Originally published on Medium on February 12, 2018
The Unreachable Present and the death of Teleology
I haven’t met many optimistic people lately. The worldview of the average American (or those I interact with at least) veers more and more towards that of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes 1.
2 “Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher;
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”3 What profit has a man from all his labor
In which he toils under the sun?
4 One generation passes away, and another generation comes;
But the earth abides forever.
5 The sun also rises, and the sun goes down,
And hastens to the place where it arose.”
Perhaps the contemporary pessimistic malaise is a collective moodiness that will pass with time. After all Steven Pinker argued (albeit in a statistically specious way) that the world is getting better as mass extinction events and violent crime have plummeted. Yet Americans are more bitter and divided than we have been in some time.
I’ve touched on the growing lack of neighborliness and community in America in previous posts. There is another, deeper sense of betrayal that drives the current discontent. The future has arrived, and in many ways it is better than what we or our ancestors were promised. Americans may not have flying cars, but they do have software that has automated millions of thankless jobs, a median consumptive ability that outranks the world’s richest people a century ago, and there is little material want.
“The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present” Bill Watterson
Today’s adults were told as kids that someday, on this earth, they would experience their happily ever after. Disney reinforced the notion. Things might be bad for a time, but then a deus ex machina will drop from the sky and deus ex machina its way to you to living(in unison) “happily ever after”. There was always a hypothetical Eden Americans were striving for for their children or their children’s children.
That long strived for vision has arrived, and Americans have realized that Bill Watterson was right. Internal expectations re-calibrate to newer and better ways of doing things extremely quickly. This re-calibration serves a purpose-it enhances the rate of implementation of new ideas, expediting economic growth and, hypothetically, human happiness.
Despite record growth in real income, economists continue to be puzzled why Americans are increasingly anxious and medicated. Never, they say, in human history has a group of people had it so good. But Americans are as isolated and anxious as they were in the days where 1/5 of them would have died in childbirth.
The future is here, and with it the realization that human nature always prevails; you can’t create a perfect future on this earth for humans so long as they’re human.