Yes I agree, we seem to be working on the wrong problems or get the priorities wrong. We keep on inventing newer technologies which come with newer problems while the ship is slowly but surely sinking. Sometimes I wonder what would it take for all of us to join a concerted effort to concentrate on the real problems we have. Technologies seem to veer into an escapist route, some way for us to run away from the problems we do have: virtual reality, leisure space travel, AGI, synthetic life, immortality.. I hope we'll eventually wake up in the last hour, at least to acknowledge where we've gone wrong.
I think this is exactly why there's an apocalypse fantasy/fetish. It's in our psyche that we're all focused on... well... dumb shit. A post-apocalypse lifestyle makes you focus on what I think we can all truly appreciate as important. There's a lot of interesting studies done on localized disasters where the idea of community actually erupts out of it. People working together and sharing, regardless of their "social status". It's all short lived until the outside world aid arrives and you still get a few bad actors in the mix (though it seems statistically, no where near as many as we think). Generally though, it takes hell on Earth for us to regain our "humanity".
Not trying to be edgy, but I think a lot of society problems stem from more and more globalization. When you're less than a drop in a gigantic pool of people, it's hard to feel like anything matters. Not saying the closed off, nationalism system is any better in the long term. It's just hard to determine a balance to the system. And with that lack of balance, we run away into the escapes you mentioned.
Sigh... well, I just ruined my day thinking about this crap again.
I have a similar experience from my childhood. I grew up under communism in eastern europe and I remember the crisis we were going through at the time, food was rationed and there were long queues everywhere. People were even joining queues without knowing what was being sold and some would start lining up overnight. I was a kid back then and didn't experience the adversity first hand but I could see and sense what was going on. Aside from these things, however, I remember how helpful and inclusive the community was. People were sharing whatever they had, whatever they cooked, recipes, anti-establishment jokes, books, video tapes, etc. There was this sense of belonging that now has dissipated completely. I was struck with a deja vu when I visited Cuba a couple of years ago. People are poor but are sane and happy in their own ways and they have time for one another. There are still disparities but not like in a western society when one counts their pennies and the other their billions. Romania, the country I grew up in, has been engulfed in corruption and asides from a cities with large concentration of wealth, everything is in disrepair, the community disappeared almost completely and everything seems to have gone downhill for the past 30 years. In no way am I decrying the communism, it was brutal to many, but what has ensued after the fact was a veneer of shiny nothing.
So, I was born in the USA, but my parents are from Poland and left a few years before the collapse. They shared many similar stories with me over the years. Generally, when the environment is bad, the local people are good. But the reverse is true too. When the environment is good, people tend to suck.
It's weird to be honest. A lot of books/movies think utopia arises in the land of plenty. But I guess a real utopia is where we all suffer against a common threat/enemy. That's when we're most human?
But when it comes to communism, it does have it's upsides. Like now in Venezuela, almost everyone is equally poor as shit. Thus, criminals don't rob people. Bullets cost too much money compared to how much they can rob from people, if they even have anything. That's a win... I guess. Great way to stomp out crime. Make everyone too poor to even bother robbing.
