How could one even describe these times? Throughout history we've had eras, ages,

[Hortensis]

15. Maybe The Great Transition? I think we'll get through this

into a far better era for the same reason people don't drive into each other on freeways.

But right now change has been speeding up ever since the Industrial Revolution and is now really beyond enormous, moving too fast to avoid some collisions. In all of human history, we've certainly never been HERE before.

* Climate disaster is upon us and growing, with resulting destabilization of lives and governments.
* Disappearing fresh water supplies in many, many areas.
* Mass migrations.
* Replacement of workers with computers and machines.
* Need for new forms of income.
* New threats of cyber and other electronic and energy attacks and disasters.
* Productivity revolution creating the rise of a dangerously destructive uberwealthy class.
* Medical revolution paradoxically combining with other factors to create epidemics of illness.
* Population explosion, with almost all new growth living in new cities.
* Detachment from the natural world and growing own food, and newly unsustainable living.
* Harnessing of new information technology by malignant forces to corrupt and control
populations and bring down governments.

Whatever else this is, it is a period of great transitional crisis created by undirected and uncontrollable change. And we're long detached from stable, functioning cultural norms developed over hundreds and thousands of years, with no chance to build new ones any time soon. That should probably be a bullet point on its own, along with ???.

This list doesn't include the positives of the changes forcing this transition, already part of it to some degree, but they're also enormous. I might have preferred that an "end to (a lot of) work" had come when we were younger, but that'll cause its own issues of course. "Idle hands make fretful minds." Hopefully a post-transitional problem. We have more than enough on our hands right now.