I don't feel like the world is about to fall apart so much as its already in the midst of it. I don't like the analogy personally, but it's the boiling frog. Just because the water isn't fully boiled yet doesn't mean the frog isn't already cooked.

That probably sounds pretty dark, depressing, and nihilistic as well as overly pessimistic and extreme to a lot of people. For me it is just a logical observation, like if I saw a delivery truck pulling out of my driveway and I conclude that I must have just gotten a package delivered.

At the heart of the matter are the two principle mechanisms I feel could hold things together. First, is people working together. Second, is technological solutions.

People will work together to solve problems, but now that things are actually falling apart, it's more like (the other analogy I don't like but I'm going to use anyway) crabs in a bucket. Too many people are in it for themselves, grabbing everything they can for themselves, pulling the ladder up, and it's more than enough to overwhelm the people who can and do work together to make things better.

Technology isn't even being used to solve easily solvable and relatively tractable problems, in fact, it's often being used to make things worse. I suppose I could go on my old man yells at clouds rant about technology at the grocery store. Instead of using it to make sure the shelves stay stocked and things aren't out of stock for weeks, we use it to adjust prices on a daily basis via e-ink displays and then forcing people to use terribly implemented self-checkouts. Now imagine that kind of problem solving being used on actual meaningful problems. Some of the technological "fixes" sound great on paper, but in the end they solve nothing at best and on average seem to make things worse.

So from that perspective, yeah, you might say I'm a bit worried at a minimum.