(please don’t take these too seriously, I just watched like 6 super dark movies in a row) A vast majority of students and people in this world kind of just float through life without any purpose or goals. The intersection of western and asian culture is that 1. You either do what you love or 2. You do what makes you money (ie whatever is the most difficult) so that you don’t die on the streets. Now, however, there seems to be a lot of people that have no idea what they’re doing and only want to do easy things (likely, it has always been this way, but I haven’t done enough research on this or have enough lived experience to make a judgement on this). The polarization of social media additionally adds to the continual dogmatic approach to politics, life views, values and everything in general. This is so much clearer in the US than any other country. My argument for why this is happening is because the US’ idea of freedom of thoughts combined with the inability of the education system to beat out parents with statistically incorrect ideas for how their children should be taught. Among non-religious people in the US, only 89% of them believe in evolution, which is crazy to think about. 1/10 people in the US don’t believe in evolution. In religious people, it’s much higher of course. I don’t remember off the top of my head, but it’s in between 40-60%. This is an indication of how schooling still will not beat what individual families preach to their children, and it shows how society has lagged behind technological and scientific advancement. Society, as it becomes more polarized with the advent of populist leaders like Trump, Modi, and Boris Johnson, is demonstrably becoming worse over time, even as the economy does well. All of this, I think, is magnified by social media and its impact on people’s perception of things, and I think that as a result, society will begin to stagnate. There’s also the idea of evolution that comes into play, where humans’ ability to fill in gaps of knowledge has played an important role in survival. If humans thought all the time about things not important to survival, such as the big bang, our role in the universe, what the sun is made out of, etc. then we would all die of starvation. But now we live in the information era, where it becomes more and more increasingly clear that curiousity will bring someone much further than at any previous point in human history, and I think that, if we were to pause societal progress at this point, curiousity would be the trait that evolves the fastest in humans. Idk if there’s actual discussions on what society will do to evolutionary progress, lmk.