How the Future Broke

I’m Umair Haque, and this is The Issue: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported publication. Our job is to give you the freshest, deepest, no-holds-barred insight about the issues that matter most.

New here? Get the Issue in your inbox daily.

Hi. How’s everyone? Welcome new readers, welcome back old friends, and a big thanks to all.

Today, a little reflection.

I’ve been thinking lately, and reached an uncomfortable conclusion.

The rest of our lives.

What will they be like?

What Will the Rest of Our Lives Be Like?

It’s hard to imagine a future where things get better.

I don’t mean that in a “we’re doomed” way. I don’t mean to be morose, or to sound glum. Rather, I think that we should think carefully and seriously. About ourselves, the world, history, the future, and our place in it.

As I reflect, I understand myself in a different way lately. I’ve realized, almost unconsciously, that this is how it’s going to be. I’ve reached a place where I don’t have to say it loud. It’s just a kind of knowing that I feel, which doesn’t have to be verbalized.

And I’d bet many of you feel that way, too.

Let me delve into that reflection for a moment.

What will the rest of our lives be like?

If we’re very lucky, things won’t get worse.

But, like I said, it’s hard to imagine a future where things get better.

At least in the way that many of us want.

Those of us who are thoughtful people. We want, and have always wanted, I suppose, in the modern era, a certain set of things, states of the world. Einstein wanted to abolish war. Orwell, to end authoritarianism. The great minds who invented the modern set of institutions that still shape the world, the UN, the World Bank, and so forth, wanted to end hunger, ignorance, deprivation. Still other great minds, like Salk, wanted to end disease.

All these plagues on humankind. All these demons within humankind.

The Age of Regress, or The Dying Dream of a Better World

Once, I think, we could dream of a better world.

In these very specific ways.

But those dreams are now over. We can no longer dream of a world which has abolished hunger, ended violence and conflict, solved the problems of deprivation, ignorance, despair, inequality, hatred.

Even polio returns, an omen. Our world is going backwards.

Can we can still dream those old dreams? We can, it’s true, but not, anymore, in the way we once did. Innocently. Now, if we still dream them, we do so with a sense of grief, perhaps. We’ve been shaken awake. We’re not just dreamers anymore. So who are we? We know now that in our lifetime, these dreams won’t come true.

Perhaps, in our darker moments, we brood: they never will. Humankind just isn’t made that way. Our nature is touched too heavily with the bitter poisons of Pandora’s box.

Let us forgive ourselves for falling prey to such fatalism.

The burden we bear is the heaviest one of all.

Once we dreamed these great and noble dreams. But now we can no longer dream them. Not the way we once did. Now we know that in our lifetimes, none of these things will come to pass. Too much water has gone under the bridge.

So does the end of a dream spell the awakening of the dreamer?

This is the question before us.

Getting back to there, from here. A world where we can abolish these old evils. End the old plagues. Exorcise the demons lurking in, screaming from, rending, the heart of humankind.

That world, from this one, is too far. To reach now. At least within the scope of our lifetimes, or what remains of them.

How long do you have left to live? I give myself another 30 years, perhaps 40, if I’m very lucky.

Three decades. Four. I can’t seriously tell myself that the world will be better by then.

The truest hope I have is that it won’t still be getting worse.

I can’t imagine that in three decades, or four, any of these Existential Challenges before us will be any better: climate change, inequality, conflict, violence, hate, social disintegration, a failing politics, fanaticism, economic stagnation.

I can only hope that they won’t get that much worse.

How the Future Broke

So what will history call such an era? The Long Stagnation. The Age of Going Nowhere. The Great Regression.

Choose your buzzword, it doesn’t matter. My point isn’t to label such things anymore. I’m not the young man I once was.

My dreams have been broken, and so have yours.

But who broke them?

As we look into the abyss, so too, of course, it stares back at us. With no answers.

If I ask you: who’s responsible for our civilization falling off its trajectory of progress, once so stable, which once seemed so assured—I’m sure you’ll have no shortage of answers. It’s elites. It’s liberals. It’s conservatives. It’s predatory capitalism. It’s populists. It’s the masses seduced by the demagogues’ spells.

In the end, all these answers are true, and there are truer ones, still.

We remain a poor civilization. Our income per capita isn’t enough to yield a world of stable middle classes. So we still fight over what scraps of the pie are left us, and that gives rise to fascism, authoritarianism, conflict, violence. Having savaged the planet to generate this meagre per capita income, we now plunge headlong into instability. The game is up. The old systems don’t deliver. And all that promises only more conflict.

But this isn’t an essay about civilizational economics. We’ll talk about that another time.

This is just a meagre reflection.

The answers are true, that you’d give me, if I asked: who’s fault is it our civilization stopped making progress, and started to regress, at first with small tremors, and by now, one earthquake at a time.

And because those answers are all correct, we’re left in an uncertain predicament.

How are we to make progress again?

Can we?

Regress, Progress, and Reinvention

I often say: the first job of leaders in this age is just stopping things from getting worse. After that, we can talk about “better” again, but first, just arrest the trajectory of decline.

In the last essay, we talked about some long run trends. Wages falling or stagnating. Prices and costs exploding. Standards of living in sharp decline. That’s one aspect of the trajectory of decline, and there are many more, from social bonds fraying, to emotional distress, to generations in rising despair.

Arresting the decline. If that’s the best we can hope for…how are we doing at that, anyways?

Britain’s doing an almost comically bad job. It destroyed itself, once the envy of the world. Government after government is only making things worse, faster and faster.

In America, can Kamala and Tim arrest the decline? Perhaps, a little bit. But so far, I’m not confident, to tell you the truth, that their vision is broad, deep, or powerful enough. It’s still tinkering around the edges, far from a new social contract. It’s not a fundamental reimagining of institutions, systems, paradigms.

In Europe, social democracy appears to be dying death by a thousand cuts. And that pains me, as it should you, because of course it’s the most sophisticated and successful form of political economy humankind has ever known. But even that hobbled itself, through a lack of investment, a lack of cohesion, a loss of its way.

So I don’t think we’re arresting the decline yet.

And we can think about in bigger terms, too. Carbon emissions are still rising. We’re this close to hitting tipping points, if we haven’t already. Democracy’s in dire shape, declining at double digits a decade. The world has no sources of easy economic growth left, and the other answer, “degrowth,” is appealing to some, but the average person is hardly going to want to live like it’s the 18th century all over again.

We have no answers to these problems. Not even glimmers of ones. And as living standards continue to decline, the world plunges headlong into uncertainty, polarization, destabilization. Everything comes undone. People feel lost, afraid, ruined. Demagogues promise salvation, but at the price of the old demons: hate, violence, spite.

(Why I Can’t Make Peace With) Our Trajectory of Civilization

This is a path towards self-destruction. Let us not mince words. We’ve known one another too long for that.

I’m not saying that things will hit Mad Max tomorrow. Don’t mistake me. This isn’t a movie. But I am saying…

One: the old dream of a better world is dead, at least in the sense that it’s not going to happen in our lifetimes, if anytime this century.

Two: our primary task now is arresting our decline, and we’re doing a poor job of that so far.

Three: that implies further destabilization and regress, which is probably what…

The rest of our lives will look like.

So why do I say these things to you? To scare you, frighten you, taunt you? Of course not.

For the reason that I suspect you feel, too.

I can’t make my peace with that.

I’ve tried. All year long, perhaps the last several years, I’ve had this feeling, this set of thoughts.

And I’ve tried avenue after avenue, road after road, to make my peace with it. The road of denial: things aren’t that bad! The road of ignorance: let me just make music. The road of fatalism: let it all burn, then.

And all these roads were dead ends.

I found no peace in them. No consolation. No salvation. They were as empty and arid as the desert.

I wonder if you feel that way, too.

So here we are, my friends.

At midnight. Star-crossed lovers. Dreamers, shaken awake, by the earthquakes of a civilization. The bittersweet memory still lingers.

Who are we now? I suspect now we must lead. And so this is my wish for us all. To remember those old dreams, and even if we’re awake now, and no longer dreaming, to keep them in our hearts, the precious and cherished treasures of an age history already forgets. This is our task now.

I wonder if you’ll share it with me.

❤️ Don't forget...

📣 Share The Issue on your Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

💵 If you like our newsletter, drop some love in our tip jar.

📫 Forward this to a friend and tell them all all about it.

👂 Anything else? Send us feedback or say hello!