I’m feeling pretty pessimistic about the future. While I don’t believe the apocalypse is coming any time soon, I’m afraid we’re about to endure some difficult times, with climate change and capitalism shifting more wealth and power to the elites. I don’t know if it’s because I’m relatively young (I’m 27) and just waking up to the horrors of adulthood, but the times I grew up in felt much more openly optimistic, so I feel stupidly unprepared for how rapidly everything is going downhill.
I would just like some perspective. I hold to the belief that this is just one difficult period among many in humanity’s history. We’ve had war and poverty and cruelty a billion times over through the centuries, and I want to know how people of those times found the will to keep going, find joy, or even fight for a better world.
Authors I enjoy are James Baldwin, Ted Chiang, and Ursula K. Le Guin, though I’d prefer recommendations from before the 20th century.
by azatouma
5 Comments
So this isn’t fiction, but there’s a tiny little book called Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis by Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky.
It helped me a lot
I’d try The Jungle by Upton Sinclair about immigrants living Chicago and working in the food processing industry at the beginning of the 20th century.
Steinbeck is good here too. The Grapes of Wrath focuses in on how the dust bowl displaced populations with no help from the government and is a stinging indictment. Of Mice and Men, my reading at least, is a very powerful, critique about society’s failure to provide for people who need help.
I liked Greenwood by Michael Christie . Wife and I was deciding whether we wanted a child , especially the way the world was (Covid times). The book is so bleak , with a majority of the book taking place during the Great Depression . But as you finish the book , you kind of realize that humanity survived all the crap that happened . All the terrible things that happened eventually become memory , leaving room for better things to happen . Then humanity moves on and ever forward .
God it was a good book .
Grapes of Wrath
How countries go broke by Ray Dalio. It’s maybe not what you looking for but it explains how debt and government ‘s management create a vicious cycle leading to economic crisis