The Darkness Where the Future Should Be

It’s political and it’s cultural: At some point in the last few years, a feeling has set in that the future is being foreclosed

The dearth of optimistic visions of the future, at least in the United States, is central to the psychic atmosphere of this bleak era. Pessimism is everywhere: in opinion polls, in rising suicide rates and falling birthrates, and in the downwardly mobile trajectory of millennials.

When, in the 1970s, the Sex Pistols sang “There is no future,” there was at least a confrontational relish to it. Now there’s just dread.

For people on the right, it’s sparked by horror at changing demographics and gender roles

What happens to a society that loses its capacity for awe and wonder at things to come?

For those on the left, a primary source of foreboding is climate change, which makes speculation about what the world will look like decades hence so terrifying that it’s often easier not to think about it at all

The right and the left share a sense of creeping doom, though for different reasons