this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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I feel like our whole lives here in the US we've been told to expect things to just generally keep getting better, seemingly forever. Like, that's the narrative of "progress." The economy just keeps growing, the nation just keeps getting richer, technology just keeps getting better, living standards just keep getting better, so forth and so on. But, that was probably never realistic, or even feasible. I mean, no civilization progresses forever. Essentially every civilization that's ever existed has followed a pattern of ascension followed by decline. Many of the most notable civilizations ascended very quickly and dramatically, and then collapsed just as quickly and dramatically. Why should we expect to be any different? What makes us think we won't follow the same pattern as basically every other civilization in history?
Every individual civilization has followed that pattern with a few exceptions. Overall, however the previous view is correct historically speaking. As a species things do just keep getting better for us, except in periods of systemic transition.
I think that's been generally true since the first agricultural revolution led to the emergence of civilization, 10,000 or so years ago. But, progress has not been linear, it's been exponential, with most of the progress occurring in just the last few hundred years, since the industrial revolution. In that regard, the progress that we've experienced over the last few hundred years has been anomalous.
The way of life that we take for granted today is very different from how most of humanity has lived through the vast majority of history (and that was itself very different from how our species had lived through the vast majority of our existence, with humans living in small hunter-gatherer tribes for most of our time as a species).
Modern life has existed for only the blink of an eye, on evolutionary time scales. Yet, in that time we have used up an incredible amount of natural resources, and we have made significant, irreversible changes to the Earth's biosphere and climate.
It took our species nearly all of the 10,000 years of civilization's existence to go from a few million people on the planet to a billion, but it only took a little over two centuries to do from one billion people to over eight billion. That kind of exponential growth simply cannot be sustained indefinitely on a planet with finite resources. Even at maximum possible resource use efficiency, and even with the maximum possible environmental impact mitigation efforts, the Earth still wouldn't be able to sustain our growth forever. We would reach some hard, physical limit to growth, eventually.
Meanwhile, my whole life, things have either gotten worse or stagnated.
Change is the only constant. One chapter ends, another begins.
It would've continued if we'd left competent people in charge instead of handing the keys over to the absolute WORST people in the world. Now we're about to lose:
Humanity would be doing GREAT if not for the humans.
Except it's the "competent" people who paved the way for this mess. You don't get a Trump without generations Bidens, Obamas and Reagans. The rot that led to MAGA isn't something that could've just not happened; it needed to be actively avoided years if not decades in advance. Besides, things were getting worse even before Trump so what?
You say that like MAGA was based on reasonable, logical reactions to real problems.
Yes, there were real problems, but MAGA pre-Trump couldn't have even IDENTIFIED a single one of them successfully. MAGA was and is successfully mobilized against imaginary problems for the purpose of creating imaginary outcomes based on magical thinking and delusion, and if you think they would've been fended off by the real problems being addressed faster, you're kidding yourself. MAGA's rise was NEVER a reaction to real problems. It was a psychological attack that successfully captured and ruined an entire society.
So now we have all the same problems we had before, except now we can't even THINK about addressing them because FIRST we have to stop a militant cult that's willing to die - which comprises half the goddamn country - from tilting at windmills and fucking everything else up in the process. Glad I'm not gonna live to see the worst of it.
No, it's based on unreasonable, illogical reactions to real problems. You don't accept "the immigrants are taking our jobs" as justification for atrocities unless you need a (better) job.
Correction: MAGA pre and post-Trump can't identify a single one of the causes correctly. They can very correctly identify that quality of life was getting worse and worse for the majority of people (including, most importantly, themselves and their communities). They can identify that they'll never own a home, get a job that pays a livable wage or have enough money to survive an emergency. There's a reason one of Trump's main bases of support is white people in rural areas and/or without a college education. There's a reason conservatives' selling point has always been being good for the economy (which is of course total bollocks, but that's a different story).
Correction: It successfully mobilized against scapegoats for the purpose of creating imaginary outcomes based on magical thinking and delusion. The "problems" addressed by MAGA are targeted with the understanding that getting rid of them will Make America Great Again, not for their own sake. We don't even need to speculate about this; cost of living was a major part of Trump's 2024 platform, and this was a big part of why he won. "Draining the swamp"
Then why do progressives consistently get conservative votes? You seem like you've never listened critically to MAGAts speak, in which case you should do that before building an alternate reality where reactionary politics have nothing to do with declining material conditions.
Except the only attempts with any amount of promise to deal with this new problem have been based on making credible promises to improve material conditions. MAGA won't and can't be defeated without addressing the material bedrock of their delusions; attempting to do one without the other is folly.
nah. it's Marketing
I think the problem is that, at some point, the powers that be decided that "better" is synonymous with "more appended zeroes". We (and presumably any society) could ostensibly have kept growing indefinitely, provided we agreed that the ever-increasing personal wealth of the few (to the detriment of the many) does not constitute growth.