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Originally Posted by manaboutown
My greatest concerns are the huge national debt and our disappointing (to say the least) public school systems which have been declining since the SAT scores peaked during the early 1960s. Student scholastic performance has gone downhill ever since. The decline became so blatantly and embarrassingly obvious the SAT was dumbed down in 1994. Today most colleges need to offer remedial English and Math courses to incoming students. The future does look grim.
Of course a large war could erupt or we could be hit with another pandemic. My father got and survived the Spanish Flu in 1918 but it killed more people that did The Great War. One just never knows.
An easy to read classic written about investors' experiences during the Great Depression era is "Where are the Customers' Yachts?" by Fred Schwed Jr. I found it rather chilling.
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One cannot spend the present worrying about the future.
In my grandparent's time (born 1901), it was WWI. The world was not going to survive a massive all-in global war! Then the stock market collapsed when they were 28 years old.
In my parent's time (born 1928/1929), it was WWII. The world could not survive the great European war as it spread across Asia and dragged in all of America as well.
In my brother's time, the fear was we would all die because of the Cuban missile crisis. The world was doomed.
In my time, the Cold War promised mutual nuclear annihilation coupled with the AIDS crisis sweeping the globe.
In my children's time it was the housing bubble bursting and dragging the new information frontier tech stocks with it. Then the Covid pandemic came and threatened to wipe everyone off the face of the earth.
There will always be something that some will say, "Why bother, it's not worth the effort, we are all going to die soon anyway."
In twenty years there will be something else. And that too will likely pass.