It's the Eschaton, try to have fun, part I

[Doktor Howl]

You see all the craziness going around, right?  You can't miss it.  Another European war.  Trade wars starting up for reasons that not even the president can properly explain. Irrationality everywhere, from vaccines to flat Earth bullshit being taken seriously.

You can't even just blame our joke of a president or Elon Musk or whichever stuffed shirt you prefer to throw rotten fruit at.  These people were all elected.  Over 70 million Americans thought this was a GOOD IDEA.

It is all very confusing, so I thought, "Why not do a root cause of failure exercise on it?"  This would take years, so I'm going to focus on the things that can - somewhat - be isolated to the United States.

Start
Problem:  The economy is at first glance, banging right along.  But in reality, it's a hot mess, as can be seen by the stock market.  Why?

Reason 1: Stocks have been overvalued in a bull market, and some of what is happening is a correction.
Reason 2:  Trump is using tariffs and threats of tariffs to make the stock market pogo up and down like Mia Khalifa to create semi-predictable (for those who know when he's going to do it) ups and downs that connected investors can use to get filthy rich.

Leads to
Problem 2:  How did Trump get himself elected again, having done all of this before.

Reason 1:  After you cut away all the bullshit, people in America are bored and want the president to make good television.  In a rational world, you want the chief executive to bore you to tears. 
eason 2:  The media, of course, makes money on clicks, so they publish outrage porn.  To a bored population, this is addictive, so the media ramps up the outrage.

Leads to
Problem 3:  People are bored.

Reason 1: We have succeeded ourselves to death.  Humans aren't really designed for boredom.  As pursuit predators that had predators of our own, humans are natural adrenaline junkies.  It's been a long time since the last global war, and global war makes all other wars look puny.  Why bother, almost.
Reason 2: It's been a long time since everyone was focused on a grotesque engineering project (humanity's only real excuse for existing) like the Apollo program (The Covid thing was even bigger, but nobody noticed).  Since our leadership has forgotten how to build or even maintain anything, there is nothing for people to point at and brag about.  So the only way they can get dopamine is to get REALLY PISSED OFF.

Both of those reasons have a feedback effect.  Any attempt to do anything to deal with them will be treated by the population as some kind of partisan attack.

This sounds hopeless, but it's not.  Assuming you have a capacity for having more fun than you really wanted.

(To be continued)

[Faust]

Something bigger has been the unify force since people crowded around wood carvings in longhouses, if we don't find that again it's all over

[Pope Mome Apocrypha]

The horrors just aren't fresh anymore, so we're settling for man-made, and they're drawing a small crowd.

[Maerman]

As a non-American, I am both terrified and deeply amused by all these developments. It's like watching a plane full of clowns drop a brightly coloured nuke on a kindergarten, and hoping it's just a bad prank.