A generation accustomed to financial challenges is dealing with their recession fears through wry TikToks and by swapping cost-cutting suggestions online.
Millennials are worried they are about to experience a “once-in-a-lifetime” recession. Again.
Dire economic downturns are supposed to be rare, but millennials — defined by the Pew Research Center as those born between 1981 and 1996 — have already had several recessions during formative stages of their lives, from the dot-com bubble burst when most were children, to the Great Recession as they entered the workforce after college, to the Covid-19 pandemic when they were trying to settle into their careers.
Once dubbed the “unluckiest generation,” millennials have postponed major milestones during past recessions. A significant slice of them graduated college between 2007 and 2009 and struggled to find jobs, which led them to delay buying homes, getting married, and making major purchases, such as cars. Then, after the pandemic led to another sharp recession, some millennials, contending with student loans and rising costs of living, decided to rethink having kids.
No one after ASI will understand the people before ASI. Imagine the perfect doctor that does not neglect you, assuming we aren’t just killed off.
I’m trying to imagine what it might be like for people that have radical life extension, combined with even AGI, along with a post-scarcity world, trying to understand the hivemind thinking that came before…I do think you are onto something. It’s hard for any of us to be sure what that world might be like but it will likely be very hard (short of mind uploads of those that straddle this shift) for them to understand how myopic people in this time seem to be (as a generality).
I find it just so weird that only a few people seem to be thinking about what is possibly coming next, and only constantly steer by looking in the rear view mirror. Especially even AFTER seeing (relatively) minor changes like refrigeration, electricity, septic systems, television, radio, satellite communications, Internet, the Green Revolution, smart phones, vaccinations, container shipping, and early LLMs and how they are all continuing to change culture. It’d be one thing to have this mindset maybe before the Industrial Age…maybe.
Case in point - things like UBI - are barely discussed. Even as we see MASSIVE wealth inequality underway, the likes of which the world has never seen before. Instead of serious discussion about a transition to UBI and serious talk about post-scarcity economies, a whole lotta dipshits are cheering on the likes of fElon kicking out the rather pathetic safety nets we have left.