"We Are In A Mass Extinction Event": These 46 Things Have People Concerned About The Future

Pretty much the entire US. But if you want to cite one specific thing, the civil infrastructure: roads, dams, bridges, sewers, etc. It's all little more than painted-over rust. We are headed for some major disasters in the country, and it won't be because illegal aliens are picking lettuce or because the library has a gay book in it.

Picture this: it's 2029, and The Big Quake finally hits LA. Now mainly due to the state's super-strict earthquake building codes (or as Republicans call them, "job-k*****g regulations"), the surface damage and deaths are relatively light. But underground, it's a different story. Hundreds of miles of aging sewer lines collapse into rubble, and for months--maybe years--nobody in downtown LA can flush a toilet. Think people might get interested in the topic THEN?

Everything.

Bottom half of the entire u.s. population only own 2.5% of wealth. Wages have stagnated for decades, costs have soared.

Guess what? Consumer spending is finally so low that Mcdonalds is begging people to come back. Small businesses are dropping like flies.

Theres about to be a whole lot of people homeless in a decade.

The people living paycheck to paycheck a few years ago are now homeless. Cycle repeats.

Then you have rampant corruption, all the U.S. media is owned by 6 companies.

Few countries are much better in terms of income/spending.

Produce. Immigrant farm workers are either in ICE detention and being processed for deportation, or they're justifiably too scared to be available. Nobody else has the intestinal fortitude to do the work. Fruit and veg aren't showing up on store shelves -- they're all out rotting in fields and orchards.

Bees. They are basically gone. I seen two this summer so far and I have extensive gardens planted with native species.

The Cascadia Subduction Zone.

Altril2010:

There was a really interesting article published a month or so ago about the subduction zone. It turns out that not all the faults are connected. So even when the “big one” hits the way the plates react is going to be slightly different than originally projected. Some areas will be much worse off and a few others may not see as much as an impact. It also means that if one area of the fault slips it doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole zone will.
No evidence for an active margin-spanning megasplay fault at the Cascadia Subduction Zone

Democracy.

The US.

Blenderhead36:

The imminent collapse of the US is possibly the most-talked-about thing in the world. I've had to stop listening to multiple podcasts that are not about current events because of how much time they were devoting to the imminent collapse of the US.

All economies are speeding toward techno feudalism at 500 mph. The greed may k**l us all.

The Anthropocene.

Anthropocene is a term that has been used to refer to the period of time during which humanity has become a planetary force of change. It appears in scientific and social discourse, especially with respect to accelerating geophysical and biochemical changes that characterize the 20th and 21st centuries on Earth.

Restaurant industry. What use to be a once a week treat or every payday is now every few months. Night out now cost a week’s worth of groceries.

Us constitution.

The 'enrollment cliff' is starting. This year, the lack of kids born during and after the 2008 recession are starting to graduate h**h school. In this population pyramid, you can see that starting at the 15-19 age group, birth rates went down and kept going down. Now, it was already going down on average, but right before the recession there was a small uptick that could have been a turnaround.

Any institution that works with h**h school grads have been panicking for the last few years knowing that this demographic shift is going to happen. Smaller universities have already been closing or merging into the state system. The US military has already been having issues with recruitment (for multiple reasons, not just population). There literally are less kids available to recruit (university, military, trade school, internships, entry level jobs that don't require college) than the year before. Then, starting in ~4 years, there is going to be difficulty recruiting college grads, for the same reason. Kids and adults going to the trades just compounds this issue.

CynthiaChames:

I also think a large part of it is Gen Z apathy. I'm sure they see their millennial siblings struggling to find secure work with their expensive degrees and wonder why they should invest in college too. 

Colleges.

CynthiaChames:

My dad works at an admission office for a community college and they're having a hard time filling classes. I also worked at a h**h school-to-college transition program and we had to pivot our curriculum because an increasing number students were more interested in trades. We all got laid off because, amongst other things, we couldn't fill our quota for college acceptances. There was just so little interest. 

Society. We are living through unprecedented technological and econonomical upheaval and I think almost everyone can feel it. The fabric that holds our communities and societies together is slowly unraveling.

The Gulf Stream.

Hope. Desire to live.

Fireflies.

Between climate change (frequency & severity of storms) and inflation/tariffs (cost to repair), the insurance industry is taking a huge hit.

Premiums are on the rise to try to offset it, which as a consumer I’m not happy about either, but a few more major catastrophes and even the largest, most stable carriers could belly up.

I mean, human civilization truthfully but people are talking about it. Especially the United States. It's being discussed but people are convinced something like that can't happen. Ya know because powerful countries and civilizations have NEVER collapsed before.

Western civilization. Crumbling infrastructure, regulatory capture, increasingly authoritarian governments with autocratic aspirations, idiocracy of the masses. It's all lining up.