The World as You'll Live It: A Young Person's Guide to the Next Thirty Years

By Connor Matteson

Are you curious about what the future could hold, but have no earthly idea where to even begin finding out more? Look no further!

The World As You'll Live It: A Young Person's Guide to the Next Thirty Years

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Aug 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885046626

Book preview

The World as You’ll Live It

A Young Person’s Guide to the Next Thirty Years

Connor Matteson

new degree press

copyright © 2022 Connor Matteson

All rights reserved.

The World as You’ll Live It

A Young Person’s Guide to the Next Thirty Years

ISBN

979-8-88504-546-9 Paperback

979-8-88504-872-9 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-662-6 Digital Ebook

This book might have my name on the cover, but its creation would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of many other people.

Foremost, my family: Mom, Dad, and Mel, thank you for being some of the very first people to support both my growth as a writer and my decision to write this book. I’ve come a long way from writing comics with crayons, haven’t I?

Thank you to David Kamien and Peter Rutland for your thoughtful advice on this book’s content and for your strong support in bringing it over the finish line.

Thank you to those at the Creator Institute and New Degree Press who worked with me for over a year to help hone my vision for this project and make the final version as well written as possible, including Eric Koester, Asa Loewenstein, and John Chancey.

And lastly, thank you to my peers and fellow young people working for positive and forward thinking change around the world, wherever you may be. Your courage, creativity, and idealism inspire me every day. I hope by reading this book, I can repay a fraction of the motivation you have given me.

Contents

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Introduction

Chapter 1

The Industrial Revolution

Chapter 2

American World Order: Part One

Chapter 3

American World Order: Part Two

Chapter 4

Multipolar World

Chapter 5

Climate Change and Migration

Chapter 6

Changing Technologies

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix

"I am not an optimist.


I’m a very serious possibilist."

—Hans Rosling

Introduction

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Being in your early twenties is a time of being between places. Between groups of friends, between cities, and between ways of identifying yourself and making sense of the world. You are awash in knowledge but lacking in experience. You are full of energy but starved for direction.

Nowhere had I felt this dynamic more than when I visited one of my high school friends, Justin, during March 2020. He went to school in Texas while I went to school thousands of miles away from him in Connecticut. But by happy coincidence our spring breaks lined up perfectly, and we quickly made plans for a week of hiking, camping, and city touring throughout the Lone Star State. We were in his apartment one afternoon, resting up from an excursion to some dinosaur fossils and preparing for a drive to the Alamo the next morning, when we both got the news.

Justin, I said while looking down at my phone, it looks like I’m not going back to school…

What? he exclaimed, immediately sitting up and paying attention.

I just got an email… I replied, my voice laden with obvious dread. They’re instructing everyone to go home and putting all classes online for the rest of the semester because of the coronavirus. As a committed news junkie, this was not the first time I had heard of the emerging disease that would dominate headlines over the next two years. However, it was the first of many times that it began to intrude upon areas of my life I had previously taken for granted.

Woah… hey, look at the bright side, man! You get to go to class right from your room. I’m pretty jealous of you.

Approximately two hours later, Justin yelled indignantly from the next room over that his classes, too, would all be online, which, in his own words, was terrible!

What do you mean ‘this is terrible’? Weren’t you saying before that you were jealous of me?

Dude, c’mon, I was just saying that to cheer you up!

We made the decision to take a three-day road trip back to our hometowns in New Jersey over the next several hours, a process that was interspersed with calls to our families, cramming our suitcases, and hurriedly wolfing down takeout. With the world around us seemingly changing by the hour, we decided we couldn’t go wrong by staying as far away from airports as we could and sticking close to our loved ones while waiting out the crisis.

As we made our way back home, our conversations alternated between casual banter about our recent activities and serious discussions about the future. In the same conversational thread, we would relive our experience at a Dallas taco truck festival and speculate if nationwide food shortages were going to ensue. We reminisced about a crowded river crossing during one of our hikes and wondered if crowded places were going to become a thing of the past. We were caught between the carefree bliss of youth and the sober-minded responsibility the world now suddenly demanded from us.

My generation is currently on the cusp of leaving this in-between place. As at the time of this book’s publication the earliest members of Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2000) are in the midst of entering the workforce. Meanwhile, the youngest members (those born between 2007 and 2012) have just reached the age where they can begin to exercise critical thinking and form independent judgments about the world around them. As we enter this new stage of our lives and venture out into the wider world, that world stands to rapidly change on several critical fronts over the next three decades.

In world politics, the American-led international order that has been in place in some form or another since the end of the Second World War is fraying. Nations that have historically been on the margins of global decision-making, like China and India, are demanding a seat at the table