36
votes
Tildes Survey #9: How optimistic are you about the future?
Submit your response here!
- Direct link: https://survey.tildes.community/-/how-optimistic-are-you-about-the-future-9/
- This survey closes on June 21, 2026 at 10:00 UTC
- The results will be published on June 21 shortly after the survey has closed. I'll edit this topic and post a comment about it!
The current plans for questions that will be asked in the coming weeks are as follows:
| Question | Survey opens | Survey closes |
|---|---|---|
| Vote for the next 4 surveys | ||
| What is your gender identity? | ||
| What's your favorite video game? | ||
| How optimistic are you about the future? | 2026-06-14 18:00 UTC | 2026-06-21 10:00 UTC |
| How often do you visit/read Tildes? | 2026-06-21 18:00 UTC | 2026-06-28 10:00 UTC |
Keeping it very simple this time around with some Likert scales! (TIL the name of these)
The person that originally submitted this question also mentioned doing this periodically (like every six months) so I figured for this first one I'd ask both how you feel about the future now and how you have felt in the past six months.
Please submit your ideas for questions here! Even if they've been submitted already by someone else. All input is valuable! You can view all submitted questions on this dashboard.
Thank you all for participating!
I believe that history can help us here. I've voted neutral to both questions, because while we have new and weird challenges that plague our current life (and by "we", I mean the minority of the 8+billion people who have access to the internet and this site :), there have always been astounding challenges that somehow humanity still pulls through.
According to worldometers.info, there were 1.6 to 2 billion people around the time the Spanish flu hit, and the 1920 estimate probably was shunted due to the Great War. Between 25-100 million people died from it, which would impact up to ~5% of the world population (wikipedia).
Before the 18th/19th century, life expectancy was pure crap compared to today. Additionally, the chances of you being born into a situation where you didn't have to basically slave your whole life away to get your next meal and keep some rags on your back were pretty low.
And on top of that, racism/misogyny/fundamentalism and all the other -ism prejudices were flamboyant af.
A lot of that last sentence played into why Hitler was such a shit human being, though he only encompassed so many hateful ideas that were already in place. After all, he became a world power because he had people behind him.
And let's just dip back even further, say, to like the stone age. Life fscking sucked compared to today. Even 300 years ago, as I mentioned, most folks didn't know where their next meal was coming from. But back then? It was still so primitive that I'd venture most folks reading this wouldn't be able to deal. Plastics are such an amazing thing (despite anyone wanting to hate on oil), we have cars and planes, and I'm literally telling you all this via a pathway that I really don't even understand.
(and now I'll just say what I think, so if bad words offend, uh, just skip those :)
Fact is, we've got it fucking made. Yeah, shit's bad out there, bad in here, but if you have mental issues, or if you weren't hetero-normal, or if you left your man because he beats you, or ... or... 100 or so years ago, you'd end up in a "facility" where you might be lobotomized.
If you didn't adhere to your society's strict policies or objected to anything of the sort, you'd be outcast.
If you didn't like the local religion, you were fucked.
Now we have Space Billionaires (go look up the "space [noun] billionaires vs space [verb] billionaires) meme :) and AI facilities taking all the water, but I'm not gonna lie: while I said I'm neutral on both accounts, the fact is, humanity is doing great right now. We could be doing WAY better, yes, but that's just humanity for you.
This is absolutely true of a baby born to peasants in Europe in say 1100. It's not at all true of a tribesperson in Australia relatively recently and likely not true across the world at various points in long scale history. Pre-history, probably technically.
Life expectancy was about 60, assuming you lived through infancy*. That's not bad and something exceeded only very recently. From what I know of Aboriginal life, there wasn't actually a heap of work involved. Everything I've read indicates a life I could life with, probably happily. A position in that society was held for those not hetero or cis gendered (I provided the tech for an academic discussion of this many years ago, I wish I too notes or something, it blew my mind but I wasn't exactly expecting it). I doubt it was utopia but it's more representative of most of human history than anything that's happened post agriculture. Your assertion that everything stone age was awful seems baseless to me, we evolved in that environment to what we are now, I can't imagine we evolved to hate every minute of it. Stonehenge was not built by a society universally in misery.
*you probably didn't.
More broadly I can acknowledge your point but I suspect it's a position that vastly underestimates the fragility of our current circumstance.
This is the ultimate in selection bias, everything pulls through until it doesn't. When I hear it I hear an article of faith more than anything else. I have been through astounding challenges in my life that I have pulled through. Yet, we can say with certainty that I will not live forever, despite nothing having killed me yet.
Most of what we have achieved since the start of the industrial revolution has been on credit that the planet we live on has advanced. The timescale of that borrowing is incredibly short, far shorter than most people can get their heads around. The fact that it has been such a short time means the bill hasn't really been presented yet, though the scale is becoming apparent. Do a bit of reading on planetary boundaries, carbon is one but there are a number and most are under great stress. This isn't kooky fringe science and we won't be able to successfully ignore them.
My suspicion is that the boomers will be the last generation to dine out on planetary credit without really having to worry about the bill coming in.
Interesting that you put this as "neutral". Seems like my position basically aligns with yours, but I consider it very optimistic rather than neutral.
What worries me the most is how we’ve managed to fuck the climate. We can have all the comfort and technologies we want, if the climate doesn’t let us grow enough food we’re going to have a very bad time.
Anywhere you look the weather has been abnormally hot and getting worse every year. This year on track to be yet another record beating hot year. With the trump war closing the Detroit there were fertilizer shortages so not all crop was planted. Along with the heat and crop failures resulting, we’re projected to have a 20–30% shortfall this year. We probably won’t feel it this, us lucky ones in rich countries (pasta will probably cost a few dollars/euros more a pack but we can still afford it just like it happened for gasoline), but it means porter countries will starve. It’ll be our turn in a while as this gets worse.
We also have no idea about the long term effects of global warming except that most climate scientists agree that it’s probably bad, serious, irreversible. For now we’re getting hot and begrudgingly buy fans or air conditioners. Meanwhile people in India are dying from the heat because it’s just too hot and even sitting in water doesn’t cool down the body anymore. How many years before it’s here too?
Politics aside (this has always been a circus), we have deep systemic issues that are catching up with us and are irreversible. I don’t think the future will be better than the past this time around, this might be the best it’ll ever be and going downhill.
hmmm as much as I agree with some of your points I do feel that the hole argument that we are so much better off today is sometimes lacking nuance. Sure things are vastly better now than say even 200 to 300 years ago. We have so much to be thankful for and we should really appreciate our world more but I imagine that their are probably more people who wouldn't agree with us because of how absolutely shit their version of the world is. I think a large portion of the global south live in a hugely different world to us and their understanding of whats good would look very different to ours.
I also think that we are able to look back on the world and say "yes things are much better now" because we perceive some of the technological advancements we have as essential to our way of life. I'm not talking about sanitation,medicine and other truly life altering ways of living. Digital technology is probably not that essential to our way of life and I say that as I type away on my laptop while surfing the web like a cool cat. Would a peasant from the middle ages want a mobile phone if the trade off was rarely ever going outside and seeing your friends in person? They might accurately judge that to be a bad trade off and reject the phone because they recognise the real value of human contact. This is just one example.
So while we do live in the best time in human history, personally I think the period between the 80s and mid 00s was the best time for middle class white people, our values are very different from the humans before us and what we consider essential is most likely far from what was considered essential back in time. I voted somewhat pessimistic for this poll because I am coming from an environmental background and I think we are gonna really screw the pooch on this in our future but there is enough positive movement in mitigating real disaster.
The immediate, 10 year future? Fuck no. 20 years? Maybe.
But then it's not really my future so much as it is my children's future. Am I optimistic about my own? Not in the least. Am I optimistic about theirs? I kind of have to me, or the weight of everything will crush me into dust.
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Some weeks ago I was telling a few people that everything's been looking more and more like cyberpunk.
I think its been cyberpunk for a while but without the aesthetic.
Yeah, I would much rather have the aesthetics and avoid the dystopian tech authoritarianism.
Agreed, which sucks because the aesthetic is probably one of the few good things you could get while living in such a setting.
I recently had a couple-hour catch-up phone conversation with a friend I hadn't spoken with in a couple years or so, and we went off on a tangent realizing that there were all these different Sci-Fi Dystopia themes that we are kind of living right now.
Terminator - AI / fully autonomous weapons
Blade Runner - this was one he brought up and honestly I can't remember the specific corollary
Idiocracy somewhat comes to mind mostly based on the pursuit of the attention economy
Minority Report - surveillance companies integrating AI-enabled cameras and AI-enabled analysis software are marketing 'predictive policing tools' - so Pre-Crime
RoboCop jokingly came up - the guy DIED and they still made him show up to work on Monday. As a corporate-owned slave.
There were more but I that's all I can remember. Also yes, I do believe Cyberpunk came up as a general theme.
I'm keeping my chin up, as a point of defiance.
I'm not a young man, and watching the global vision of the future slide from "we're gonna have flying cars and short working hours!" to "yeah, but what kind of apocalyptic dystopia?" has been disheartening.
A lot of things have improved over my life: Cancer survival rates. The quality and capability of computing. Access to other cultures and viewpoints. Heck, just access to information.
On the other side of the coin, I see a galaxy of ills that can all be traced back to a small number of root causes - and so much of our day-to-day stability is anchored in those causes that meaningful change would necessitate an intolerable upheaval.
And so here we are... Millions, even billions, all aware that a tipping point to a new lower-energy state is inevitable in the long term, but too scared of the transition to do anything that smoothes it out.
The inflection point analogy is something I've brought up a lot. It does feel like we're at a stage where a lot of people I talk with feel it too. The sort of... Lifting of the veil to reveal the horror that awaits us a bit.
Maybe that's a bit too dark, but it feels as if there isn't much to be done besides hunker down and harden with friends and build strong community.
At the moment? I'm pretty far down the unoptimistic curve.
Issues that are on my mind, sorted from largest to smallest impact first, then re-sorted from soonest impact to furthest-out impact.
Largest first:
Climate change: Loss of / change in arable farmland around the world. The current and upcoming worsening water crisis. Damage from extreme weather events of increasing frequency and severity. The upcoming positive-feedback tipping points we are approaching, and so much faster than anyone predicted / wanted to be on record saying and then risk being wrong about. Pretty well baked-in harms which we could at least stop increasing but we mostly aren't.
The approach towards / increasing risk of World War 3 with multiple involved nuclear powers and the orange narcissist having legal nuclear authority (with the rumored but unconfirmed story that he already tried to order a nuclear strike on Iran and one of our top military officials stood up to him and outright said 'No').
The tangled-together mess of the possible existential-level threat of AI combined with the largest financial bubble in history combined with this being the driver for the fastest accumulation of wealth and heavy-handed financial power ever seen. If my information is correct then the overwhelming driver of economic growth in the USA is the ocean of money being poured into AI. And at some point I expect that to crash and burn, with the main questions being 'when does that part start', 'how much of a crash', 'how fast of a crash', and 'how much of our economy will have been bound into the fate of the AI bubble when that crash occurs'. Expected (more) massive job loss, depression.
The approaching food insecurity crisis due to the major disruption to and loss of fertilizer supply associated with Hormuz and the unnecessary war with Iran that orange started.
The current energy supply disruption from Hormuz and the staggered effects different countries are looking at as strategic petroleum reserves get drawn down - they are finite and will either run out or get close enough that nations will be unwilling to go below X percent reserves and will stop releasing. I do not expect the situation with Hormuz to be 'resolved' for any value of that word anytime soon, and possibly never (the possibly never referring to a stabilization situation where there may not be active war / shooting/taking/sinking of ships but where all the factors involved keep active marine traffic to a fractional percentage of what it was going into the long-term).
The variable levels of political 'burning of Rome' in the USA and the variable levels of bad (or some potentially good) outcomes. How much more will be degraded or outright destroyed by the time various elections occur / will the orange hitler wannabe attempt to do (insert variable levels of interference in / attempts to halt / attempts to overthrow results of elections).
In order of (likely) soonest to furthest out:
Food insecurity. The harvest seasons in the northern hemisphere aren't too far away and the loss of / price-inaccessibility to fertilizer supply is already baked in for a majority of that if I understand correctly.
Energy disruption. This one is somewhat variable as while it is bad, the nations involved have had and do have fair amounts of time to seek alternate sourcing / put austerity measures in place / make plans / etc. Effects should at least be staggered out and not hit everywhere all at once. Is still fairly bad for everyone though.
Tied for 3rd and 4th place due to unknown and perhaps unknowable timeline-affecting factors:
USA/political 'burning of Rome'
Approaching/increasing risk of World War 3 with potential nuclear involvement (I acknowledge that the polities involved don't actually want nuclear involvement even in the event of otherwise full-scale war with the likely idiotic exception of the orange)
The bursting of the AI economic bubble and subsequent harms. Bubbles can keep going for a while based on human factors and momentum. Hard to know.
Climate change effects. While we already have been experiencing, and are continuing to experience gradually more severe effects, it is still a slower progression scale on this one compared to the others listed above. It is also an item that doesn't fit well on the 'how soon does this happen' metric because it's very much not a discrete effect at a point in time but a combination of gradually-increasing effects combined with specific tipping points combined with individual extreme weather harms of variable impact.
I can't speak to the access to fertilizer but if it helps at all, the corn and soybeans are growing as per usual. They're not human food generally but the farmland around here continues to farm
That is good to hear. Intended for first-order human calories or not, at the large scale there is enough inter-relation and inter-dependency in the world total calorie production that, when looking at large scale effects it kind of all pools together.
Agreed, just wanted to make it clear what kind of crops it was. It's the time of year when everything is a super rich green and the corn looks good in a way that tells my Midwestern soul that it's gonna be a good harvest. We're also in a D0 at worst and it's been raining/storming regularly so we have good climate at the moment for crops.
Very optimistic.
Are there currently major political, social, economic problems? Of course there are. There always are. But the long-term trend line is that humanity as a collective always manages to improve and get through hard times, as @Asinine said.
Will my own short-term future be good? No idea. It'll probably be fine. But my own life doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, and collectively, for all of us, the future is brigher than the present.
The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.
This is a fun question!
As others have noted, the scale of what to be optimistic for is unclear. So it gets your thinking hat on! I'll be interested to see the results.
For me, I'm very optimistic. That's honestly because I'm just mostly happy these days, I've got a lot of good things going and don't read/watch the news. For those that read the advice thread I posted, I broke up with my ex partner too recently and while that's a little sad that's ending, I'm actually really excited about dating, socializing and the oppertunities I'll get from the breakup, at least for the next few months.
Also, I just got ADHD meds and I'm planning to post a thread about them at some point.
In general, I think for people today it's so easy to get swept away with the big doom and gloom stuff. There's a lot of reasons why it's so popular to talk about in TYOOL 2026:
Global warming is scary, so is extinction levels and so many other things. But I'll be miserable if I worry about all those things, and I also can't do shit about any of them either because about 100 billionaires are doing most of the damage anyway. So I might as well be happy and then hope the next disaster we've predicted isn't that bad.
I go back and forth. I said that I'm somewhat pessimistic and I go back and forth between that and neutral.
But I also don't consume a lot of news either, because if I do, it sends me into a spiraling depression and cynicism. And I can't be that way, because I have shit to do.
It's fine have some irrational hope that things will turn out ok, but being simply optimistic sounds almost like science-denial to me (scientists are telling us to be worried). But maybe the question should have been split it in two parts, 1) optimism for personal life 2) more globally ("I think I will be ok" vs "I think things will be ok").
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/
I put somewhat optimistic. Personally, things are going well, and my friends and family are doing well. In fact, apart from the internet, if it was just my personal experience and talking with my in person friends and family, I’d put strongly optimistic.
There’s chaos in the world, but when hasn’t there been?
I answered "very pessimistic" for each question.
My reason is simple and sad and irrefutable. I hate it. I accept it.
When my mother was born the world population was 2.5 billion. When I was born it was 4 billion. When I got out of high school is was 5.6 billion. Today they say it's 8.6 billion.
I think that number is low but hey.. I may be stupid.
What I know is that when we can't make enough food for everyone we won't get together and make a plan and do the right thing. I know someone will decide to just kill the other people so we can survive.
Then and us. Someones tribe will kill someones else's tribe.
I'd like to say I am above this but I know I am not. It'll be them, not us.
I know I'm not one of the good people. I'm just normal. That's the problem.
It may please you to know that the current expectation is that the population will cap out around 10 Billion, as more parts of the world develop sufficiently that women gain control of their own reproductive rights and as child mortality drops. The new worry is whether there will be enough young poor people to work for the rich old people and sustain the expectations of growth that underpin most retirement systems.
If it makes you feel better, there's basically zero chance that we won't be able to feed everyone, even if population increases drastically. Like most developed countries France (as an example) is only 33% cropland and yet has an absurd food surplus. Russia is only 7% cropland; Africa likely even less. In addition cropland has been increasingly productive -- roughly 3x as productive per acre since your mother was born, though that trend obviously will have some sort of upper limit. Finally, we currently use cropland very inefficiently. Growing alfalfa for Gulf horses, corn for fuels (especially in the US), etc. Overall it's extremely unlikely we won't be able to feed everyone!
Food is mostly a logistics issue, which can include corruption, war, etc. But yeah, it's not an issue of capacity.
My answers: "Very optimistic" and "Neutral". Given the state of the Western world, pretty weird answers, right? I answer these on a metric of stoic pragmatism, a modality that has kept my sanity relatively intact for the past several years, and as such, I measure these solely on my own terms at how I see things for myself. State of the world is absolute dogwater, but I don't let myself lose sleep over it. That would be a waste of resources when I could be doing something, anything large or small, to better myself. In ten years, I'll be nearly pushing forty, and I know I've got plenty of years ahead of me, so I just take it one day at a time, because "this too shall pass".
So then, if all that's the case, why "Neutral" for question two? I can't predict the future. I don't know where I'll be for certain in the next six months, most likely doing the same thing I've been doing for the last six, and the six before that, and the six before even that. You get used to the routine. I would post relevant song lyrics I made some time ago that encapsulates this feeling, but...I don't want to get my comment removed!
I am somewhat optimistic about my future.
But I am somewhat not optimistic about the future as a whole.
So maybe I should have put neutral?
I feel like my life is going well. Not the best, not by any stretch, but at least when it comes to my immediate experience, I am looking forward to the future.
I might just be enjoying a position of privilege however, because at a global scale, we seem like we're tumbling down to ruin so I don't know what to say in the end. Kinda neutral maybe. I do keep hope as best as I can.
I’m a little optimistic. We have the means to improve our quality of life. But we need to organize around that goal. Once people start demanding that a lot can improve.
I have some strong feelings about this so here is my argument for optimism:
Technology has been going up the whole time, and the culture war is set up to rubber-band in the good direction in a few years. Just as the pendulum had swung far in the progressive direction in 2015 before rubber-banding to conservative-reactionary. The problem for the conservatives is that they've tried to artificially lock in their win by subsidising podcasters and buying up platforms to fragment critical communities, which has only pulled the spring back further. When it snaps back there will be political change.
Optimism is a pragmatic political choice. You can only make the world better if you believe it can get better. Doesn't matter if you don't see how. If you care, you must believe there is a way to fix things, you must be waiting every day for something to come along, for someone to come up with something and then get behind it. You must savour the small victories, because every big victory is made of a thousand small ones. I speak Irish in the home with my one-year-old. We already have a small library of books in Irish for kids and adults. That means the Irish language will still be alive in the year 2100. That's a victory. It doesn't fix the general trend, but there is no solution to the trend if nobody is willing to do that.
Doomerism (often) isn't a political belief, it's procrastination. This doesn't apply to everybody obviously but it also isn't nobody. Social media culture dictates that everyone has political positions, but most of them don't want to act on those beliefs because they're social media addicts, all they wanna do is scroll and post. Their excuse is doomerism. In terms of online discourse doomerism is kind of perfect: it's a strong belief so you're not an uninformed centrist normie, you have maximum scope to criticise every other ideology that does things in the flawed real world, it's too abstract and passive to be criticised itself, and you don't have to do anything to prove your commitment or avoid being called a hypocrite. I reject doomerism because I see it for the trap it is: an excuse to be comfortably lazy. Excluded from this are, obviously, people who have literally lost hope due to long-term material and political conditions holding them down. They can and should feel how they feel. But non-marginalised people like me should not be hiding from the world's problems in the comfort of our safe homes.
Like, how optimistic am I about the future of my life, or the world?
Because my life is going great but I'm like 90% sure multiple major governments are going to collapse and/or go full fascist dystopia in the next decade.
I'm having an even harder time with this one than the video game question. 😅
"The future" is pretty big. The future of what? The world? My country? Myself and my family? Over what timeframe? I have such different answers based on these criteria that I might be better off abstaining.
We are doomed, and things are going to be great. I don't know what that translates to but it isn't "neutral".
I've become a big fan of leaving the survey questions very open in that way with a limited set of answers. And then having the topic available for discussion on how people interpret the question. :)
Is it possible to add a link back to the originating Tildes post on the survey site after you've completed it, or a redirect directly back to page?
That is certainly possible, I will get around to that somewhere later today. :) Good idea!
We're doomed! Maybe you didn't know it, but the whole Earth will be swallowed by our Sun!
I'm kinda optimist. I believe the near future will not be that bad - somewhat optimistic.