'Apocaloptimist' is a humorous term I recently heard that best describes how I've felt about the economy these last 4 years. The concept that it's all crashing down, but not to worry because we'll all be fine, in the end. I'm not sure that it's all going to come crashing down, but we're still not out of the recession/depression and there is a long road ahead before things improve to the point where we can feel confident about the future. Regardless of where we are, a quick review of history does point to one clear fact, and this is simply that mankind has a remarkable capability to adapt, make due, and eventually engage progress of a tangible nature.
We're still progressing today, just much more slowly.
But in the depths of a recession, true pessimists step forward. These are people who cannot see anything good, and refuse to take a simple step of reviewing history and seeing that bad times never last 'forever'. Absolutes can come back to haunt you, if used improperly. "We can never..." is the kind of phrase that inspires someone, somewhere to think, "Well, maybe we can...", and then they actually go out and do whatever it is we could never do.
Most human activity leads to peaks and those peaks are usually followed by valleys. Getting into the right frame of mind is how you get out of the valley and move to the next peak. Statements such as this, however, do nothing to help:
“No more fundamental innovations are likely to be introduced to change the structure of [today’s] society .... Like every previous civilization, we have reached a technological plateau.” — Jean Gimpel, technology historian, professor, and author.
Malthus was wrong, and 215 years later his views have still not provided any meaningful insights on how the world operates.
