The state of the world

     An unfortunate thing about blogging, for me at least, is that it’s a lot harder for me to come up with things to write about when I’m in a good mood than when I’m in a bad mood. I realize that I’m writing for an audience of zero, so I don’t really NEED to keep up with daily posts, but it’s best to get in the habit before some poor soul decides to read what I’m writing. 

    It’s not like I feel good about the state of the world. Like everyone else with even small amounts of observation skills I expect the United States to collapse soon, but for now everything seems, almost calm. Like the speed at which we’re hurtling to destruction has slowed down. I could be wrong, but at the moment I’ll settle for the feeling that things aren’t getting worse. 

    I think everyone’s expecting 2022 to be another bad year like 2020 and 2021 were. That’s certainly a possibility, but I don’t know that it’ll be as bad as everyone thinks it will be. Back in 2020, when the year was just starting, I remember thinking that 2020 would have to work very hard to be worse than 2016 was. Sure enough, it delivered. I don’t think that 2022 would have to work hard at all to be a worse year than 2020 and 2021 were. It’s been so bad for so long that it would only take a very minor disaster to ruin everyone’s year. 

    I also think that if 2022 wanted to be a good year, it couldn’t just be a year where nothing interesting happened. It would need to be a year where something truly amazing happened that everyone on earth agreed makes our lives materially better. That’s not that unlikely either. The James Webb telescope’s been launched recently after all. 

   I don’t really know if this year will be a good year or a bad one. I was one of those people who was really hopeful for 2020, and I was convinced that 2021 couldn’t possibly be worse. I’m sure if I made a prediction one way or another, the universe would set out to prove me wrong. I’m just happy that, for now, the biggest issue we have to worry about is NFTs, which have the nice advantage of weeding out all the scum. Well, the republican party’s been doing a lot of shady things lately, and the Alt-right is going nuts, and the democrats aren’t as equipped to save democracy as one might hope. Yeah, we’ve got a lot to worry about now, and a lot that needs to be fixed. I’m just happy to see people who are doing their best to fix it, in whatever way they can. If the past decade or so has taught me anything, it’s that sometimes the little victories are the hardest ones to earn.