Life in the 2020s comes with so much dissonance and dysphoria because everyone knows this civilization is doomed, but it’s not being acknowledged by any of our mainstream institutions. We can all see everything getting worse and worse before our eyes in real time, but our government officials don’t talk about it. Our mass media outlets don’t report on it. Our education systems don’t recognize it. There’s a giant elephant in the room with us at all times, and normal people are acutely aware of it, but the talking heads keep speaking as though everything’s going to keep ticking along normally into the foreseeable future. We can all see the summers heating up. We can all see that there are fewer insects and less wildlife around than when we were young. We can all see that the western empire is on borrowed time. We can all see that younger generations are having much more difficulty affording housing and life expenses than their parents and grandparents. We can all see that technology has stagnated as capitalism’s innovation-for-profit model hits the limit of how far it can carry us as a species. We can all see the apps, search engines, social media platforms and tech services getting shittier and shittier year by year. We can all see AI making everything worse and turning everyone into cognitive infants who can’t do anything for themselves while consistently failing to deliver what its proponents say it will deliver. We can all see the people around us getting dumber, crazier and more miserable as we are pushed into dystopian conditions where everyone gets more and more alienated and must pay a monthly fee for the experience of connection. We can all see that state authoritarianism is escalating in proportion to public discontent with the status quo. We all know we’re in a completely unsustainable situation. We all know we are riding a bus with disintegrating wheels. But it doesn’t get acknowledged by anyone at the top. The news reports are still about the latest celebrity gossip and whether the economy arrow is pointing up or down. The movies and shows are still about wacky and witty characters for whom capitalism is working perfectly fine. The politicians are still talking about culture war issues and the Evil Dictator of the Day. It is taken as a given that our grandchildren will be living in more or less the same kind of world we are living in, when we all know there’s no way this is true. The wheels on the bus are coming off, boys and girls. The ride is near its end. I’m not saying we’re all going to die, I’m just saying this civilization as it presently exists cannot possibly be sustained. Immensely drastic changes are coming up around the bend whether we like it or not, either by a deliberate transformation or by some cataclysmic event occurring against our will. Life in the 2020s feels so spiritually dissonant because we all know this is the case, but all the sources we’ve been trained to look to for information and context are acting like everything’s perfectly fine. They’re painting a cheery picture over reality while every normal person is staring at the giant black cracks that keep appearing in the paint job. Which tells you all you need to know about the competency of the people who are steering the bus. The people in charge are just going to keep driving this thing into the ground until there’s nothing left to save. If there’s going to be a world-saving revolution, it’s going to come from we ordinary people who are willing to acknowledge reality, not from the oligarchs and empire managers presently steering things who have been blinded by the pursuit of profit and power. We either find some way to get their hands off the steering wheel and take control, or we find ourselves confronting the future horrors they’ve been discouraging us from thinking about while they drive us to our doom.