“It’s tough to be alive now,” the actor Timothée Chalamet recently said. “I think a societal collapse is in the air — it smells like it.”
The economist Deirdre McCloskey once put it, “For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell.” But is it? One may be alarmed about the state of the world. Perhaps you’re horrified at the risks and dangers that lurk about—pandemics, political chaos, riots, people at each other’s throats, unprecedented events. Perhaps you’re getting a strong whiff of societal collapse.
The Bible says the following: 2 Timothy 3:1-4
New International Version
3 But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—
Marcus Aurelius wrote, “that all of this has happened before. And will happen again—the same plot from beginning to end, the identical staging.” (Well, at least I know where the Sc-Fi BSG got the saying from.) during the Roman times you had The fall of the Republic. Nero. The Antonine Plague. Persecutions. A lot of nasty stuff.
As to our time what have I learned the hard way? Focus on what I control. Do my best. Live with virtue. I have more time behind me than in front. I can't justify my existence in the past. It was a waste, nothing was accomplished. I will try to justify my existence for the short future I have left. You can do the same if you want to.
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