Also, the Edge.org 2013 question has just come out, and they ask a bunch of prominent thinkers What should be worried about? I just spent a few hours skimming the whole giant page, and picked out a few favorites. At the top Geoffrey Miller writes about Chinese eugenics, and down the page Robert Kurzban writes about the destabilizing effect of the imbalanced sex ratio in China. Also on the subject of human demographics, Kevin Kelly writes about the underpopulation bomb.I still think there are non-trivial tail risks of this-century societal collapse running around. One is that climate change turns out to be a runaway process and basically burns all/most of the biosphere in a massive drought. Another is that the process of keeping ever larger numbers of technologically unemployed people from revolting turns out to be too hard. A third is a massive cyberwar.
]]>Having negative events happen to you, the study found, decreases your happiness but increases the amount of meaning you have in life. Another study from 2011 confirmed this, finding that people who have meaning in their lives, in the form of a clearly defined purpose, rate their satisfaction with life higher even when they were feeling bad than those who did not have a clearly defined purpose. "If there is meaning in life at all," Frankl wrote, "then there must be meaning in suffering."