6 ms·

It is frustrating to not be able to predict the future. How can you get married, have children, get a 25 year mortgage on a house, buy a car for comfort even th

It is frustrating to not be able to predict the future. How can you get married, have children, get a 25 year mortgage on a house, buy a car for comfort even though you don't absolutely need it? Even if you do consider buying a home, how do you know it's worth anything if you can't predict this particular place's future situation? Some countries tax enough to make the risk of buying quite high. A leap of faith is required and sometimes things don't happen the way we expect but it's better than aiming for nothing.

moffkalast 4mo ago
That's the neat part, you don't. At least as far as the younger generations is concerned there is no future for us, even if you don't include climate change. Laying flat / quiet quitting, etc. movements are not accidental.
- ffsm8 4mo ago
  Laying flat is completely different though. It's the realization in china that their efforts will never amount to meaningful rewards, hence they scale down the effort to what's absolutely necessary for survival. Living without a home and only working maybe 1 day a week to get enough food to not die. Equivalent in Europe would be to just be homeless and get by on social security, US probably getting by on food stamps. What you see here is subtly different: they see the sword of damocles. Whatever they may do, the end may come at any point and they have no way to influence it. But to go back to the initial question of what to do: you ignore it. You cannot do anything about it, hence you can only gamble that it doesn't manifest and work under that assumption. If it does manifest youre fucked anyway. But if it doesn't, you're gucci
  - pandalism 4mo ago
    Might be a nitpick this doesn't seem like a sword of Damocles type scenario, that implies the constant, and extraordinary, risk of decisions taken from a position of power, aka you get the throne but the swords there ready to kill you for a minute action/decision and you lose it all. I'm not sure what would be a more apt parable, something about being a leaf in the wind, or trying to swim upstream, aka powerless that no matter what you decide, how you act, bigger phenomena than you is the only thing that matters?
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - userulluipeste 4mo ago
      "I'm not sure what would be a more apt parable, something about being a leaf in the wind, or trying to swim upstream, aka powerless that no matter what you decide, how you act, bigger phenomena than you is the only thing that matters?" There was and still is a lot of hazard (and lack of control) in anyone's life. It gets either mitigated (somehow, when possible), or assumed & ignored. So, no need for parables, as this just sounds like life, as it always been, no more and no less.
- soco 4mo ago
  Where is this obsession with predicting the future comping from? Did humanity ever predict the future?`Yet it somehow thrived, brought us here and enabled us to complain about the lack of fortune-telling.
  - bluGill 4mo ago
    You cannot predict details of the future, but you can make enough predictions for reasonable purposes. The sun will rise in the east tomorrow. Between December and February next year it will drop below freezing, and snow. The weather will support a garden most summers (enough rain, not too hot or cold), but only if I'm planing specific plants that do well in my climate, there are some foods that will never work where I live and so I can predict the future enough to risk planting them. Most people thinking about predicting the future are asking for either more details which we cannot give, but the trend is good enough and nobody thinks about it.
    - doctorwho42 4mo ago
      And within your examples lie the rub, we are losing the ability to predict or rely on those weather patterns which have served our species for the past 10,000 years. Hell, some of the largest civilization upheavals and collapses were due to localized climate disruptions (sometimes planet wide). Volcano in place (a) erupted and the temperature dropped enough to impact growing cycles, etc
    - red-iron-pine 4mo ago
      i can buy a house because i can plan on having a job next year, and probably in the next 5 years. i can have a kid because i can afford it, because i have a job, and my housing situation is stable i can take time off to recover from illness because i won't get fired for being out of office for a week i can pay for other life infrastructure like a car or a new roof because i know my pay and job is stable and i'm not going to move i don't need to stockpile food water and ammo because the government will be mostly benevolent and effective, and disasters will be infrequent and mitigated. i don't need to wear a bulletproof vest to go to work because my streets are reasonably safe, and i'm not going to get drafted to fight in a war. etc. etc. etc.
trolleski 4mo ago
They make it impossible to predict on purpose. The more the population is disoriented the better for the ultra rich, paradoxically it maximizes control. It is a hostile act of course, but as always they're at war with you but you are not at war with them. Choose offline communities, organize, organize, organize. Peacefully, constructively, remember a coordinated general strike is much more dangerous to them than your prison sentence for throwing a brick at a cop.
- malfist 4mo ago
  Who is "they" in your story?
  - doctorwho42 4mo ago
    Probably referring to those with vast amounts of power and wealth at their disposal. There isn't some vast conspiracy. But generally it takes a certain kind of person to crave that type of wealth and power. So they tend to all pull in the same direction to keep and build upon said wealth/power. Thus can be viewed as collectively working towards the same nefarious state of things.
    - trolleski 4mo ago
      Yes, but sometimes they actually cooperate and coordinate, like we saw in the Epstein files. And the unpredictability actually has a name and it is "flooding the zone".
      - red-iron-pine 4mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
  - trolleski 4mo ago
    I stated that in the post. :)
andyferris 4mo ago
It always required a leap of faith - that’s the point of life, getting married and having kids. Not so many generations ago parents might not know if they’d survive to see their children reach adulthood (or if their children would survive, or if they’d be infertile, or die during childbirth). My parents are boomers who ended up doing well, but had to buy a house at a 17% interest rate and low wages not knowing if that was a smart or dumb move. The current generation face huge land values (but have better medicine and moderate interest rates). Who would you trade places with, without the benefit of hindsight?
- doctorwho42 4mo ago
  Someone in my career in the 1950's... In a heart beat, even if I didn't know what was coming next. High taxes lead to reinvestment.
chrsw 4mo ago
There are enough people in the same boat that I would think the future would tend to support families, maybe with a bit of struggle, above all else. No matter how good computers get at devaluing labor or how expensive housing gets, kids still need to eat, learn and grow.
- monerochan 4mo ago
  Just because there is a need does not mean it will be fufilled
- everyday7732 4mo ago
  A need does not get filled simply because it exists. If society is no longer necessary and participating within the economy then society can't provide a safety net for kids. It's like walking in the desert assuming you will reach water soon because you are really thirsty. Nature doesn't care about human needs and will allow you to die of thirst.
  - generic92034 4mo ago
    But does human nature allow one member of the caravan having (a lot of) water, while everyone else goes thirsty?
    - doctorwho42 4mo ago
      It does when you abstract it to our current situation. It's like having a caravan in which every oasis you pass you only get a miniscule amount of water to refill. While another caravan of one, that you never see or interact with directly gets to gorge on the oasis... While simultaneously filling up extra barrels of its water to bring back home. You don't know where this caravan of one is based nor do you ever see them... But everytime you go by the oasis it is noticeably worse for wear.
    - vel0city 4mo ago
      It sure seems like it with us having so many billionaires while there's still massive poverty at the same time.
otikik 4mo ago
Well, imagine being able to actually predict the future. It would suck. There would always be an optimal choice all of the time. You would be a slave to your prescience. The only way free will is possible is that we are oblivious to the future. Good luck with your choices, and your life!
- dainank 4mo ago
  Dune Messiah in a nutshell.
  - monerochan 4mo ago
    [dead]
  - otikik 4mo ago
    Yes. And "Arrival", as well.
- doctorwho42 4mo ago
  Sooooo... We are doomed because we can predict the sun will rise tomorrow? We are doomed because we can predict the weather 7-10 days out with reasonable accuracy? We are doomed because we can predict the climate change based on models? We are doomed because with our knowledge of physics we can predict the outcome of many events?
  - otikik 4mo ago
    /r/woosh/
- erikerikson 4mo ago
  Being determined doesn't require awareness.
lqet 4mo ago
Yes, predicting the future was never possible. In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak. Yet I am immensely grateful that my ancestors chose to build homes and marry and have children and live life through the great plague, through middle ages in which most of the population expected the apocalypse to be just around the corner, the 30 years war with up to 70% of the population dead in some areas, two world wars, a time in which nuclear annihilation of mankind seemed just one false push of a button away, and a time when large parts of Europe were covered in radioactive substances following the Chernobyl disaster. End times are nothing new, it's the historic default mode.
- mothballed 4mo ago
  A lot of those people were able to do it without debt which made it far less precarious. I have equally pessimistic view of the future so I built my house one piece of wood at a time with cash. I bought a piece of shit car with cash. I've never used debt, I just got all the things I have by buying shit cars and shit land and slowly slowly making things better until I have nice things. For much of the youth, this is impossible. The permitting and regulatory process for houses is hostile to slow and DIY building so even if you can get cheap land near jobs (you can) you can't do it without predicting 30 years of mortgage payments. The pandemic monetary policy (more recently) and cash-for-clunkers(longer ago) trashed the used car markets. Increased regulation, licensing, insurance requirements and liability made childcare far less affordable. Also in the old days "neglect" was stuff like actually starving your kids to death so if you were broke you could work or do domestic stuff to save money and leave them home or to run around outside without Karen having them snatched by CPS. Annihilation isn't so worrying, it's the surviving that's scary.
  - bluGill 4mo ago
    Their existence was even more precarious because they were one crop failure from starvation. They couldn't save food for long, and even if they tried an army is likely to come and take it all (if mice didn't get it first). Dept is bad, but it isn't nearly as bad as the things they dealt with.
skybrian 4mo ago
It seems like if real estate becomes a more uncertain investment, it has more to do with climate change than AI.
chaseadam17 4mo ago
No one could ever predict anything and we're all going to die.
icefrog98 4mo ago
The fun part is we can believe AI will generate boatloads of cash and require no additional cash, and financial history will come to an end. But the future is not set in stone. Simplistic, naive and even optimistic and maximalist thoughts about AI are in the end just guesses.
hoppp 4mo ago
Just be a genetic machine and do your thing. Our ancestors can evolve into more primitive forms and technically we will live on. When it stops being evolutionarily beneficial to be intelligent because the machines do the thinking then it will happen. Can't do anything about it
tencentshill 4mo ago
When enough people are no longer willing to make the leap, the market cools, and incentives appear to heat it back up. Perfect balance is always achieved. In a libertarian dream world.
holoduke 4mo ago
One should live and enjoy today. Way too many people live in the future. Only to find out it never becomes reality. Today is reality.
refurb 4mo ago
How is this any different than it's ever been? Not making life choices because you're worried they'll turn out bad is a terrible way to approach life.
- littlexsparkee 4mo ago
  You're making a choice to be resilient - doesn't mean you can't pursue the other course down the line but it's self preservation at this point. I don't think it makes sense to give it a moral valence.
bossyTeacher 4mo ago
Different aims have different risk profiles though? Saving up 3 months to buy a car you can replace in 8 months if it breaks down is very different from deciding to quit your lucrative career to become a low paid artist which is different from giving up 18 years of your life to make a human who might need assistance from you for longer than 18 years and from other people once you die. Mortgages are also a different risk profile. Aim at something yes. But don't be reckless or overly optimistic.

moffkalast 4mo ago

That's the neat part, you don't. At least as far as the younger generations is concerned there is no future for us, even if you don't include climate change. Laying flat / quiet quitting, etc. movements are not accidental.

ffsm8 4mo ago
Laying flat is completely different though. It's the realization in china that their efforts will never amount to meaningful rewards, hence they scale down the effort to what's absolutely necessary for survival. Living without a home and only working maybe 1 day a week to get enough food to not die. Equivalent in Europe would be to just be homeless and get by on social security, US probably getting by on food stamps. What you see here is subtly different: they see the sword of damocles. Whatever they may do, the end may come at any point and they have no way to influence it. But to go back to the initial question of what to do: you ignore it. You cannot do anything about it, hence you can only gamble that it doesn't manifest and work under that assumption. If it does manifest youre fucked anyway. But if it doesn't, you're gucci
- pandalism 4mo ago
  Might be a nitpick this doesn't seem like a sword of Damocles type scenario, that implies the constant, and extraordinary, risk of decisions taken from a position of power, aka you get the throne but the swords there ready to kill you for a minute action/decision and you lose it all. I'm not sure what would be a more apt parable, something about being a leaf in the wind, or trying to swim upstream, aka powerless that no matter what you decide, how you act, bigger phenomena than you is the only thing that matters?
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - userulluipeste 4mo ago
    "I'm not sure what would be a more apt parable, something about being a leaf in the wind, or trying to swim upstream, aka powerless that no matter what you decide, how you act, bigger phenomena than you is the only thing that matters?" There was and still is a lot of hazard (and lack of control) in anyone's life. It gets either mitigated (somehow, when possible), or assumed & ignored. So, no need for parables, as this just sounds like life, as it always been, no more and no less.
soco 4mo ago
Where is this obsession with predicting the future comping from? Did humanity ever predict the future?`Yet it somehow thrived, brought us here and enabled us to complain about the lack of fortune-telling.
- bluGill 4mo ago
  You cannot predict details of the future, but you can make enough predictions for reasonable purposes. The sun will rise in the east tomorrow. Between December and February next year it will drop below freezing, and snow. The weather will support a garden most summers (enough rain, not too hot or cold), but only if I'm planing specific plants that do well in my climate, there are some foods that will never work where I live and so I can predict the future enough to risk planting them. Most people thinking about predicting the future are asking for either more details which we cannot give, but the trend is good enough and nobody thinks about it.
  - doctorwho42 4mo ago
    And within your examples lie the rub, we are losing the ability to predict or rely on those weather patterns which have served our species for the past 10,000 years. Hell, some of the largest civilization upheavals and collapses were due to localized climate disruptions (sometimes planet wide). Volcano in place (a) erupted and the temperature dropped enough to impact growing cycles, etc
  - red-iron-pine 4mo ago
    i can buy a house because i can plan on having a job next year, and probably in the next 5 years. i can have a kid because i can afford it, because i have a job, and my housing situation is stable i can take time off to recover from illness because i won't get fired for being out of office for a week i can pay for other life infrastructure like a car or a new roof because i know my pay and job is stable and i'm not going to move i don't need to stockpile food water and ammo because the government will be mostly benevolent and effective, and disasters will be infrequent and mitigated. i don't need to wear a bulletproof vest to go to work because my streets are reasonably safe, and i'm not going to get drafted to fight in a war. etc. etc. etc.

trolleski 4mo ago

They make it impossible to predict on purpose. The more the population is disoriented the better for the ultra rich, paradoxically it maximizes control. It is a hostile act of course, but as always they're at war with you but you are not at war with them. Choose offline communities, organize, organize, organize. Peacefully, constructively, remember a coordinated general strike is much more dangerous to them than your prison sentence for throwing a brick at a cop.

malfist 4mo ago
Who is "they" in your story?
- doctorwho42 4mo ago
  Probably referring to those with vast amounts of power and wealth at their disposal. There isn't some vast conspiracy. But generally it takes a certain kind of person to crave that type of wealth and power. So they tend to all pull in the same direction to keep and build upon said wealth/power. Thus can be viewed as collectively working towards the same nefarious state of things.
  - trolleski 4mo ago
    Yes, but sometimes they actually cooperate and coordinate, like we saw in the Epstein files. And the unpredictability actually has a name and it is "flooding the zone".
    - red-iron-pine 4mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
- trolleski 4mo ago
  I stated that in the post. :)

andyferris 4mo ago

It always required a leap of faith - that’s the point of life, getting married and having kids. Not so many generations ago parents might not know if they’d survive to see their children reach adulthood (or if their children would survive, or if they’d be infertile, or die during childbirth). My parents are boomers who ended up doing well, but had to buy a house at a 17% interest rate and low wages not knowing if that was a smart or dumb move. The current generation face huge land values (but have better medicine and moderate interest rates). Who would you trade places with, without the benefit of hindsight?

doctorwho42 4mo ago
Someone in my career in the 1950's... In a heart beat, even if I didn't know what was coming next. High taxes lead to reinvestment.

chrsw 4mo ago

There are enough people in the same boat that I would think the future would tend to support families, maybe with a bit of struggle, above all else. No matter how good computers get at devaluing labor or how expensive housing gets, kids still need to eat, learn and grow.

monerochan 4mo ago
Just because there is a need does not mean it will be fufilled
everyday7732 4mo ago
A need does not get filled simply because it exists. If society is no longer necessary and participating within the economy then society can't provide a safety net for kids. It's like walking in the desert assuming you will reach water soon because you are really thirsty. Nature doesn't care about human needs and will allow you to die of thirst.
- generic92034 4mo ago
  But does human nature allow one member of the caravan having (a lot of) water, while everyone else goes thirsty?
  - doctorwho42 4mo ago
    It does when you abstract it to our current situation. It's like having a caravan in which every oasis you pass you only get a miniscule amount of water to refill. While another caravan of one, that you never see or interact with directly gets to gorge on the oasis... While simultaneously filling up extra barrels of its water to bring back home. You don't know where this caravan of one is based nor do you ever see them... But everytime you go by the oasis it is noticeably worse for wear.
  - vel0city 4mo ago
    It sure seems like it with us having so many billionaires while there's still massive poverty at the same time.

otikik 4mo ago

Well, imagine being able to actually predict the future. It would suck. There would always be an optimal choice all of the time. You would be a slave to your prescience. The only way free will is possible is that we are oblivious to the future. Good luck with your choices, and your life!

dainank 4mo ago
Dune Messiah in a nutshell.
- monerochan 4mo ago
  [dead]
- otikik 4mo ago
  Yes. And "Arrival", as well.
doctorwho42 4mo ago
Sooooo... We are doomed because we can predict the sun will rise tomorrow? We are doomed because we can predict the weather 7-10 days out with reasonable accuracy? We are doomed because we can predict the climate change based on models? We are doomed because with our knowledge of physics we can predict the outcome of many events?
- otikik 4mo ago
  /r/woosh/
erikerikson 4mo ago
Being determined doesn't require awareness.

lqet 4mo ago

Yes, predicting the future was never possible. In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak. Yet I am immensely grateful that my ancestors chose to build homes and marry and have children and live life through the great plague, through middle ages in which most of the population expected the apocalypse to be just around the corner, the 30 years war with up to 70% of the population dead in some areas, two world wars, a time in which nuclear annihilation of mankind seemed just one false push of a button away, and a time when large parts of Europe were covered in radioactive substances following the Chernobyl disaster. End times are nothing new, it's the historic default mode.

mothballed 4mo ago
A lot of those people were able to do it without debt which made it far less precarious. I have equally pessimistic view of the future so I built my house one piece of wood at a time with cash. I bought a piece of shit car with cash. I've never used debt, I just got all the things I have by buying shit cars and shit land and slowly slowly making things better until I have nice things. For much of the youth, this is impossible. The permitting and regulatory process for houses is hostile to slow and DIY building so even if you can get cheap land near jobs (you can) you can't do it without predicting 30 years of mortgage payments. The pandemic monetary policy (more recently) and cash-for-clunkers(longer ago) trashed the used car markets. Increased regulation, licensing, insurance requirements and liability made childcare far less affordable. Also in the old days "neglect" was stuff like actually starving your kids to death so if you were broke you could work or do domestic stuff to save money and leave them home or to run around outside without Karen having them snatched by CPS. Annihilation isn't so worrying, it's the surviving that's scary.
- bluGill 4mo ago
  Their existence was even more precarious because they were one crop failure from starvation. They couldn't save food for long, and even if they tried an army is likely to come and take it all (if mice didn't get it first). Dept is bad, but it isn't nearly as bad as the things they dealt with.

skybrian 4mo ago

It seems like if real estate becomes a more uncertain investment, it has more to do with climate change than AI.

chaseadam17 4mo ago

No one could ever predict anything and we're all going to die.

icefrog98 4mo ago

The fun part is we can believe AI will generate boatloads of cash and require no additional cash, and financial history will come to an end. But the future is not set in stone. Simplistic, naive and even optimistic and maximalist thoughts about AI are in the end just guesses.

hoppp 4mo ago

Just be a genetic machine and do your thing. Our ancestors can evolve into more primitive forms and technically we will live on. When it stops being evolutionarily beneficial to be intelligent because the machines do the thinking then it will happen. Can't do anything about it

tencentshill 4mo ago

When enough people are no longer willing to make the leap, the market cools, and incentives appear to heat it back up. Perfect balance is always achieved. In a libertarian dream world.

holoduke 4mo ago

One should live and enjoy today. Way too many people live in the future. Only to find out it never becomes reality. Today is reality.

refurb 4mo ago

How is this any different than it's ever been? Not making life choices because you're worried they'll turn out bad is a terrible way to approach life.

littlexsparkee 4mo ago
You're making a choice to be resilient - doesn't mean you can't pursue the other course down the line but it's self preservation at this point. I don't think it makes sense to give it a moral valence.

bossyTeacher 4mo ago

Different aims have different risk profiles though? Saving up 3 months to buy a car you can replace in 8 months if it breaks down is very different from deciding to quit your lucrative career to become a low paid artist which is different from giving up 18 years of your life to make a human who might need assistance from you for longer than 18 years and from other people once you die. Mortgages are also a different risk profile. Aim at something yes. But don't be reckless or overly optimistic.