#so i REALLY wouldn't be surprised if some politician world leader or some ceo of an oil or arms company decides that total war is profitable

[deodatasslawson]

Nuclear war is still somewhat of a threat, albeit a lingering threat, considering there are some serious war-mongering politicians who are willing to amp up wars and even threaten nuclear war.

If it's not a nuclear war, it will probably be a world war or some other devastating war that will affect people worldwide.

So what occurs to me is that Baby Boomers/Gen X and Millennials/Gen Z (the cutoffs are a little arbitrary, but bear with me) both grew up in the shadow of extinction, but have had qualitatively different experiences of it.

For the Boomers, the big fear was a sudden, violent catastrophe; nuclear war. US and Soviet ships start shooting at each other off the coast of Cuba; someone, somewhere in the huge and ponderous Cold War military apparatus, mistakes a meteor for an incoming ICBM, and just like that, your world is over. You're always just one bad day away from death on an unimaginable scale.

This fear has never really gone away (and certainly it's had something of a revival, recently), but it went into remission after the end of the Cold War. For Millennials, the overwhelming fear isn't of a sudden catastrophe, it's of a death by a million cuts; global warming. A slow decay growing faster; a downward spiral as everything you love and value crumbles and rots and turns to garbage around you.

When what you fear is a sudden catastrophe, normalcy--"business as usual", abstracting maybe a few reforms of the political systems--becomes a refuge. It could all be gone in a flash, but at least it's here now. It's real, it's solid. You can live in it, while it's standing.

When what you fear is a slow rot, "business as usual" becomes part of the horror. You're not escaping anything; you notice things getting worse around you with every passing summer; even worse, you are--however infinitesimally--assisting in your own demise; slowly and thoughtlessly, you are weaving the rope that will be used to hang you. Normalcy becomes your executioner.