I can't time the market worth shit - I got my first investments out before the 2008 collapse in earnest, and got into the job market at its peak. I waited through the 2010s to accumulate money to invest, only to start doing so amidst rampant speculation in crypto, then NFTs, then meme stocks, then AI.

So yeah. I am not getting a job at a financial firm anytime soon.

That said, the societal gestalt seems primed for something to go horribly wrong. AI boosters are positing their models as solving all of society's ills, which first requires acknowledgement that these are in fact problems facing society requiring solutions. Everyone is broadly on the same side - wealth inequality is a problem, climate change is a problem, energy dependence is a problem, job security is a problem, housing is a problem, etc - but we're all varied on the approach to solving these problems based on personal biases and perspectives. YouTube is infested with AI slop, social media is filled with doomers and preppers, and subcultures are simultaneously splitting off from larger groups (like those leaving Twitter/X for BlueSky or Mastodon) while also forming newer alliances and communities around shared goals or ideologies. Even those in positions of power acknowledge the polycrisis before us, while exacerbating it further by firing swaths of workers to fund their own bunkers, yachts, and contingency plans via share price bumps.

It's in the air, this horrid pit in the stomach that doom lingers just around the corner. It's been there for a decade, long before COVID, festering beneath the surface. Hell, for many of us pre-9/11 Americans, it's been a gradual decline since the heydays of the maximum-employment 1990s. So many of us feel it that it just cannot be ignored, and thus it becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: enough of us believe something bad is coming, therefore something bad must happen to quell those feelings.

There's two things that give me (and my OCD) solace of a sort:

* We'll all find out together, regardless of status or strata

* Most of us - statistically, generally, based on prior events and barring any explosive escalation - will likely be relatively fine

Yeah, the shifting of geopolitics is likely to result in more violent conflicts with the potential to kill billions if things go NBC. If we don't address climate change, millions will die from wholly preventable causes and tens of trillions of dollars of property will be destroyed over the next century. Misuse of AI could result in doomsday scenarios that Sci-Fi has warned us about for decades. Wealth inequality appears poised to create a modern version of the Coal Wars, if current events are any indication.

Technology alone won't save our asses. Neither will some mythical billionaire genius, or AGI deity. It'll have to be us, regular humans, rejecting the present and choosing to build a better future together.

And I think we can do that.