Alex Wright

“I saw some disturbing things: people I had gone to school with, whose personalities had sparkled with creativity and curiosity, went into the workforce and became depressed, dulled, and directionless. They were so tired and jaded that all they felt capable of doing at the end of a workday was flopping onto the sofa and watching Netflix. Democracy itself had become something of a joke, as everyone knew that business and political elites, not the mass public, determined the contours of government policy. There was a widespread sense of fear, anxiety, and helplessness. People joked that they didn’t know how long the human species had left, what with climate change and nuclear weapons and the steady piling up of mountains and mountains of garbage. The future seemed to hold, at best, something like the dystopia depicted in Pixar’s WALL-E: a grim, desiccated planet strewn with flaming rubbish, nary a plant in sight, and the remaining human population reduced to passive, internet-addicted lumps.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist