They Gon' Be Alright
Ask anyone over 40 these days (and far too many under 40), and they'll tell you humanity is doomed.
AI will enslave us.
Society will collapse on us.
Climate change will cook us.
And nuclear annihilation will finish us off.
They'll also tell you the younger generations are hopeless, phone-addicted, work-allergic zombies who've forgotten how to have sex or make friends.
Okay, maybe the kids are a little off, but I’m not buying the doom spiral bit.
Let's take a gander at what the genius doomsayers of previous generations had to say about this (each quote offered below with my own brief reality check).
What They Said; What I Say
Democracy will be dead by 1950.
-John Langdon-Davies, 1936
Brilliant, John! Well, except for the part where democracy defeated fascism and communism, walked the U.S.S.R. into extinction, and built the single greatest economy in the history of mankind. But hey, who's counting?
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
-Charles Duell, US Patent Office, 1899
Smart, Charles! Shame you never got to fly on an airplane, surf the internet, or watch a Roomba scream when it hits a wall.
We have about five more years at the outside to do something.
-Kenneth Watt, 1970
Wise words, Ken. Good thing we used those five years to invent email and watch the BeeGees take over the world.
If we don't act now, by the year 2000 mankind will have destroyed the earth.
-Senator Gaylord Nelson, 1970
Spoiler alert, Gaylord: We're still here. Earth's still here. It's TikTok that's destroying mankind now.
World civilization will collapse by the year 2000 and there is nothing we can do about it.
-Arnold Toynbee
Nothing Arnie, except create the MacBook, cure diseases, and build a Starbucks on every corner.
Young people have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint.
-Peter the Hermit, 1274
Peter, I'm shocked it took you 750 years to discover that teenagers are annoying.
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.
-Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1968
I remember reading this idiots book in the 1980s. Scared the hell out of me. Sorry to break it to you, Paul, but hundreds of millions didn't starve. Instead, we got drive-thrus, DoorDash, and a 37% obesity rate.
I Don't Think So
It may be true that things are terrible at the moment. I'll grant you that. But everything has always been terrible. And by almost every meaningful metric — life expectancy, literacy, poverty, disease, violence — things are actually better than they've ever been.
Despite the facts on the ground, it seems to be a generational rite of passage, especially once we hit our 40s, to shake our heads at "the state of the world" and grumble about "the youth." Every generation thinks they're living through the end times. Every generation thinks the kids are soft.
I'm not a betting man, but I am a father, and so I have no choice but to believe that our kids — and their kids — will be fine.
Unless we really screw it up, I wouldn't be surprised if humans are still around in 500 years.
Maybe even wiser.