The Future We Should Have Had

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.

I’ve been musing over the last few days. Trying to express how I feel in more abstract terms. Let me now make some of those thoughts more concrete.

The Future We Should Have Had

Not so long ago, I imagined that the future would have turned out differently. I thought we’d pull back. Come to our senses. Understand the gravity of our situation.

I thought that we’d have begun to reverse many of our Existential Challenges.

That we’d have turned generational downward mobility back upward. That we’d have halted carbon emissions. That we’d have undone the dramatic rise in inequality. That democracy would have reasserted itself as a primary political form. That incomes would have lifted.

And people’s spirits, flagging, would have lifted. If not soaring to the heavens, then at least unburdened with a sigh of relief.

None of that happened.

I’m often accused of being a pessimist.

I have the unwelcome task of analyzing the state of reality before us. This is why you read, and it’s what I’ve been trained to do.

If anything, I was over optimistic.

Because, as I said, I expected that we would have at least risen to our challenges, if not fully, then in some halting, partial way.

We haven’t.

Looking around the world now, even I feel frightened. Upset.

Shall I bullshit you? OK, I’m not worried. Ha-ha! Everything’s going to be fine. Clap for me!

This is what our leaders say.

Nobody believes them. We play along, wearily, whichever side we’re on. On the right, the masses who find the full fascist schtick too disgusting, but play along anyways. On the center and left, those who sort of half-heartedly clap along for Kamala and Tim or Justin or whomever, knowing that…

All the above feels more and more true.

Because it is true.

Where are we now?

The Place We Ended Up In, But Shouldn’t Have

We’re in a place that, as I said, I didn’t expect us to be. There he goes, Umair the pessimist. He’s always saying we’re doomed! If only it were that stupidly simple, I think to myself.

I expected us to have done better. And as I warned, exhorted, challenged, tried, goddamit, tried, to the point of exhaustion, notoriety, and infamy…what do you think I was trying to say? Not that we’re doomed, but that we should be doing better.

We haven’t.

So now we’re in a difficult place.

I won’t say it’s the place of worst-case scenarios, though that Red Zone becomes more and more likely as we take this path.

It’s the place of unfulfilled possibilities. It’s a place of…what? Utter mediocrity. Fatalism. Denial. Futility. Willful ignorance.

I don’t like this place.

It upsets me, to see our civilization’s possibilities being squandered this way. To see us giving up on the future, even as it breaks apart, jagged remnant by remnant.

I don’t want this to be happening.

Do you?

Do you get the sense of what I mean?

So did we get here, to this place we shouldn’t be in? A place of we-should-be-doing-way-better-than-this?

Ask yourself: how is it possible that today’s young generation, globally, faces a lost future? Can’t find decent jobs, whether in America or China? Can’t afford homes? Don’t know what to do?

That’s lost potential.

It’s on us.

And it’s a grave, stupid, dire, pathetic place for a civilization to be. Sorry to put it bluntly.

Like I said, it hurts me. I don’t mean to lash out, but I can’t sugar-coat this for you, either.

We are sucking right now as a civilization.

The Truths We Don’t Speak Now

Let me talk to you honestly for a moment. More honestly than I should.

Let’s think about the upcoming American election.

I clap along for Kamala and Tim, half-heartedly. Many of you do, too, whether or not you want to admit it. I like them as people. They’re inspiring, warm, funny, kind.

And yet I know and you know that they aren’t anywhere close to offering programs, paradigms, ideas, which are going to move the needle in terms of America’s problems.

Yes, it’s nice to give people a little help buying homes. But it’s not going to move the needle very much. Sure, it’s essential to give women rights again, but that’s a pretty low bar for progress, in fact, not progress at all, just a lack of regress.

How are we going to solve these problems? America has the worst healthcare outcomes in the rich world, but spends the most. People can’t afford decent lives on average incomes, and that’s before AI and yet more greed wreck the economy further. Generations face declining—imploding—fortunes.

I have five friends I grew up with, in a happy, old, storied little town, just outside DC. The only one who’s left there—because the rest couldn’t afford to live there anymore—did so because her parents had the wisdom to buy a house for her the day she was born.

You see what I mean. This is how deep our problems go, and how elemental they are. What’s more basic than a home of your own? But our societies can’t provide even that much, and I don’t mean that in a sort of social democratic way, just in the way of an economist—they’re unaffordable. Globally. This is what it’s come to.

I could go on with more examples, but do I really need to?

This is where we are. But it’s also how we got here.

Our Politics and Paradigms are a Straitjacket

Our politics now have narrowed to the point where meaningful progress is simply outside their purview. They have been circumscribed so tight they’re a straitjacket now. Just winning back the right of privacy for women is seen as some kind of a miracle for progress, which it emphatically shouldn’t be.

These straitjacketed politics. How did they come to be?

Our leaders aren’t up to the task.

They, too, are products of systems and institutions which have failed.

I like Kamala and Tim, and I worry about being critical of them, because euphoria’s purpose is ward off thinking clearly, and lose one’s self in the moment, the mass, the feeling.

So I hesitate about writing the next few sentences. Should I, I wonder? Or shouldn’t I? It’d be easier not to. Perhaps I should just walk away from it all, this wretched task before me, which is to try and reason with a world going mad with despair, inequity, wickedness, stupidity. What fool believes they can bargain with a world, anyways? Let alone one going dark?

But my task is my task, just as yours is yours.

Our politics are straitjacketed to the incremental. The piecemeal. What’s possible is in no sense what’s necessary. What’s possible is a grain of sand, when what’s necessary is a mountain.

These ideas. They’re not bad ones. They’re good ones. But they operate at a scale so minuscule, compared to our problems, that it’s like using a spoon to try and lift Mount Everest. Just can’t be done. You need a lever the size of the moon, made of a stronger alloy than tin.

And so Kamala and Tim. I like them. I’m not against them. But I clap half-heartedly. Hey, it’s the lesser evil. It’s not so bad, I tell myself. Just go along to get along. What’s wrong with you, man, why do you always have to be so critical? Can’t you just let it go?

I should, is the truth.

Walking Away From the Future, vs Creating It

I should shut up, stop, walk away. This wretched task is also makes an unforgivable wretch of me. He’s the guy who told us! But it’s never anything good. Stupidly, that much, I’m powerless over. I can’t control the calibre of our leaders and institutions anymore than you can.

All I can do is evaluate them.

And in times like these, find them wanting.

You see, here I have a delicate message, which often goes unheard. It’s not that all of our leaders are bad. Terrible, awful, repellent. Some are genuinely admirable and even likable people, like Kamala and Tim, or Justin, or who have you, pick your poison.

But it is that they’re not up to the task. Not so far. Perhaps they will grow into it. Perhaps they will discover that leadership, in this highest sense, means accepting history’s burden, as wretched as it is, as impossible it seems to shoulder. Not just saying, look, this piecemeal thing, it’s what I did, applaud for me, when we all know that you can’t use a spoon to lift a mountain to the moon.

Let us be clear. The task before us is reversing our Existential Challenges.

That is the task.

It is what leaders and institutions are there for in this age. The other alternative is to serve and enrich themselves, which of course only corrodes what’s left of us further.

Reversing: all these. Downward mobility. Staggering inequality. The ravaging of our planet, and its attendant consequences on migration, economies, and societies. Social disintegration, the fraying of ties and bonds. The systemic underinvestment in people and the future. The black mood of now, endemic pessimism and despair, and while joy provides a moment, a mood, to remember, true, it’s not by any means an antidote. Conflict, hate, violence, all growing.

I could go on, but the point is what I want, need, beg, plead, despair, to make clear.

The task. Before us. Is reversing. Our existential challenges.

And before this task, our leaders are so far inadequate. Their ideas, their plans, their policies—their paradigms. They do not seem to grasp the gravity of the situation. They don’t seem to understand that our systems and institutions have failed, and therefore, a band-aid here, to keep a juddering conveyor belt alive for another moment or two—it’s not going to work.

They don’t seem to understand the scope or scale of what confronts us even remotely.

If I say to Kamala or Tim, what are we going to do about generations in downward mobility, the fact that young people around the world feel their future’s ruined, that the economy isn’t creating enough good jobs—one gets the sense they’d smile and laugh, and even do so authentically, honestly, warmly, meaningfully, and have no idea what the hell to do about it.

And of course I won’t go into what Trump might say.

My Task, Our Task, My Failure, and Our Failure

Is that unfair? Am I being unkind?

This wicked way we lurch, day by day.

Or are we victims, now, of our low expectations? Isn’t it fairer to say, someone who wants to lead a society, a world, its great institutions, should know, at least in some sense, what they hope to do about its biggest problems? Not just go blank and give us smiles and grins?

Who is the wicked one, me, them, or us? Is it history? Is it the human condition?

Who, in our story, is the hero, and who the villain?

There’s only silence.

I watch the city go by. Cigarette by cigarette. The sun sets. The night falls.

And I wonder.

This wretched task before me.

It stretches into an untold infinity.

Civilization won’t end with us.

But it has paused in us.

We are giving up too easily, my friends. Our spirits have grown feeble. Our hearts are weak. We are not the people, yet, this age demands. We cheer too easily, squabble too much, bicker too hastily. Our vision is clouded, and yet, as the earth quakes beneath us, here we are, paralyzed.

These are wicked things to say.

I regret them, each one.

My task is a wretched one, etched in regret, carved with grief, from the stones of folly. Take my heart in your hands. If all we have to give one another is today, let us do so in a truer way.

❤️ 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!