Hey lads! The current state of the UK and the world is very unstable right now and most of us think that it will only get worse.
So what do you think daily life will be like in... 2040 for example? 17 years ahead from now. Please give any answer because there is no wrong answer. Anything could happen in 17 years.
Personally, i'm split between kind of like now but much worse and even more poverty or a war/civil unrest happens that leads us to live like some wasteland scavenger.
Please! Just have a think and imagine (with the current state of things that may get better or worse in your opinion) what your daily life will be like in 2040. i'm sure none of us here are time travelers so we can't really argue on whos right or wrong in the replies.
Who knows... for all we know England, Scotland and Wales may not even exist by 2040 and there will be no electricity. Or maybe things will get better.
I read an interesting observation the other day that people have become more humourless and serious. I can see it being true given the relentless series of shocks we've had over the last few years.
>most of us think that it will only get worse
If it's anything like investor sentiment then that's a pretty sure sign things are about to get better. By objective measures the long-arc of history points upwards so there's no need to threat. I can frankly see it given a lot of the technology coming online right now will absolutely revolutionise our lives and all the forces opposed to our comfortable liberal existence are in variable levels of crisis at the moment. If you gave it 2-5 years then yeah I'd be more pessimistic but it'll be right.
So in 2040 I'll be working an easier job thanks to an AI assistant, I'll be healthier than my parents, the UK will retain several economic niches, we'll eat lab-grown meat and a whole lot less of sugar. I'll be 50 so that's pretty terrifying.
These things do tend to go back and forth, but the pendulum does tend to usually swing forward more than it swings back.
Of course, there's nothing saying that long trend can't come to a stop, there have been many serious economic upheavals that lasted more than a lifetime or two over the years, but I think in the modern world we are managing to keep on top of things well enough despite all the bullshit.
I think the thing that causes a lot of pessimism and bitterness is that we've had more or less two full generations who grew up under the downturn. Millennial are already all in their 30s and feel they had much of their youth and opportunity robbed from them, Gen Z is still growing up into a future that's showing no signs of improving before they hit their 30s. It's pretty cold comfort to imagine things will start getting better just as we're all hitting our 50s and 60s. You don't get a do over at life.
How does one avoid bitterness over that, really? It's hard. You look back and you think fuck, all the things I could have done if I didn't have my nose pressed straight to the grindstone merely for the chance at economic security in future. All the relationships that broke down from stress over money, all the opportunities you missed because you were doing overtime, and what do you have to show for it? You just barely clawed your way on the housing ladder just in time for interest rates to go up faster than at any point in the last 20 years? Fucking great, thanks.
In general I think politics will look very strange going forward when people my age are the biggest and most influential voting demographic, because we are going to want blood. We are going to want vengeance.
A third world war soon followed by buildback-better economic boom and widespread implimentation of new public technologies. Sources; my arse.
Seriously though, my livelyhood is in the hands of our government - I'll either be cannon fodder, homeless, or a further degenerated version of myself (unless I do something about the latter, though my post history in /emo/ suggests not).
>>460850 >I read an interesting observation the other day that people have become more humourless and serious.
That's because people are growing up in a world where a slight misstep online can ruin your life, so people are more guarded. That and there's pretty much fuck all comedy on TV these days.
Most of what's happening in the news right now will just be a pub quiz question by 2040. You'll be racking your brain, trying to remember the name of that short fella who was in charge of Ukraine during that war or the weird Asian bloke who was Prime Minister for a little over a year.
The big story is AI. We don't know how it's going to pan out, but we know that it's going to have a bigger impact on our day-to-day lives than anything else. 17 years ago, most people had phones with keypads that they mostly used for making phone calls. You would have seemed absolutely mental if you said "Next year, Apple are going to bring out a new kind of phone that only has one button, has to be charged every night and costs twice as much as current phones. Within a decade, phones like it will have completely changed our day-to-day lives and we'll struggle to remember what life was like beforehand."
Personally, I think that the middle class is going to be absolutely decimated, facing something that looks like the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. Anyone whose job consists mostly of sending emails and writing documents is at very real risk of being made redundant overnight by an advance in AI. The traditional working class will be largely unaffected because an algorithm can't fix your roof or wipe your nan's arse, but office workers are going to be the coal miners of the 2030s. I can't begin to predict the social and political repercussions of that.
I'm not a doomer but the work I was doing is already drying up. I bought some land; AI can't do what I can with it. I can live off it or I can live off the proceeds of what I grow or some combination of both. I love it out here and I love the work. It's not far off self-sufficient and I don't need electric. Anything short of a nuke or total ecological collapse I should be fine.
