Most situations with other humans remind me how dearly I’d like others to have what one might call situational awareness for the 21st century. “Situational awareness for the 21st century” might be summarized by:

Our World in Data graph plotting world GDP in the long run, looking hilariously pareto-like.

Or the current unfathomable ~near-100% rate of involuntary deaths, which we could image viewing from the perspective of a future textbook page from a more civilized Earth:

Claude-generated graph of “deaths”, vibes-plotting the death rate from pre-agricultural times to the dark-ages/enlightenment/21st-century and claiming all of it is “senseless, shocking, chaotic barbaric butchery” (slight spin on pre-agricultural times which are “stable” but otherwise the same), compared to the time after ~2029 (symbolic date denoting a friendly and anthropic singularity) here denoted as “today” to indicate this graph may've been dropped by a student in thousands of years from now who accidentally ripped a sheet out of their textbook.

Or even Holden Karnofsky’s graph from his essay “This Can’t Go On”, which argues that the 21st century is exceptional in part because humanity just couldn’t possibly maintain 2% growth rate for 8,200 years, despite our time handling it just fine:

Holden-Karnofsky-generated graph where the dates behind major inventions are plotted on a timeline and, 8,000 years from now, a point is denoted symbolically by “growth can't continue at today's rate past this point”.

The 21st century could also be said to be exceptional for its stunning lack of enlightenment. Quoth Robin Hanson:

Yet even these differences will pale relative to one huge difference: our lives are far more dominated by consequential delusions: wildly false beliefs and non-adaptive values that matter. While our descendants may explore delusion-dominated virtual realities, they will well understand that such things cannot be real, and don’t much influence history. In contrast, we live in the brief but important “dreamtime” when delusions drove history. Our descendants will remember our era as the one where the human capacity to sincerely believe crazy non-adaptive things, and act on those beliefs, was dialed to the max.

I see no reason why determinism wouldn’t be true all the way down: and so as technology advances psychology will eventually be “solved”, in the sense that human minds will become open books, illusions of “free will” will be dispelled, taking illusions of “free will” mattering along with them, and then humans will simply be. They will see no point to suffering since they could just as well avoid suffering by pressing levers X and Y, similar to how in the 21st century you or I can take paracetamol whenever we feel pain (and we don’t think much of it). They probably wouldn’t spiral into a Doestoevsky-like fit of burning-everything-down just because they feel purposeless, because they wouldn’t feel purposeless, because purposelessness is probably solvable via sufficiently advanced psychology. Frankly, it’s difficult to imagine any psychological problem remaining once you apply sufficient solutionism to it.

All of us children

The ability to forgive the actions

All of us in a museum

Another thing I don’t understand about some of my fellow 21st-century-born compatriots is that they don’t seem to understand that we’re being watched. There is an abstract, almost begrudging admission that “future generations” are capable of judging us; but it never goes into any detail, and it’s treated as a rhetorical technique rather than a true, material thing. That there are students in the future who will read about you in the history books is not a delusion, or the stuff of pep talks: there are literally children of flesh and blood who’re reading about your actual name, on textbooks, printed with real pulp paper.ˆ1 Visualize the scene with as many serendipitous details as you can to make the image feel more real, if you need to.ˆ2

It will feel weird to people when you tell them that you were alive in the 21st century. Like when my dad tells me he’s been to the Soviet Union for a soccer match, and has seen Gorbatchev give a speech before at his university. The 21st century has an ancient, metallic taste to it, because it’s the tail end of barbaric times before technological maturity, the dreamtime, years where anyone could stick their hand in the waterfall of human activity and expect a dozen jets of water to blow in every direction from it. (You’d better get used to the butterfly effect; you’re swimming in it.)

That only those who’re voracious readers of science fiction or otherwise became futurists understand this is baffling to me. Most times I read about people in the newspaper, I can’t imagine they could’ve acted the way they did if they were aware of it all. It seems like such a vast truth that you can’t merely go on treating everything else so seriously anymore.

Calvin and Hobbes looking up at a sea of stars, Calvin says “If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I'll bet they'd live a lot differently.” Hobbes asks “How so?” and Calvin answers “Well, when you look into infinity, you realize that there are more important things than what people do all day.”