I'll never forget one of my freshman "intro to engineering" courses in college the professor spent probably 15 min on the very first day going on about peak oil and how we were all doomed. He said this to a class full of kids enthusiastic about their future who want to build and make the world a better place. To this day, it was the single most toxic thing i've ever experienced and this was in the mid/late 1990's! If only one kid took his brain/soul poison to heart it would be a tragedy.

Yeah peak oil. I remember books on the bestseller racks about that one.

I was amused when the Peak Oil site The Oil Drum shut down because of the dwindling number of contributors of "high quality content".

There's a middle ground between doomerism apathy and optimistic status quo that problems aren't that bad so business as usual. People become pessimistic when they see societal structures that prevent actions dealing with serious problems. You don't have any justification or saying the long term trend is always positive. The future has many possibilities, not all good. The human past is a mixed bag. Trends are trends until they're not. Past wrong predictions are not guarantees those or similar predictions won't come true in the future.

We really don't know that democracy will always prevail, that capitalism is sustainable in the long term, and that our current global civilization is immune to collapse. We don't know there will never be a nuclear war or that climate change won't hit the wrong tipping point. We don't know that humanity's future will continue to be better off indefinitely.

I agree, we don't know. But you can orient your life around the negative, find every excuse for why you are not succeeding or happy, spend too much time complaining about it all, and never make any progress. Or you can assume that things will work out eventually, pursue your goals, and probably end up in a better place.

> We don't know that humanity's future will continue to be better off indefinitely.

Right. We don't. And we never did. What I was saying is that when I was young, there was plenty of reason to believe everything would go to hell soon... and we were wrong, things got a lot better. There's just no way to know.

The last Romans living in the Roman Empire in 400AD may have also concluded that their problems would eventually be solved and they would continue thriving, just like they had for a thousand years. But they would be wrong. Just go back to 100AD and they would be mostly right: they still had a good 300 years in front of them (so they would never see a collapse, nor their children and grandchildren).

So yeah, eventually things will undoubtedly take a very negative turn. The question really is, will that be in 10, 100 or 1000 years? You don't know, I don't know. But given the above , I think it's fair to conclude that by being positive you're almost always correct.