The world has always been mired by war, famine, corruption, etc. but with the printing press, then radio, then television, then cable, then the internet and social media the level of awareness the average person has to intimate details of these events is absolutely unprecendented. Unfortunately, humanity has absolutely no plan in place for how to coach your generation for how to handle the effect this has on your psyche and it is unfortunately going to be up to you to learn discernment of when to shift your focus of attention inward, locally, or globally.

I expect your future will be full of a lot of new and unprecedented things. Unprecedented access to AI for problem-solving, breakthroughs in medicine and understanding of the human genome, jobs we still can't fathom because we don't know how mass deployment of AI will shift society, new styles of music and cultural changes. It will also be different than the past because of climate change, but different doesn't necessarily mean worse. You will probably not be dining on wild sushi every weekend, but you might have access to normalized lab-grown meat or if shortages are well-managed you might even enjoy better health than my grandparents who destroyed their health with all the processed foods that got popularized in the '50s.

When I was young we had physical globes with lines drawn over countries that no longer exist and people had a sense computers would change everything, but people spend time predicting the big stuff like pandemics, famine, and war but most moments of our lives are touched by the little stuff. No one ever predicts kpop, tiktok dances, global memes. In the '90s there was a common belief the future would be utopic and it did not pan out that way. Similarly, I don't think AI will solve everything for a utopic future, but that doesn't make dystopia inevitable either. The aging people of reddit feel a sense of loss because we remember how things were and as you age it is harder to look forward because your physical body will never be as great as it was in your teens and 20s, but no matter how much fun I had in 1997 your best years are likely ahead of you.

No matter how challenging things get, for as long as our species survives we will always be resilient and create joy as well.