surprised by change and upredictability

[J_]

In about the last two years we met the following unpredictabilities and how we coped with them (or not):

1 we got new neighbors who made damages to our house by refurbishing their house (both houses are direct connected). we still have legal struggles to get the damage repaired. costs: time consuming (we are our own lawyers to spare legal costs) mental pressure (now surmounted)

2 in the Netherlands extreme hot wheather in 2022 and 2021, relentless strong winds end of 2023 and first quarter of 2024. (just accept it). In Austria Alps end 2023 and first quarter hardly snow even on 3600 ft. (we just accept it. for both countries still much outdoor not in the skiff or on cc skis but walking instead).

3 we see around us a much faster grow in lifestyle- and wrong- nutrition illnesses: knee-hip replacements, shoulder and back problems, cancers, leukemia and parkinson; even on early middle ages. (DW and me follow the best available knowledge for an active life and eat only non processed fresh food (plant based))

4 rapid accelerate inflation on energy-costs (countered by us by not using much) on food-costs (we just bear it) and real-estate prices and rent costs (we own our places)

5 rapid grow of people who inhabit our country, towns are suffering, roads are jammed with traffic. (we avoid most by timing).

6 much higher speed on bicycle lanes by explosive changing from human powered- to electric powered bicycles. more accidents. (we are extra alert when on walking/bicycle paths but if that will help??)

7 wars in ukraine and mid eastern countries (glad to be too old to be soldier, sorry for all those civilians who are bearing it)

8 explosive digitalisation all around from museums- to public transport to paying systems and banking (just accept it and go with that flow)

9 three banks we used gone bust. (but no capital loss by shields of government).

10 explosive grow in "thrift shops, even thrift shopping malls" (very pleasant to use)

11 time seems to go faster and faster (is that an age-thing? and was/is it predictable ?)

What do others experience?

[delay]

2 Can confirm the strong winds in The Netherlands! Last week there was Bft 7... I just slow down until I can sustain the effort, but it's slow going.

3 Not sure there is an increase in illness, the things I hear about could be incidents. I do know that the average person is healthy until he is 60 (55 for low educated, 70 for high educated.) This comes much earlier than people expect.

4 Food prices seem 30% to 50% higher. This is not too bad. People used to spend 5% of their income on food and this is now increasing to 7%. I do hear people switch away from meat to avoid the cost.

5 It seems to me immigrants do all the "real work", like cleaning, care, transport, repair, road maintenance. They're very well behaved to the point of being self-deprecating. Everyone says they want fewer immigrants (even immigrants themselves), but nobody wants "real work" for themselves, let alone for their children.

6 The increase in electric bikes is familiar too. Yet there are fewer people on bikes every year, the cycling lines are empty compared to my youth.

8 Increasing digitalisation, yeah, there are fewer people who pay cash. One thing that might change this is the increasing tax on smoking. A bag with 50g of shag tobacco is now 25 euro. I hear people are looking for ways to purchase cigarettes without paying tax.

9 Banks going bust doesn't ring a bell. I used DSB Bank which went bust in 2009. Which banks have gone bust since then?

10 Can also confirm the increase in thrift stores which is very enjoyable.

For myself, the surprise of recent years is that human narratives are much further removed from reality than I thought. This includes stocks and savings accounts: these are just promises and conventions. I feel much less sure about anything I thought I knew.

[Jethrofisher]

That you categorize these events as unpredictable and surprising is something that could be reflected upon.

In my own experience, the process of coming to grips with a "new reality" is actually quite painful. Not only do the individual events leave a mark, but what they signify is even harder to accept.

[7Wannabe5]

It varies considerably, but at the moment I feel more bored with how nothing really changes and everything seems quite predictable. Like I try to take an interesting side path off of the main trail, and it's just another short circle through a field full of dull invasives next to an ugly parking lot, and then I'm back on the main trail again.

[Henry]

I read obituaries on a daily basis. Both out of curiosity and enjoyment that someone I hoped is dead is dead. If the person lived to a relatively normal healthy age, there is always a factoid speaking to not only a change or some unpredictable occurrence but a tragedy ie a predeceased child or grandchild. I often reflect that this is not the life I envisioned for myself but upon a deeper inquiry, how could I have envisioned a life and then have that life come to fruition. That is not how reality works. We do not get to design, shoot into the sky and then admire the explosion of our own fireworks. Life is fucked up and circuitous. It's actually a fucking irrational providential disaster but we find ways to connect the dots that deceives ourselves into thinking we are exercising control.

[J_]

@delay: other busted banks we used were: Iceland-bank and Amsterdam Trade Bank (FIBR).

The increase of population comes not only from immigrants. When I was born we had about 9.5 million inhabitants in an already dense inhabited country. Now we have more than 18 million inhabitants.

[delay]

@J_ you're right about the banks, I remember now.

Population was 9.5M in 1947. Ah, so you mean growth in the past. The 60s even had net emigration. After that both births and immigration contribute to population growth. In 2015 immigration became a more important factor than births. It's interesting that death statistics since 2019 are controversial and not part of the regular data set. I found another dashboard that lists relative population growth for the last few years. Today births no longer compensate for deaths, and net immigration has grown to unprecedented levels.

[7Wannabe5]

@Henry:

I agree, but we also have little control over our belief that we do exercise control. As far as I'm aware the only known Level Yellow (post-post-modern) therapy for Level Orange (modern) agentic thinking is to contract with another human to bind you from neck to ankle in plastic wrap and then dangle you over a dangerous drop. The inability to move your limbs in such a situation cures you of strong belief in your own skills by severing the brain to hand/foot connection.

Although, I hear tell that old timey religion also works for some folks.

[Henry]

Unless you're talking extreme circumstances, no one dies from the self-deception that they are in control. It's probably required for survival. It's definitely required for anxiety. I am old time religiony but belief doesn't translate to thinking on a continuous basis. It's an anthropological impossibility. But life has a way of reminding me. People plan. God laughs.

[chenda]

''The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind. The kind that blindsides you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday''

''You too will get old. And when you do your will fantasise that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders''

@Henry - One of my longstanding hobbies is visiting the dead in churches and graveyards and reading the epitaphs. There seems to have been a 19th century fashion (or possibly 18th I can't really remember) of over-egging the suffering of people prior to their death. A recent grave I saw (housed in the floor of the nave so everyone walks on him) read something like ''Hereith lie the body of the Rev Green, vicar of this parish who departed this life after a long, painful, debilitating illness...'' The grave did not specify the nature of the illness but here I am 200 years later imagining the Rev Green's bowels exploding on his deathbed on a regular basis and the local nurse demanding a premium to sort out the shitty mess.

[Henry]

Oldfucksville has a church that dates back to revolutionary times. It has a cemetary. The church is on fumes but they can't sell because who wants a building with a graveyard included. We went a few times and there was an old crone who wore a sweater on blistering Sunday mornings and insisted the overhead fan be turned off because she was cold. What irritated me to no end was the old bat left before the final hymn so we were all left there sweating our Christ loving balls off while she went home to her crockpot and nap time. I complained to the Pastor that this early leaving old fart should not be in charge of climate control so The Pastor gave me the blessing to sneak out and turn the fan back on during the service. She figured it was me behind it and It became such an eye fucking blood sport that I was one unrepentant click away from pulling her fucking red sweater off her shoulders, tossing it up 20 feet onto the fan blade, turning that bitch onto high speed so she could watch her sweater go around in circles while she froze her wrinkly ass off. One day I'm driving by the church and there is a back hoe digging a grave. I was surprised there was a vacancy. I return a few days later to check out the tombstone and lo and behold it's the sweater lady dead as all fuck. Seems she got a one of the few remaining spots. Here lies Sweater Lady, a cold ass complaining bitch.

[7Wannabe5]

the self-deception that they are in control. It's probably required for survival. It's definitely required for anxiety.

I agree that it almost certainly helps with survival. I strongly disagree that it is required for anxiety. The whole point of self-aware engaging in extreme trust exercises is that the over-used route of anxiety/control is re-wired. This is accomplished by forcing you to place your trust elsewhere. You learn how to "let go" of your anxiety. This is the power that built the pyramids.

[J_]

That you categorize these events as unpredictable and surprising is something that could be reflected upon.

In my own experience, the process of coming to grips with a "new reality" is actually quite painful. Not only do the individual events leave a mark, but what they signify is even harder to accept.

I agree, it’s worth to reflect on.

Nr 1 is a nasty surprise. Shit happens.

For the other events it’s more the speed that surprises me. We have here discussed enough the climate changes to expect, the price rises of energy and basic food. I think we all see the bad influence of malnutrition on people’s health. I have lived long enough to be aware of being not in control in life for a big part. I do not complain at all. My take of it is : I have to adjust to the speed of change.

[jacob]

@J_ All the ones you listed, except maybe the neighbor (then again, having people always had a chance of a bad neighbor) are continuations of long-term trends. I think the only one that wasn't underway 10-20 years ago is the electrification of bicycles, driven by a rising battery industry which again is driven by cars and laptops. In parallel universe, that might not have happened, because that depends on 1 or 2 companies, but everything else did.

Between 2016 and 2019 or so, I/we were working on a bookproject that had every category from your list included. The one thing that I failed to include---IIRC there was only a half paragraph note---was the invention of Turing-test grade AI and recently an AI that scores >100 on a human IQ test. So far, though, that has not made a huge splash outside of specialist/nerd circles. Show me someone who is raving about the singularity, and I'll show you ten people who don't know who or what chatGPT is.

Reading similar older books on future predictions, that is, the kind that are broadly focused, not the "my specialization will become the most important", such books seem to miss about 1 thing or prediction of medium importance per decade. Of course that adds up over time. The present doesn't look anything like was envisioned in the 1960s.

Probably the main prediction/reduction of uncertainty is how predictable everything is. There's a strong tendency to make predictions that are either based on extreme optimism or extreme pessimism. The predictions that fare the best are the boring ones that predict that things will largely remain unchanged. How people live today is not very different from how it was in 1984. Only the colors and designs have changed. Conversely, compare 1984 to 1964 or 1884 to 1924 ... Basically, the speed of change is slowing down.

PS: I fun "game" I like to play is to take your age and apply it backwards from your day of birth. For example, if you're 75, go back 150 years and compare the three points: now, your birth, the past. Would you say things have changed more in the N years of your lifetime or the N years preceeding your birth.

[Western Red Cedar]

What do others experience?

The most dramatic one for me was experiencing mega-fires erupt in the northwest US every year, often leaving my city filled with acrid smoke for months. While I knew it was a possibility, it was certainly an unpleasant development and a younger WRC always thought the risk was from actual wildfires, not lingering smoke from fires hundreds or thousands of miles away. It has shifted one of the nicest periods of the year into one of the most unpredictable.

[Slevin]

The most dramatic one for me was experiencing mega-fires erupt in the northwest US every year, often leaving my city filled with acrid smoke for months. While I knew it was a possibility, it was certainly an unpleasant development and a younger WRC always thought the risk was from actual wildfires, not lingering smoke from fires hundreds or thousands of miles away. It has shifted one of the nicest periods of the year into one of the most unpredictable.

Similarly for me, all the cities surrounding mine burnt down and over a dozen people I knew lost their houses on Dec 30th 2021, leaving them stranded and dealing with painful insurance policies on top of the insane headaches of rebuilding and remediation (literally still happening to this day). Then December 19th the next year, I almost had to evacuate my house again due to another enormous fire started in the canyon closest to my house... And this is all in the middle of winter, the season when you you are supposed to be insulated from all this. Fire season was supposed to be in the summer time.

[J_]

Probably the main prediction/reduction of uncertainty is how predictable everything is.... The predictions that fare the best are the boring ones that predict that things will largely remain unchanged....

PS: I fun "game" I like to play is to take your age and apply it backwards from your day of birth. For example, if you're 75, go back 150 years and compare the three points: now, your birth, the past. Would you say things have changed more in the N years of your lifetime or the N years preceeding your birth.

Jacob, I think your conclusions here are a little bit...too general to be of much help.

You are the one who made a path visible to break with the custom to work, spend en work more to spend even more. Not with general observations but very precise recommendations and analyses. (for which I am still grateful). You prepared me (and others) to the reality of climate change, fossil energy shorts and economic driven immigrants.

To make an example (and fun game) how little things change: the house in the Netherlands I live in is about 500 years old, the second owner (around 1590) was an immigrant from Portugal. A merchant who fled his home country where he was chased for his religion. He choose a country with relative freedom of worship and a mercantile attitude. We see it still all around us now.

My point is that I did not realize the high-speed of the (predicted) changes 2 to 9. That high speed is, so far I know, not predicted.
See also @delay findings above (about the Netherlands I suppose): "Today births no longer compensate for deaths, and net immigration has grown to unprecedented levels."
Same speed surprise (on climate change) with @Slevin and @Western Red Cedar here above.

Jacob or others can you elaborate some about the speed of (those 2-11) categories of change?

[jacob]

Jacob, I think your conclusions here are a little bit...too general to be of much help.

Well, okay, I guess I asked for that...

2) Weather events that are now considered extreme [historic] will become an every other year thing by 2040(*). The world will pass 2C in 2035 or so. (Currently at 1.4-1.5). Winter sports in the Alps will be gone or replaced by articificial snow. The Med will be haunted by drought and wildfires and people will spend their summers in 45C smelling smoke and watching brownish skies. If you seen it once, just shift your mindset where this is normal and blue skies are unusual. In Northern Europe, the problem will be water. The waterscape will change. The lowlands will see flat fields becoming lakes on occasion and unsuitable for farming in general. Lots of flood damage. Again, this will become a regular thing. Some places will become uninsureable.

(*) And even crazier events will setting new records in 2040. Like, category 6 hurricanes will become a thing.

TL;DR The extreme weather events now will become normalized. Think about that. People on the US west coast might have to travel to see a blue sky. However, that's not much different than how people are currently traveling to experience snow which used to fall in quantity from the sky where they live but which hasn't really for the past 20-40 years.

3) The world is getting older and fatter with all its associated [lifestyle] diseases. Twenty years ago diabetes medicine was a sure [demographic] bet. This will continue. There may be occasional regional food shortages due to (2), but the world is currently feeding 8 billion humans and the equivalent of 16 billion similarly sized farm animals.

4) The current inflation was mainly due to mismanaging the pandemic in the main economic powerhouses (China and US). This caused supply chain issues. Due to lack of social security needs, consumers (who otherwise don't have money), were simply given handouts even if they didn't need it. (In contrast, welfare states had a system in place) This money was in some cases spent frivolously on NFTs, memestocks, etc. and otherwise just plowed into the stock market which would otherwise have gone down more. As the world opened up again, there was a labor shortage because the uncoordinated lockdowns had broken the production systems. Wages went up (more than inflation). This gave people more money and in turn this drove retail prices up---catching up with the previous inflation of financial assets(*). In reality, most people's wages have increased more than inflation itself.

(*) Governments ended up holding the debt. This completes the triangle of inflation.

Consider this a hiccup and a return to a more normal economy (pre-2009) where real interest rates are actually positive and cash has value. This will be new to anyone who got into finances after 2009 ... but a return to normal for everyone else, except maybe governments whose debt exceed their GDP. They're now stuck between a financial rock and a political hard place.

5) Many developed nations have fallen below reproduction rates. However, there's a huge demographic bulge that ensures that population will keep going for several more decades albeit not as fast. The world will peak out around 9-10 billion at the end of this century. Demographics is the most predictable trend of them all. It would take nothing short of a massive pandemic to make a dent in this. Incidentally, COVID was not the last pandemic. Not even the worst possible case. I predict another one and that it will go pretty much like the last one with initial denial followed by bungling that makes it worse than it needed to be... because humans gotta human. It'll happen when it happens this way because people will have forgotten just how bad it was. Human memories are incredibly short and tends to discount bad experiences in the past.

However, you will see A LOT more refugees thanks to (2) above. The estimates are some 600 million global refuges by 2060 compared to about 60-100 million currently. These will be both internal and external as "bad places" get depopulated.

This requires building up the "good places" as they currently have too few roads, houses, ... the value of these places will go up as the "bad places" lose their value (and perhaps their existence as a going concern). Basically, the valuation migrates too.

6) This one is kinda tricky. e-bikes on a mass scale are kinda new and people are still working out the appropriate culture/behavior---right now they think of ebikes as bicycles, whereas a better model would be slow scooters.

Kinda like when cars first met horses. Fortunately, we do have models to copy. In the more progressive cities, cars are getting shut out of inner cities or charged very high parking fees. Fewer cars means more bikes on existing roads. Even in the US, I've seen one city where certain residential streets had been converted from car lanes to full bike lanes.

7) The "End of History" (Francis Fukuyama's declaration that democratic capitalism had won and declared the best political system) only lasted about 25 years with one hegemon to rule them all---turned out to be harder than it looked. My guess is that people who still remember the alternative government forms are dying of old age and young people are growing up unsatisfied with "the winning system" and are willing to try new systems, using "illiberal democracies" to transition into "authoritarianism-light" or "authoritarianism-heavy" (you can already see how politicians are "friending up" with like-minded souls in other countries rather than with politicians within their own country). These transitions move at a generational speed. First the culture must be ready to accept change ... and that happens like Kuhn's paradigms. It's not like people suddenly decide that "hey, there's a better idea, Imma change my mind" but rather that "these new ideas look way more fun than those old ideas that clearly don't work currently"/"what could possibly go wrong that's worse than this". (The historic answer is of course: plenty)

I would absolutely expect that the world will be repeating the lessons of history here. Not WWIII, but more like the proxy-conflicts between 1950 and 1990. Much of this will be focused on resources (parts of countries) rather than entire countries since the nationality framework is decreasing in importance. The trend in the US with individual states "going their own ways" in terms of laws are a good example.

Bonus: I would not be entirely surprised if EU fractures into an EU-North and an EU-South to stop climate-induced internal migration from the burning countries in the south and their collapsing agricultural/tourist situation. Likely there will be some "deal" in the form of the north sending money (they already do) and food in return for closing the borders. If so, expect a certain brain drain from the south to the more prosperous north.

8) I agree that it's easiest to go with the flow. One of the things I've done in the past 2 years is actually to get a smartphone and a windows [gaming] computer. If I had to admit to one surprise it was just how easy it was to figure it out compared to my old baseline of ~1999, when I last owned a windows computer. All the technical issues have been hidden under layers of abstraction. I know a lot of seniors struggle with computers. They always use age as an excuse and claim that young people have some natural talent that makes it easier. I'm convinced the senior problem is more of a near total lack of interest in learning insofar they can avoid it by just asking someone else to "fix their computer" for them. This being something that has become so easy that a 12yo nerd can do it.

I bet the two things that will become more ubiquitous in terms of interfacing are VR headsets and AI. Over the past 30 years, we've gone from
1990) Use a desktop computer and buy software from the store.
2000) Use a desktop computer and install software from the internet; get accounts on different sites and interact with your bank, government, favorite forum, ...
2010) Use a smartphone and install an app for everything you want to do.
2020) Use a smartphone and talk to it/using video to interact.

I don't see the idea of popping on a VR headset to talk with an AI avatar to do your banking business as being that far off. Artists will be complaining about the lack of human interaction sooner rather than later. Give it 10 years for headsets and personal AI to make the move from nerd-grade to consumer-grade.

Also note that while the 1990 solution is nearly dead, 2000 is still valid but is now dominated by the 2010 solution. (And this makes me---an old guy---complain that my favorite 2000 world is going to shit. This is of course just makes me oh so predictable )

9) Banks go bust all the time (mostly small ones). Way more than hit the news. But yeah, on a personal note, I don't expect to be able to use the same bank or business for more than a decade before it gets merged/relocated/...

Like with computers, the better strategy here is to stay one generation behind the bleeding edge. Dealing with the newest generation or older generations of doing things is just harder. It's easy to settle and anchor into something that has worked for 10-20 years. However, this makes it hard to transition when the change does come.

10) There are now more Chinese millionaires than American millionaires. The world is running out of places to produce cheap goods. (I don't think it's ever going to happen in Africa.) I'd expect China and India to ramp up their price and quality much like Japan did it before them.

The main thing here is that everybody (except the homeless) in the west have been used to being in the 90%+ percentile of global wealth with average spending around the mid-five figures. We'll be getting used to the idea that developed countries basically don't have much development runway left. Americans (and Europeans) in 2050 will not be substantially materially richer than they are now. They'll be competing with a few billion people from South East Asia in terms of fancy goods and tourism. The relatively poor in the west (say a household making under $40000/year) will not just be falling behind locally but also globally. This is part of what drives (7). Consider that the median global educational level is now somewhere around an 11th grade education. Someone with a HS degree essentially has 4 billion competitors, most of which are willing to work for $1/hour.

Thrifting (not just stores) is a trend that will continue. Repairing instead of throwing away or "recycling" to a dump in Indonesia will also trend up.

11) The perception of time mainly has to do with "#novel impressions"/"#stored novel impressions" in the brain. As we get older, the denominator is cumulative. If people start doing the same _kind_ of thing over and over, the brain doesn't need to make new connections as it's only experiencing, not learning. So, for example, if you're going on your 10th trip to a different place, it's practically routine and therefore not as memorable is your first trip.

Time speeds up if you're not learning materially new things.

This is kinda hard to explain because of how "new" is commonly defined. Perhaps, the best (but also vague) definition of new in this regard is "a difference that makes a difference". Basically, the experience has to change how you think. If you came back from the experience without changing how you see the world, time went fast.

In nerd speak, what matters for the perception of time is installing new software into the brain, not adding more pictures to the Picture folder.

---

To summarize and generalize. Predictions can often be very general and therefore sound vague. The trick to turn general observations and trends into specific practical actions is to remember Gibson's adage that "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed". So, for example, if the graph tells you that flooding chances are going from a 1000-year event to a 2-year event where you currently live, you look at other places where flooding is a 2-year event. Then consider how your current place will transition into that. This avoids the extremely common trap of "I'm well aware of this problem, I just never thought it would happen to me."

[7Wannabe5]

Would you say things have changed more in the N years of your lifetime or the N years preceeding your birth.

This depends on perspective or how you might roughly identify. I think it's possible that the lifestyle of an urban/suburban middle-class, middle-aged, female in the U.S. changed more from 1965 to 2024 than from 1906 to 1965. For example, such a woman would have likely been wearing gloves to church on Sunday and a housedress at home on Monday in both 1906 and 1965, but not so much in 2024.

For humans who were already reasonably affluent, educated, urban, white, straight, and male, lifestyle change from 1906 to 2024 would mostly just be a matter of whether some poor local Black scrub-woman was picking up your laundry from your house or some poor Asian woman was sewing you a fresh new disposable t-shirt in a factory across the globe. Most members of this forum would probably prefer to be transported to the life of a Patrician in Victorian London or a Patrician in Roman Empire than the lifestyle of average 17 year old female rural inhabitant of Sub-Saharan Africa 2024.

IOW, given that the average American currently has 50 "energy slaves", the lifestyles of those who had 50 actual human slaves or early industrial wage slaves in previous eras were likely equally, although differently, comfortable.

Also, those of us who are frugal tend to revert somewhat to earlier technologies/practices, so I currently own fewer "modern" appliances than my parents owned when I was a young child, and I am a more skilled scratch cook than my mother. So, this form of personal conservatism tends to reduce the rate of change over lifespan. Maintaining a personally socially or intellectually conservative lifestyle would have similar effect.

[ffj]

Interesting. I'm old enough now to have witnessed a lot of change in my 55 years on this planet. Some of it predictable, some not so much.

The personal computer and the internet changed everything forever for everyone. The power of this change is immense and if you sit back and think about it no one or system has escaped its influence. Even the people that hate its clutches are still having their actions being dictated. Nobody has a choice to opt out completely.

Same with privacy, it doesn't exist anymore. You are being surveilled constantly, whether through the NSA, traffic cams, store security, trail cameras, or your neighbors Ring system. Your "private" property is surveilled through Google maps. Your purchases and non-purchases are monitored, your behavior is being noted somewhere. Your curious neighbors have a slew of devices to record you against your wishes, whether through a cell phone, security system, or other devices. And your visits will be noted on platforms such as Facebook without your knowledge or consent along with your photo that you also didn't give consent to take. Also, your personal information is on the internet including your past and current address, your past job titles, phone number, and helpful suggestions as to who your relatives may be as part of the "free" package. Even having the curiosity of your ancestry has yielded some unpleasant and invasive results.

When I was growing up your local news came on at 6 pm and the evening news started at 630pm. You trusted both sources explicitly. And if you really wanted to be well-rounded you also watched 60 Minutes once a week. Again, the internet has exposed and hoaxed every news source especially since the rise of Trump. Most people today are skeptical of the "news". It is too easy to see where you have been duped.

Same with religion. Gone are the days where the only information one received about their religion was from the church. Or never knowing your religions' dirty little secrets. I've noticed a huge shift away from organized religion in my lifetime and a shift in tactics from the ones still trying to attract followers. Rock music at a church service? Charismatic bros leading the service? Even the poor Jehovah Witnesses seem to have given up on the door knocking.

Less people are getting married and having children or just one. Part of that is because they have left the church and some of it is through sheer practicality.

Because of wages and inflation. Wages for the entry blue-collar worker has stagnated for the past thirty years. The margins for many of the working class jobs are extremely thin and the wages reflect that so if you are an "employee" then you are fucked over the long-term. We always have the principles of ERE to save us but not everybody is capable of this and not everybody can create their own companies and be successful. It's quite shocking actually how little wages have increased for many jobs that are extremely necessary and important.

Immigration has its role to play here because if you have a large pool of people that will work for low wages then you will naturally depress any wage increase. And they tend to gravitate towards the blue-collar jobs; drive by any construction site and just observe. Opinion here, but it always bothers me when people declare that immigrants do the work that citizens refuse to do. It should be rephrased that immigrants will do the work that citizens refuse to do for a particular wage. Obviously, there is a lot to unpack from that opinion but the reality is that immigration has gone bonkers recently, look at any graph, and that is quite a change from any presidency, Republican or Democrat.

There has been a huge shift in perception of gay people in my lifetime. They've become boring, acceptance.

People are much fatter than they used to be in my youth. I watched a movie from 1973 the other day and it was quite a contrast in body compositions from what you observe today. Some of it is lifestyle, but a lot of it is cheap, processed carbs too. And everything else that is overly processed and refined. Many of our food choices are literally poison. But it is also my perception that people in general are living longer, even with debilitating conditions.

Wars haven't changed much in my lifetime. They are always over resources for the most part and governments find a lie (weapons of mass destruction, etc.) that the populace will swallow to gain support for it. What has been a nice consistency is that skirmishes remain fairly localized with conventional weapons. Nobody has been dumb enough to do something stupid enough to mandate huge involvement from large players. And by nice consistency I mean it could be much, much worse. Also, people are much more aware of circumstances now behind "decisions" and that has an effect on actions moving forward so another win for the internet. No more easy lies.

In my observations, the seasons have shifted by about thirty days with it staying quite a bit hotter later in the Autumn season. As far as extreme weather, it is about the same I would guess. I think we are more acutely aware of weather than we used to be in the past. Another effect of the internet.