The debate over whether post-pandemic inflation could be transient gave way to whether this could be the 1970s with the pain of stagflation and energy shortages; then whether the crypto collapse could have the flavor of the 2000s housing market; what exploding energy prices in Europe could do to politics there and beyond; and worst, that grain prices could trigger a wave of famine around the world. On Bloomberg’s “Odd Lots” financial podcast, the hosts frequently see that there has been a “perfect storm” of crisis situations: in shipping logistics, coffee pricescopper production shortages, the challenges to start pump more oil, seemingly everything broke or went a little wrong at the same time. Is this just a heightened period of unusual events, or a lull before interlocking pieces come crashing down?
And this leaves out the deeper concerns people have, which also contribute to a sense of societal disintegration, about depression and anxiety in teens, refuses in reading and arithmetic, the ubiquity of fentanyl, the resurgence of anti-Semitism and anti-LGBTQ violence. The police took one hour intervening while a heartbroken young man was shooting children. Young people shot grocery stores because they were black, gay and trans nightclub regulars, college football players after a excursion to see a play. Lives just ended half way through something normal, and few things make people feel like the world is ending more than that.
There’s a reason so many people are concerned about wider society loneliness that is hard to define and harder to break. There’s a reason so many people describe walking in a fog. “For now we live at the end of the world,” poet Saeed Jones wrote in his latest collection“shocked by headlines and alarm clocks.”
Even in all this pain and dark possibility, some news has defied expectations. Russia did not roll through Ukraine; the United States and Europe have held together; people to celebrate in darkened cities from which Russian troops withdraw. Many of the biggest names in US election conspiracies — and especially the people who wanted to control the levers of the election bureaucracy — lost their races in the states most important to the transfer of presidential power. The collapse of major crypto exchanges and coins has so far not spread across the financial system. The Supreme Court sounded skeptical this month on the independent state legislature theory, though we won’t really know that until next year. There was no widespread violence or unrest on election day or in response to the results.
Maybe humans were underestimated against artificial intelligence, as my colleague Farhad Manjoo argued; there was a breakthrough in nuclear fusion, even if it would be very complicated to build on; people will probably receive one soon malaria vaccine that could change the way the disease spreads. Some of the most dire predictions of climate change may turn out to be too bleak. “The window of possible climate futures is shrinking,” says my colleague David Wallace-Wells wrote this year “and as a result, we’re getting a clearer picture of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, far beyond climate normal yet mercifully short of a true climate apocalypse.”
He argues that some of the improved outcomes stem in part from a mobilization in response to deep fears. This is related to the mysterious fluidity between ominous warnings and positive outcomes, that fear can ameliorate the reason for fear. This may be what kept the really hard-core conspiracy theorists out of office this fall — that swing voters heard a dark picture of what might happen and acted. Or maybe they just want more stability; maybe a lot of people do.
This is, in theory, why people on Twitter and in places like The New York Times debate the nature of our problems and their seriousness: the reaction. The private and public scientific debate information about, for example, the seriousness of a new variant of a virus can guide the response of the government and society.