[Citation needed]
The sad part about believing in an afterlife is that it’s so easy to give up on the world we have to leave for the next generation.
Even if there would be a blissful afterlife, the people who survive you will suffer more for your complacency.
Yeah, we seem to misunderstand each other at every turn, it may be that we have too little common ground for this to be a productive exchange.
Let’s chalk it up to cultural differences and see if we can meet in a forum more conducive to nuance and building understanding.
I’m saying that sometimes it’s not fixable. We’ve been at this for about 200 000 years, almost nothing has been long term solved yet.
Besides, your perspective is iffy. From what you’re saying in the reply, you’ve ignored the suffering of the rest of the world until it affected you personally, and now you claim to speak for everyone affected? Seems like quite a douchebag thing to do.
The world will be different, this will probably not be what ends us all. We will more probably survive as a species only to put ourselves in a bind with even higher stakes. Our base social instincts are wired this way as long as there’s resource scarcity or inequality.
Bold words from a country built on the failure of other empires.
Science fiction is in it’s essence the exploration of a situation when all the confounding factors have been magicked/scienced away.
Not uncommonly it explores the requirements of the technical solution, what would the machine need to do for this to work out? And/or What happens if it doesn’t?
Take for example “Do androids dream of electric sheep” by Philip K Dick, it’s about finding androids advanced enough not to know they’re artificial and how to identify and relate to them when the only diagnostic is slow, clumsy, and suspect. It’s more an exploration of what makes a person than it’s around the marvels of The Machine™.
During the 1900s the vehicle for science to magick with had been machines, computers and AI. Remember that space travel, fission power, psychology, modern medicine were all new, hope inducing breakthroughs just this same period.
There’s also the issue that the definition of the genre came after it becoming large enough to matter. The edges between scifi, punk/cyberpunk, speculative fiction, isekai and even to fantasy are all made after the fact, meaning modern machines go into scifi, old machines go into steam-/diesel-/etc-punk. The main difference between Science, Magick, and Eldritch horror is how detailed the mechanics of the solution are described, and speak to different people.
But on the topic of the story not being centered around a machine: try the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons.
Or go the entirely other way with Ring World by Larry Niven. There’s plenty of machines-did-it in the fringes, but the central theme is to figure out what would be needed for a Ring World to exist, what would happen on it, and how would it be managed. It’s an exploration of physics more than anything - more “what is the machine” than “machines-did-it”.
And the Foundation series (Asimov) famously explore the premise “what if sociology works”, and the other details solved by throwing machines at them.
You also have The Culture (Iain Banks) series that center on/around post-scarcity society and explore that.
I get it, the world is overwhelming, and one person can’t possibly neither bear nor solve it all.
What helps is limiting your scope: lower your media diet, focus on real people and relationships, focus on the things you can do something about, and do those well.
That’s not the same as doing your thing at the expense of others’, but that it’s fine to learn and correct and simplify as best you can. If you learn that your car is made from endangered child labor and methane leeching radioactive rain forest - you don’t have to burn it at once, but be mindful not to get that type of car the next time.
Find one goal and task and keep your head down until you reach it, it’s the only way any of us can get any real work done.