Do you care what happens next?

How it feels inside for me is that people are important and matter much more than amoebas, it even feels like there is someone out there who cares and who is in control of everything, but when I ask myself what is the objective evidence that my feelings are true I have no answer. It isn't a problem for me that I cannot reconcile the contradiction.We do know that people don't matter to things like the cosmic dust of interstellar space. People don't even matter to most life from amoebas to hamsters. People only begin to matter to more intelligent life (e.g., dogs tend to care when they lose their owners), and of course people matter to other people. But what evidence is there that anything else cares about us?Do I care what happens next? Immensely.But in the last year or so my eagerness and anticipation of the future has been affected by recent world events, adding fears that weren't there before. Though there were hints, the years leading up to World War II provided no indications of the depth and magnitude of the upcoming tragedy. Our present contains even stronger hints of upcoming troubles, and there seem few indications of the world shifting to a more positive course. One very troubling parallel is that as Jews tried to flee the growing Nazi threat doors slammed around the world, the same as today for Middle Eastern refugees.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo: dust => space.

You may be right. Sometime within the past few years a study found that violent death has been declining steadily over the past some thousand years...oh, wait, I found the source, a Steven Pinker TED talk. I didn't know that was the source. I heard about the study when I tuned in to the end of a radio interview with someone whose name I didn't catch, but it must have been Pinker. Here's a version of his talk from YouTube: Pinker says we may be living in the most peaceful time in human history.--Percy

I began factoring that into the equation decades ago. If I were to methodically go over a map and list all the countries that I would have felt safe visiting 30 years that I would not feel safe visiting today, and vice versa, I think it would show far more countries moving into the "not safe" category. Here's a list off the top of my head: This list is just a number of countries from the Middle East where most of the unrest is. There are naturally a large number of countries that were safe to visit then and now, but my fears stem from the shrinking list of safe countries to visit.--Percy