2013 — Different Year, Same Old Crap

In much knowledge is much grief, and he who increases his knowledge also increases his sorrow
— Ecclesiastes 1:18

The year 2012 is nearly over. Naturally our thoughts turn to the future as New Year's Day approaches. Specific predictions about the future almost never pan out, although on the rare occasion somebody gets lucky. Only trends are important, whether they end with a whimper or a bang.

And the trends say that in 2013 we will experience the same gradual deterioration we saw in 2012 — different year, same old crap. Generally speaking, people come in two varieties: optimists and pessimists. Those in the first group vastly outnumber those in the second, but you can count on all of them to be optimistic or pessimistic right on cue if you give them half the chance.

A quick search of youtube reveals that the pessimists ("bears") are dominating the intertubes, although they are few in number. So if you want some Doom & Gloom forecasts for 2013, watch Harry Dent, Eric Sprott, Jim Rogers, Gerald Celente, Marc Faber or Peter Schiff. If you looking for a special treat, listen to Alex Jones interviewing Jesse Ventura.

All those guys will tell you that some human-caused disaster will befall the global economy next year, and that could happen, this being Planet Stupid, but such an event is not very likely. For example, here in the United States, it is likely "the recovery" will continue, with tepid, phony, annualized GDP growth of about 2% and the economy adding (on average) about 150,000 shitty or imaginary jobs per month, depending on how enthusiastic the BLS statisticians feel when they make the various "adjustments" to the raw survey data.

And yet, regardless of the official recovery story, and all the other bullshit stories, little will change. Current trends will continue apace, to wit—

The incomes of ordinary Americans will stagnate or deteriorate.
Wealth and income inequality will get worse.
Household debt will increase slightly, decrease slightly, or stay the same. In any case, there will be a lot of it.
The public debt will grow and grow, rendering the word "trillions" meaningless.
The Federal Reserve will print money to cover most of the new public debt.
New banking scandals will come to light, but no bankers will go to jail.
Paul Krugman will call for a "World War II" kind of stimulus to fix the economy.
Some drivers who spot a box turtle crossing the road will run it over to reassert their pride of place as members of the dominant species on this planet.
Nifty technology from Apple and other tech wizards will make our lives richer and easier every day
Our corrupt, dysfunctional government will remain corrupt and dysfunctional.
The miracle of fracking in low permeability "tight" shale rock reservoirs will prompt optimists at Citigroup to tell us the United States is the next Saudi Arabia.
Crude oil will be expensive.
There will be more extreme weather events, which will result in renewed calls to fix global warming, which will be ignored.

These, and a thousand other things, will continue in 2013 just as they did in 2012.

On the planetary scale, none of the gradually unfolding, disastrous trends I write about will be reversed. Humankind's "progress" on the road to self-destruction is slow (on the human time scale) but steady.

On a personal note, I will complete my 60^th year on this planet in 2013, a scary prospect which was still unimaginable to me a mere 10 years ago. About 25 years ago, I began a long, bumpy journey to find out what in hell was going on on this planet, and I'm now pretty much satisfied that I do indeed know what's happening here. The news has not been good, as the quote from Ecclesiastes implies. It is true—in knowledge there is much grief, and more sorrow inevitably follows from any increase in that knowledge.

As the years went by, as my knowledge increased, as my perception sharpened, as the trends became obvious, as a good-enough approximation of Human Nature was revealed to me, as my sorrow increased, it occurred to me to ask a very simple question—why is the news always so bad? After all, when I started out all those years ago in the same state of delusion and ignorance that most people still live in, the outcome could have gone either way, or so it seemed to me. It wasn't necessarily the case that humans are irredeemable fuck-ups.

But as the years rolled by, and my knowledge increased, in the observation and experience of life, and from books, I was literally pushed into the same depressing—inevitable, ineluctable—conclusions over and over again. DOTE is the result. Why is the news always so bad? Because that's just the way it is. This is very disappointing.

It is these personal considerations that form the world-weary perspective from which I contemplate another year on the Planet Earth, and think about what will happen here. The older and wiser among you will immediately recognize that I am right about our prospects in 2013 (and the year after that, etc.), regardless of whether there are some unpleasant surprises in store for us. And if there are, those nasty surprises will merely be the inevitable outcomes of trends which were cast in stone a very long time ago.

Find contentment where you can, and please try not to make things worse than they already are.

And on that note, I will conclude this 2013 forecast.

Bonus Video — Barbara Ehrenreich on the dangers of positive thinking