September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy

I'm Polish, but this is such a pessimistic, overdramatic take. The visualisations are impressive, but you're living in Poland's golden age. See this Hacker News story with 1,000+ upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062117 The war in Ukraine is a tragedy, but it has proved that Russia is weak. The price shock will speed up the transition to renewables, and Iran is losing its grip on Hormuz. So many of the other issues are solvable. It's easy to be a pessimist, but there's a bright future ahead of us.

I feel like this is overdramatized a bit. For instance: it's mentioned that EU gas storage is at 67% and Germany's at 56%. What is not mentioned though is that Poland's storage is at 97% because the previous administration, for better or worse, was paranoid enough to invest in a sizeable marine gas terminal and the current one stocked up early. Regarding real estate: adjusted for inflation prices peaked 2.5 years ago, interest rates are also much lower than back then. Nobody is buying because all the Ukrainian refugees who were moving to Poland are here already and that's the last bump in population this country will see for the foreseeable future. Also there's the threat of war on Polish soil, which affects investor sentiment.

> Every generation believes it is living through the end of something. Many generations are. Last century saw the collapse of the British and Soviet empires - titans by any measure - through mismanagement. Europe as an international power was also broken (compared to how they used to be). I can easily imagine 1900s me fleeing to America in fear of the end times and feeling quite justified in his choices with hindsight. Less obvious where to run to these days as the US not-an-empire looks like it may crumble. Most of the people who died didn't get an opportunity to complain, so we live with some serious survivorship bias on how bad things got.

This is one of the most cogent summarizations of the status quo that I've seen. It leads nicely into a conclusion that, even without the preface, seems reasonable: build personal buffers of water, electricity, and cash.

Blame too much connectedness. Humans are not designed to be affected by things that happen 100's of miles away. They shouldn't even know the names or those far away places or people. They shouldn't have dependency on things that are produced far away. Tribal populations lived isolated lives. Most of human life on Earth involved only small-sized settlements with occasional visitors from the far away places. Connectedness opens the flood gates . You get inundated with news from every corner as if it is happening in you neighborhood and as if those are your people. You are not designed for this.