SpyderTL wrote:
And I think it's perfectly normal to be depressed most of the time nowadays.
That was always true. It's just that in the past, few people had the luxury of spending much time thinking about that (or anything at all, really), so they either got through it or died young.
Want to know why there are so many kids with autism these days, or asthma, or cerebral palsy, or any number of diseases that were rare or unrecognized in the past? It's simple: until medicine and sanitation improved in the early-mid 20th century, most children with those conditions didn't survive to term, or died at birth, and those who did live a little longer died of childhood illnesses or poor parental care before they got much older. The overwhelming majority of 'new' diseases are only new in the sense that people aren't dying of other diseases first, and are traveling around enough for previously localized diseases (e.g., HIV, which which existed in the Rift Valley in a less virulent form since before hominins became hominids, for most of its history was passed mother to child during pregnancy, and would usually be latent for 40-50 years, so few of the people with the infection would live long enough for it develop into AIDS) are finding new regions that they can spread into, with large enough populations that a more virulent mutation won't be self-limiting.
As for farming, well, that's a good idea on the surface, but surviving the initial fight over the remaining arable land - and keep in mind, most of the areas that we are growing food on today would
not be suitable for agriculture without long-distance powered irrigation, internal-combustion powered tillers, plows, and combine harvesters, and petroleum-based fertilizers - is likely to be a matter of pure chance, and only about 1 person in 100,000 is likely to survive when the current society collapses - and that's not the figure for the US, that's world-wide, so we're looking at a total survivor population of less than 1 million. Also, since we've pretty much exhausted the easily reached resources already, we're in the Motie scenario - it really is a case of "the stars or bust", because we aren't going to get another chance.
(And yes, I know of the allegorical interpretation of
A Mote in God's Eye as Yellow Peril scaremongering about the re-emergence of the PRC into international politics after the death of Mao and the end of Cultural Revolution. The point about the exhaustion of resources by industrialized societies is still valid.)