"The Limits to Growth" came out in 1972. Friends and I began offering a course called "Futures" to assess the book's predictions and other frightening and worrisome ideas. A sizeable portion of the students in the class, which was optional and not required by any major, were natural resources majors, studying such fields as forestry, wildlife management, water science and soil science. They introduced me to many fears and scary things I hadn't thought about before: a spate of earthquakes, a takeover by nasty foreigners, a total debasement of our currency, no water. The Limits to Growth predicted by 2025 we would be out of water, overcome by wastes and garbage, unable to breathe our highly polluted air, be too crowded with overpopulation and other difficulties.
I admit that we have 7 years to go and that such yucky problems could still get us a year or two later. Besides that, I know of many other possible widespread problems such as 15 feet of snow and narrowspread ones such as my developing lung cancer. I feel too lazy to worry. I am a fan of Alfred E. Neuman. It might be that multiple decades of meditation and watching my mind make subjects to think about, or to worry about, or to hope for, extra-slippery. I see that I am worrying about the next hurricane and I decide to think about how lucky I am to have the family I do. I try to avoid news olds having to do with those in and around our capital city but sometimes I fail. When that happens, the wrong name and the wrong subjects come to mind. But then I think of Nostradamus, and Chicken Little, and Cassandra and I recognize
How often predictions are totally wrong so why worry
How challenges and difficulties often spur us to better ways of doing things
How frequently American and other humans have faced problems and passed through them or swallowed them or laughed at them
How Byron Katie and other thinkers advise applying a little brain effort and asking what is the evidence that this problem is creeping up on me
How likely is it that I have fallen for a news item calculated to stir my fears and curiosity when I should be cutting the lawn?
I admire our better worriers. I am confident that some people, strong and practiced worriers, can get more worries into a morning than I can manage in a week. Mitch Horowitz in "One Simple Idea"and Barbara Ehrenreich in "Brightsided" take the opposite stance from Norman Vincent Peale in his famous "The Power of Positive Thinking". If you are aiming to get stuck in less positive thinking and face the dark truths of life more squarely, those two might encourage you.
