs that are quite expensive now but I do believe will come down in price. I don’t really want to do the pollution/CO2 thing because I’ve had enough already. Suffice it to say it’s hard for me to be an optimist.