It's been happening in Japan for a while now. I don't think misery is the right word for it. Adult diapers have been outselling baby diapers there for a while now. Maybe it hasn’t progressed far enough to judge yet.
As long as it happens at a slow enough pace for us to adapt, it could be alright.
I wouldn't want to depend on social security or pension programs for my retirement though. Those systems would collapse in an environment where the aging population outnumbers the working population that drastically.
Oceans will be probably without fish before 2040 due to overfishing. 90% of sharks are already gone, without them the whole marine ecosystem collapses.
Not sure where you're going with this though. Your point is things are going to hell, so a gradual decline in population, growth, and economic activity wouldn't be as good as a hard crash?
> a gradual decline in population, growth, and economic activity
No time for that, probably. And it's not even on the horizon ... all policies have economic growth encoded in them. We're not even thinking about slowing down.
We're not talking about/doing degrowth, afforesting, reforming industrial agriculture, abolishing animal agriculture, making a dent if fossil fuel consumption, stopping overfishing and biodiversity loss ... we don't really do anything, instead just dream of blocking the sun with sulphuric aerosols and leaving for another planets.
Hard crash, and soon, would be probably better. More resources for the civilization that comes after this one.
Humans have figured it out many times in history how to live sustainably but keep forgetting. When the Europeans came to the Americas, they found people living sustainably. They thought these people were primitive and have never experienced civilization. Well, it turns out they were the people that remained after civilization collapse and have adapted to live sustainably so they wouldn't repeat what the Europeans created. North and South America had, at some time, cities far larger than any in Europe before those civilizations collapsed. For example, the mound builders along the Mississippi.
What's different today is we have now a GLOBAL civilization thanks to globalization. With many of the same features across people's and economies. Humans have never dealt with global risk like we do today.
> We're going to have to figure this sustainability thing out though
It may be already late. I wish it wasn't so. I think we could have chance at repairing it ... if only we would do what's necessary. But we're not doing what's necessary, we never started even discussing it, and I'm starting to doubt that we'll ever do. We're talking only about climate change, but that's only one of the symptoms of the overshoot. Even people @ hacker news mostly don't have a clue.
> we can't just ignore the problems
We've been ignoring them for 50-70 years. The limits to growth / club of Rome was in 1972? So far ... we did nothing but ignored the problems.
We may cross the 1.5C threshold in 5 years. Not in 2050 as previously expected, but in 5 years. And we're still pursuing economic growth. Have you noticed any evidence to the contrary lately?
> it's going to be a big challenge, and things may get ugly
I recommend few videos for you. I must warn you ... it may hamper your ability to enjoy parties.
Collapse: The Only Realistic Scenario - Arthur Keller
ok, what if all those old people would get to be fit enough to do stuff?
how long would, or rather _could_, they really chill? All the old people I know wish they
were fit enough to be productive and constructive. Drugs and tech will provide this opportunity at some point in the near future.
And what is all this nonsense about social security and pension systems breaking down because the aging population outnumbers the working population??? Think about the exponential function. Everything will get more efficient. Up- and recycling, too. We only consume so much because nature had no way to be more efficient. That's where freaking sentient human beings come into the picture. And AI. I really don't understand the pessimism. If we set up an account on the wall street for every citizen of the planet and let robots do their magic, nobody would lose, everyone would gain. How? "MAGIC". I'm kidding. By ways of the exponential function. You can simulate it yourself. Are there more and more ideas waiting to get on the market or less? To fulfill some desire or need, to fix something that urgently needs fixing? More and more and it will never end. The amount of desires will keep growing. And everybody is misunderstanding the expanding universe. What do you think 100 cooperating billion humans will do? Cooperating in a decentralized way, how most of the economy works, minus the bad top level management and the inefficient ways of the stock markets (the greedy people). When has the human brain become sentient? And so incredibly powerful? After it grew to about 70? 80? 100 billions brain cells?
I'm in my thirties and so is my brother. We now laugh about the ways our parents grew stuff and procured food and stuff. And we realized that it took us so long to understand so many things because our psycho-social environment was too busy being drunk. Which is fine, because the top level management of the professional, local, regional, national and global systems are incredibly incompetent and nobody wants to harm anyone and or go to jail and leave the family worse off. We were slow for multiple reasons but now that we are catching up with the rest, and more importantly, our own potential, things will speed up exponentially.
I take care of the tech side and he gets into the whole sustainable gardening side of things. There is enough water and enough energy sources. The only problem to solve will be the chemicals in water, ground and air, but we are positive that there will be progress in the many approaches we have already found online and offline.
I used to like the term "self-fulfilling prophecy" until I understood it is equivalent to "the purpose of a system is what it does". People get smarter and improve systems. It's a beautiful and never-ending story.
As long as it happens at a slow enough pace for us to adapt, it could be alright.
I wouldn't want to depend on social security or pension programs for my retirement though. Those systems would collapse in an environment where the aging population outnumbers the working population that drastically.