Current Events > William Gibson: People are suffering from 'future fatigue'

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/sci-fi-author-william-gibson-explains-how-future-fatigue-is-putting-people-off-the-22nd-century/

In a interview with the BBC, Gibson said people seemed to be losing interest in the future. All through the 20th century we constantly saw the 21st century invoked, he said. How often do you hear anyone invoke the 22nd century? Even saying it is unfamiliar to us. Weve come to not have a future.

It's true, nobody talks about the 22nd Century. Although to be fair, that's still 80 years away and our own grandchildren will likely be dead by then.

The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone, Gibson said in 2012. Ahead of us, there is merely more stuff events. The upshot is a peculiarly postmodern malaise. Gibson calls it future fatigue. This is a condition where we have grown weary of an obsession with romantic and dystopian visions of the future. Instead, our focus is on now.
Gibsons diagnosis is supported by international attitude surveys. One found that most Americans rarely think about the future and only a few think about the distant future. When they are forced to think about it, they dont like what they see. Another poll by the Pew Research Centre found that 44% of Americans were pessimistic about what lies ahead.

So no Crystal Tokyo, then

So why has the world seemingly given up on the future? One explanation might be that deep pessimism is the only rational response to the catastrophic consequences of global warming, declining life expectancy and an increasing number of poorly understood existential risks.

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