Nobody's Driving

"nothing more important than climate change. Nothing more important than affirming their gender. Nothing more important than paying their loans"

What do you mean, exactly? That adults are focused on the various challenges they face in life?

> do you remember how happy and fun life was when you were teens?

Well, no, not really? My teenage years weren't even particularly terrible, but I definitely had a lot more fun in my 20s, and I'm quite sure I'm not the only one.

Who would drive?

We have, for better or for worse, no one-world government. We don't have a great way to overcome free riders, etc. A nation or group of nations can choose to reduce their emissions, but this means it's easier to undercut them on the global market. The same thing happens with human rights - it's cheap to buy stuff made by enslaved people, so we do.

There's no body that's really able to price negative externalities correctly. Emissions kill people - lots of people - yet there's no real price for using other people's lungs as a dump. For a brief window that body might have been the US and its hegemony, but the US doesn't have the power it used to. Perhaps China will take up the mantle - not much benefit to conquering the world if there isn't a civilisation left.

We should still do what we can, of course. Perhaps enough students on the bus can shift their weight or grab the wheel enough to stop it careening down the ravine. Technological advances have certainly helped in terms of making renewables more competitive against fossil power.

I also think teens are largely sad because they are lonely - so are adults; we have fewer friends and see them less than we used to, and social life has been torn to shreds. My mom thinks the same; she grew up on streets where kids ran outside to play with friends and neighbours _all day long_. But there were far fewer cars (and they were smaller and slower), and there was a parent in almost every home to keep an eye on things out the kitchen window.

There seems to be this persistent romantic nostalgia for the culture of at least the postwar era but also extending back through the Industrial Revolution and maybe beyond. We have all these materials of men in suits looking so professional as they sit at drafting boards and prototype new machines! Oh, how our culture has degraded! Must be the dang kids with their dang TV/video games/hip hop/Tik Tok!

But the older I get the more I come to realize that human culture hasn't changed all that much, what has changed is the democratization of cultural displays. Now that the "elite" are forced to compete with the "rest" in media (social or otherwise), that retro perfection spell is broken and the idealists are butting up against the reality that humans basically want to be carefree and revel in the enjoyment of life.

So what achieved such rapid technological improvements the past couple hundred years? Well, it's pretty clear by now that good ideas happen all over the place, and money flows relatively freely to make these ideas available for public scrutiny and adoption. What changed seems to be the working conditions of the rest -- child labor and 12 hour days in grueling conditions made the Industrial Revolution successful (largely for the elite), and forced/exploitative labor made the computing revolution possible in the 60s up until now in the mining and manufacturing sectors. Now that people are fighting en masse for a global solidarity centered around respect in the workplace, you are seeing elite complaints about how it will destroy civilization as we know it, presumably based on a convenient and self-serving nostalgic view of progress as something that "requires" "sacrifice" from others (never themselves, somehow).

If culture has changed to any serious degree, what's changed in the rest is that we realized this life is about more than toil and scraping by.

Yet many of the rest believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed elite and so have looked upon those around them with contempt and disdain, citing arguments of moral degeneracy ("mind virus"), etc. to fuel their reactionary ideologies. The reaction has been swift and the elite have the money to fuel it as part of public discourse through influence of the media machines, but they cannot completely quash this rising tide because media companies are still beholden to the economic forces that the elite instituted in the first place -- popular stuff makes money, so these ideas continue to be visible in popular media.

No one was ever driving. Only the superorganism called society can be said to be "driving", and even then we would need to qualify that heavily to be clear despite the clumsy language. Treat your fellow humans as such so collaboration is possible and this may actually work out.

Also, please stay alert and in control when you drive. Collaboration works best when you keep your neighbors alive.

I mean that these are great things to fight for, but I think it can't be the full horizon of someone's life. Because these fights don't justify themselves with their own importance. Why is it important to fight climate change? Why is it important to figure out how to pay your loans?