Anxiety over mankind

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I need help with fixing anxiety and how I can cope and survive during an economic crash, technological singularity, political crisis. It's holding me back socially. Will I survive? Is there any real solid proof of things going into the dark ages? Being a millennial sucks. I wish I was a teen or adult during the 60s or 70s. God hates me if it exists.

<--- Was a teen during the 70's. Verdict's still out on whether it was a good time, though.

True. Isn't the coming crisis horrible though?

I was a teen in the 60s, and spent my life trying to avert this crisis. It wasn't fun, being sensible. As for the anxiety: Learn from the past, and plan for the future to the extent of avoiding the obvious mistakes, but live in the present. People who have had near-death experiences are never afraid of dying again. Their stories are heartening.
We only had to somehow stop a Nuclear war. Now, that's only in the top ten somewhere, but we also know a hundred times more about psychology, etc, and everyone can self-publish and get replies to build a network. The blue meanies are mighty, but still a small minority. Find your natural allies, and work with them. There is safety in numbers.

"I am an old man, and I have seen many troubles; most of which never happened."
- Mark Twain

I was a teen in the 80's, when goth got started, except they didn't really have that term yet, it was just the weird kids out back who wore black and smoked tons of cigarettes, listening to skinny puppy & bauhaus. Teen suicide was a major problem those days.

I too have a lot of anxiety over the future of mankind. Since the economic crisis of 2008, I started learning as much as I could about the financial system and it's history. I discovered a disturbing reality, it's all a major con game that has been escalating for centuries. There is no real logical reason the financial system is still functioning, it's all held together with bubble gum & duct tape. And relies heavily on everyone "playing along" with it. Economics isn't math, it's sociology and subject to the unpredictable nature of human behavior.

Like earthquakes, the economic "big one" isn't a matter of "if", but "when". Some day the house of cards will fall.

But I try to look at the silver lining. When the global system ultimately fails, it will be an opportunity for mankind to set up a new, de-centralized system. Right now, the current system is so corrupt and bloated that turning that ship around mid course is impossible. It has to fail to make room for something better.

Mankind is kind of like a junkie on heroin, we need to stop our destructive addiction, but we're too afraid of the painful withdrawals. But eventually, we will have to hunker down and go through the detox if we are ever to live a more productive, clean & sober life. It's that or perish.

there have been people like you thinking the world is just about to end for as long as people have been around. It hasnt. So take heart from that fact, the world isnt going to end, its just your hormones and the fact that people love feeding people this crap.

I remember being a 5 year old and hearing the latest " the world is going to end on this date". It never did, and it hasnt for 2012, millenium, and all the rest. It still depressed me until i was old enough to realise it was BS.

They told me oil, petrol and coal supplies were going to run out in the next 15 years when i was 13 at school and have they? 20 years later nothing has changed whatsoever. Do u see any imminent exhaustion of oil, coal and petrol? have they mentioned it in the news? Thought not.

People love these stories but they forget about the kind of people that believe this crap. It RUINS their lives by sinking them into depression and in all honesty its probably been going on for hundreds of years, generation after generation.

For every one of the million and one predictions about the worlds future, for all the scare stories, for all the science fiction, the reality is that nothings happened and real life has just plodded on like before.

The world is just going to go on like it always has. Do not let the conspiracy story idiots bring you down.

Seriously, its all complete and utter nonsense.


DO NOT LISTEN TO THE IDIOTS. They DO NOT have your interests at heart, its just their pathetic way of making the world more interesting.

Don't call me an idiot.
Every empire in history eventually collapses, and this one is sitting on the brink.

Just keep on believing the fiction that the world is doing just fine. It's not.
Go back to your bread and circus slave.

The world I was trying to save IS gone. My dad drilled a gas well with a rig on a truck. Now, it takes huge effort, significantly reducing the net gain and increasing pollution. Nuclear waste will be a permanent problem. Youth culture hasn't been optimistic and positive since the 60s. Life persists, but with fewer species, and the weather is making agriculture riskier than ever. Optimism is more functional than pessimism, but denial is deadly in the end. A little chunk of ice easily tells you if the weather is warming up. A glacier does the same for your planet, and I've seen them retreat, in person.

i never called you an idiot pete, the part where i addressed you didnt come until after i quoted what you said.

out of interest, have you ever done the Myers-Briggs personality type test?

at a guess, Infj.

heres the test. Prove me wrong if you want. http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp

ill make my point if you do the test.

We on the spectrum do obsess over negative things and get overwhelmed because of poor working memory. Mankind is going to do what they are going to do. So narrow it down to improving , you, your family, friends, etc. When I get in an infinite negative thinking loop I try to remember to leave this site, turn the computer off, go outside for a walk etc. Try is the operative word as I am not always successful but that technique is recommended for autistic people when they get an obsessive be it positive or negative.

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Weren't the 60s sort of violent and scary? What with the assassinations, Vietnam war. Not to mention the segregation and police brutality.
Hm ok. What is technological singularity?

And I have no faith in mankind, but for different reasons.

"Technological singularity" is the point at which machines become self-replicating, resulting in ever-more rapid generations of machines that are exponentially better-designed, and hence more intelligent, than the ones that came before. This is usually tied up with fears that the eventual machine intelligences will come to regard humans as a useless nuisance and seek to do away with them.

Of all the fears about the future to have, this one strikes me as the most irrelevant. For a start, we can't even design a chess computer that can consistently defeat all human players, or a robot that climb a flight of stairs (in fact most robots so far deployed are mindless automata on production lines). So the prospect of a 'terminator' race of robots seems very unlikely indeed. And besides, wouldn't anyone but the most lunatic of AI researchers insure that their creations were bound by Asimov's three laws of robotics?

I refuse to lose a moment's sleep over this one.

I don't think anything is going to happen, but if you want to get into preparedness you should look up some sites. There are tons of sites where people are concerned about all kinds of things like that and they get ready, make plans, prep, all that. They tell you how. If you can't let it go or get some kind of anxiety med for it, then doing something about it is probably the best way to feel secure so I'd suggest looking up some of those prepping sites. Look up Survialism or Survivalist. It used to be just crazy people out in the woods but now it's catching on and becoming a big thing.

I would read "The 5 Stages of Collapse" by Dimitry Orlov. Our way of life is collapsing, but another way of life will appear organically. We can manage this transition wisely.

I got quite into survivalism when I was a mid teen and the prospect of nuclear war was constantly hanging over our heads _ stored fuel and food and dug a fallout shelter in the back garden. This being Britain, I didn't have access to guns or ammo, but I would have stockpiled those too if I had. That was the ultimate in terms of worry about human kind's future, and nothing else have ever come close since.

<SNIP> (This reply is out of order - some bug held the thread up for a while.) The basic fear is of the unknown, which always starts at the present. I don't think there has been an un-scary decade, but there was more hope in the 60s, and the government only had a tiny number of phone taps installed. With only 3 billion people, really cheap oil, many media companies and a middle-class majority, we had options. Assassinations have at least kept pace with the increase in population if you look around.
A friend of mine was in a major news editor's office in the 70s, trying to convince him that he should stop glossing over the problems. He wasn't doing too well until he got distracted by the Reuters ticker in the office, which he then quoted "Allende's just been assasinated." End of discussion.