Not really, each time is roughy the same; lots of people run around panicing and yelling that the world is ending, things change a bit and everyone settles down again. Afterwards things may be better, or they might be worse, but they’re ‘normal’ again and so the panic receeds. People look around, and the world is pretty much exactly as it was before, and the individual changes are understandable. Much more insidious are the slow changes, that you barely notice as they happen, but leave one generation wobdering why the next doesn’t just buy a house if rent is so expensive.

I’ve had the dubious pleasure of living through the threats of global cooling, acid rain, continent spanning wars, nuclear armegeadon, global financial collapse and goodness only knows what else. The nice thing about end-of-the-world panics is that you can only be right once.

I’m being a little flippant, but humans have a knack of pulling back from the brink in time, usually not before causing themselves a great deal of pain, but before things change beyond recognition. We do face a number of potentially catastrophic challenges at the moment, anthropogenic global climate change (I’ve found calling it climate change, rather than warming helps more people listen, rather than rejecting it out of hand), capitalism that’s largely out of control, fascists running major goverments, brainwashed populations and a miriad of other issues. Maybe this is the time where the end-of-the-worlders are correct, but I’m banking on us solving these problems one at a time.

the reasons are making more sense as time goes on though.

I’m kind of in the same boat as you. I personally don’t think it’d be beautiful, more it’d be different. I just want to not be in debt and be smothered by our current society ruled by the dollar.