Why are these kinds of stories so hard to sustain, so often subsumed by negative and dystopian visions when the fact is, nobody can predict the future. Assuming dystopias has an element of self-fulfilling prophecy, but it’s also unlikely things will unfold exactly as anyone predicts.

Because we live in a free-floating state of anxiety, we don’t even need a problem to set off a stream of disaster scenarios. Living in the future creates the illusion that we are managing our life and steels us against personal failure.

How might we still be OK, even if it all fell apart? Entertaining the most extreme consequences can be the best way to finally neuter an otherwise nagging concern. One by one, we should confront the worst, and see that it is, for the most part, very survivable.