7 billion people yet so little Humanity

These past couple of years, I've been feeling a kind of anxiety that I'd never felt before -- I no longer consider the future a certainty. I used to have absolute faith in humanity's ability to overcome almost any challenge, and trusted our species to ultimately listen to reason whenever push came to shove. However, looking at the various preventable crises that lie ahead, I have to say that I've lost that faith.

Climate change is going to decimate food supplies and cause death, collapse, and migration. Antibiotic resistance is growing, and we're two to three decades away from pneumonia becoming a death sentence. The social and educational revolution brought about by modern technologies is being negated by bad faith reasoning and self-gain driven manipulation. All of these problems are entirely of our own making; they're the direct result of our selfish and petty nature, and I feel powerless in the face of that realization.

I don't think I've ever felt as small and disillusioned as I did when I watched every authority figure -- from the PM of the India to my own father -- dismiss major threats to the survival and wellbeing of our entire species, threats backed by science, simply because the idea itself was either too absurd or too inconvenient to consider.

I used to think that I could just sit in my office, focus on my work, and trust the rest of humanity to trend towards a desirable future. I had so much faith in us; I'm heartbroken to see how absolutely -- and how proudly -- so many of us are failing one another.

I'm angry, I'm saddened, I'm disappointed, and I'm terrified. Not only for myself, but for the billions that stand to starve, the billions that stand to die, and for the inescapable suffering each and every one of us is going to endure once our bill comes due.


I wish I had something more to say, but beyond the desperate hope that some scientific breakthroughs save us at the eleventh hour, all I can say is that I hate us all -- we could have been so much more.