How much of the misery of the Great Depression was due to foreclosures and split up families? That marked all of those that lived through it, oddly enough, probably for the better. That Great Depression working generation had to learn how to work and that got them through a war, but by managing the blood of those of the youngest of the 30’s. They appreciated the benefits of family ties and went to great lengths to just hang on. Unfortunately most of the generation that had to try and work through the Great Depression are rolling in their graves. Anyone born after 1935 could only have the vaguest childhood memories of the Depression and can not image just how much damage collective greed and over extension can do.

Unfortunately, when we finally come out this time around, there will not be as much raw stuff lying around to be discovered or improved upon to stimulate us out as far as the first post-war generation got catapulted, with the senior management of those who worked through the depression. Ever see any of the future-looking movies or pre-infomercials from those 2-3 post war decades… nothing was impossible in the World Of Tomorrow. Who is writing the really brilliant sci-fi these days… like the stuff that came out in reams in the Hugo Awards? Where is that optimism about the future, fanciful as it was, now? Gone! Why? No one can dream up enough undiscovered laws of the universe to make anything even remotely feasible whose pre-cursors can not already be found all around us.

Sure, some isolated neat stuff will happen in the future, but not for most of us. There is no more uncharted territory that we can get to. Rather than making continental-type leaps forward we will be just turning over every rock in the garden to see if there isn't something unfamiliar underneath it. Those born after 1990 or so are going to come out of university in a few years or so and look around at all of the accumulate mess and not have a clue how to go about cleaning it up and nothing to clean it up with and no chance of any new gadgets coming along to solve their problems.

My advice to every able-bodied person : learn a second trade that will be useful when it all hits the fan. No I'm not talking about the survivalists of the cold war era. We are unlikely to nearly sterilize the planet but it will get bad and a great many people will be rotting 20-40 years from now. My guess is that those who are better prepared and more flexible will fare better than those who are not. Teach your kids to work, hard enough so that they really ache for about 2-3 days afterwards so that when they stop aching they realise that they can survive discomfort. We are not significantly different from neo-lithic peoples after the initial dispersion out of Africa. We just compounded efficiencies for buying and spending.

Speaking of sci-fi, have a read of John Brunner’s Shockwave Rider (1975 set in early 21st century) or Stand On Zanzibar (1968 set in US 2010).