5 Doubts and Fears About the Future Upon Turning 40 This Week
I am less optimistic than I was at 30, partially because I was right in my prophecies of 2024, but also because I am so sick today.
This is the 19th installment of the new “Axis of Genocide” series at this Zionist Substack, the successor to the “Antisemitism and Culture” series which can be read in two 30-essay collections here and here.
This new series will document and analyze the antisemitic genocidal war waged against Israel by the Hamas terrorist group and its primary supporter, the Islamic regime in Iran. The accomplices in this attempt at a second Holocaust — Vladimir Putin’s criminal-gangster state in Russia and the authoritarian regime in China — will also come in for scrutiny and loud condemnation, as will the non-state actors supporting them, particularly the international Muslim Brotherhood propaganda network, and radical activists of both the far left and the far right. Other evil states and terrorist groups will also receive scrutiny. You can find a list of previous installments at the end of this post. Thank you for your support.
When I turned 30 years old a decade ago, I wrote an article for the website where I was employed as an editor at the time, titled “5 Realizations Upon Turning 30 Today” in which I laid out my hopes and predictions for the future. Here were those realizations and a few quotes from the article:
1. I need to be a father someday.
2. I do not need to be a parent anytime soon. It may be a decade or more away. And that’s a good thing, I say unashamedly.
3. By the time I turn 40 — January 29, 2024 — we will either be in the middle of the next Big War or just starting into it.
4. By the time I turn 50 — January 29, 2034 — we will have won the Big War against the Shariah-Socialist slave state alliance.
5. By the time I turn 60 — January 29, 2044 — the neo-1960s will be upon us.
Some highlights from the piece:
“Ben Shapiro is the newest of my friends to join the parenthood club. I’m so thrilled for him and his wife. They’re going to love that little girl so much and just create the most extraordinary human being.
For most of my life I was agnostic on the parenthood question — it was largely a reflection of an agnosticism about, well, everything. A child was such a permanent decision, a no-going-back choice in which one decided that another’s life would come before one’s own.
What changed? What caused the light switch to flip over from the wobbly, maybe-kids-some-day, to YES, I have a responsibility and a need to become a parent? Finding the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with was only step one. There was another big change that had to happen:
I don’t hate myself anymore.
I think that’s what was really at the heart of not wanting to have children. People who see themselves as a broken ball of neuroses don’t want to compound their misery by spawning miniature versions of themselves who will likely be even worse than they are.”
“I know that there’s no reason to ever hate yourself because we’re all capable of transforming ourselves. We’re not hardwired or stuck with anything about ourselves. All problems have their solutions and we can become happier, more productive, better people if that is what we choose.”
“Biological reproduction is not a prerogative for our family so there is no clock counting down, pushing us for when we need to start. Adopting children will more than suffice.”
“Today it is as though we are in a neo-1930s and our culture and leaders are just as blind to the approaching Big War as they were 80 years ago. More so, actually. The Nazis didn’t advertise their intent to exterminate the Jews and acquire a nuclear weapon the way Iran does today. Neville Chamberlain had an excuse; Barack Obama doesn’t.”
“This period [the 2020s] will be akin to a neo-1940s. I am dead earnest in my belief that massive, global wars are coming soon in our lifetime. The slave states currently oppressing more than a billion people will not give up without a fight and the weapons of the future will make mass murder even easier.
“I do not fear these wars because I know America will win them.”
“What technology will we unleash to win it that will then transform our world in a burst of neo-1950s economic growth and cultural optimism? What will be the Manhattan Project of our era?
“I believe it’ll be the merging of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology — when the computers are so small and smart they’re able to help us out at the cellular level. At this level we’ll be able to communicate with machines as though they were extensions of our own bodies. The day will come when one won’t be able to tell the difference between how it feels to pick up something with your real hand and your robotic hand.”
“Or by that time will the distinction between man and machine be nonexistent? When we have computers floating around in our bloodstream and cybernetic replacement organs and limbs, what then?
“People expect me to feel bad for turning 30 today. Why? What’s another decade when we’ve got technology coming down the pipeline making it plausible for vast numbers of people living today to live well beyond 100?”
I intended to write this on Monday when my actual birthday was, or yesterday, or the day after. But the truth is I have felt absolutely terrible this week. Lower than I have in months.
How bad? I asked Sally to remove the sharp knives from the kitchen to make it more difficult for me to kill myself. The depressive aspect of the PTSD struck back, for reasons I don't really understand. My therapist said on Tuesday that it was probably a hold-over from the recent trip to Indiana. It's true that I haven't felt so great since getting back, but I attributed that to sickness - what we found out was an ulcer, which is now feeling fine - and just "not getting into my groove yet." I figured that I would eventually feel better.
And while I still felt rough for several hours this morning, maybe the fact that I can write this now is sign enough that I'm starting to get better. After all, I felt well enough to watch a movie with Sally last night. I introduced her to "No Country for Old Men," which we both enjoyed. It's a quieter film than I remembered.
Was I depressed about turning 40? Honestly, that wasn't it. If anything contributed to bringing me down, then it was simply reflecting back on the last decade, thinking about its disappointments, shocks and surprises. I couldn't help but review my life on this milestone birthday, and unfortunately, part of that meant thinking, once again, about the friends and former business colleagues who have lied to me and betrayed me. Thinking about the almost deadly PTSD I've fought since fall of 2021, which I'm clearly still fighting. But there was more.
1. While I still want to be a father and am amenable to a biological or adopted child, more and more I doubt that Sally and I are well enough to raise a family.
At the time I wrote that blog post a decade ago, my now-soon-to-be-ex-wife and I had not fully decided whether we were going to be parents. Soon we did, though, or rather, she did. Between her recently-diagnosed Lupus and an intense desire to focus on her art career, children soon dropped out of the picture. She called kids "the art killer," and mourned when her female artist friends got pregnant.
For many years, I thought raising a family would be out of the picture, that dogs and career would be all there was. Then Sally and I connected after the multiple assaults which effectively ended my marriage - and left me more broken and suicidal than ever before.
When Sally and I got together in 2021, it was partially because we found our values in alignment and realized we could raise a family together. Now we've been together for two years, and we’ve dramatically improved from where we started - living in a decent apartment, me working the best job I've ever had, and now with a dozen authors signed up for us to publish their books. (We're in production now on these titles, and it's going great - Mike Kilgore is a machine at churning out awesome artwork for these covers.)
But this doesn't feel good enough yet. More and more, it seems like Sally and I are both too sick - me with the PTSD, her with the chronic pain and decreased mobility from her catastrophic shoulder injury - to run around after a child. Some days, it feels like we're just getting by on our own, launching this publishing company right now.
I'm just in further doubt than ever before about the depth of what I can accomplish and handle. Perhaps it will just be having dogs and a career. At least this time, though, I'm with someone who loves me more than the Siberian Husky and painting pictures of Black and Latino women and LGBTQ people.
2. I fear this "Big War" which has now begun is going to be worse than I imagined a decade ago.
Well, on point 3 of my "realizations" 10 years ago, it looks like I was more correct than I wish I had been. As I type, two countries are waging outright war against free societies: Russia is trying to conquer Ukraine, and Iran is using its proxies - Hamas and Hezbollah - to try and conquer Israel. The Big War has begun, and it's not really going to end until those waging it are defeated. That's something which could happen in any number of ways and take years or a full decade, as I predicted in 2014.
Over the last decade, I've learned much more about war, the Middle East, and really, just how fuckin' evil most of humanity really is. The optimism of 30 has passed from this world as I've been seemingly perpetually beaten down, and watched as the movement I joined in 2009 shed its commitment to a Reaganite hawkish libertarian conservatism, choosing instead to worship one of the baby boomer generation's most corrupt, evil men.
Who is ready and willing to fight this Big War which has now begun? I look around at both Democrats and Republicans and see almost no one of seriousness. The only voice I can consistently rely on to articulate foreign policy views comparable to mine remains John Bolton, who I advocated for to get the GOP nomination in 2015:
3. I no longer think we're ever going to see a better, more optimistic time in America. I fear that the technologies which have so transformed our lives over the last 20 years are only going to fuel greater conflict and act as key weapons of war for those seeking to conquer free societies.
Back in 2014 I was very much a "tech optimist." I was part of a conservative "new media" movement which believed that the new technologies emerging could genuinely enable us to change the world, to counter and perhaps even someday replace a "mainstream media" which was "biased to the left." Inspired by Andrew Breitbart, whom I actually knew, the call was to return to journalistic standards of objectivity.
That didn't happen.
Instead, the right-wing media became even more biased to the right - and even more unreliable - than the "MSM" it sought to replace. Today the "conservative media" I participated in building is just a business, telling right-wing people what they want to hear - and what they don’t, as falsely stoking their customers’ worst fears seems to be a big part of it, too. There isn't even the pretense of journalism. Right-wing bloggers decided just on polemics and opinion, not the harder work of real journalism. They picked pageviews over principles.
Technologies are just tools, and there is no destiny that they will make us any better than we were before. In fact, they may make us worse. I won't run down the laundry list of the negative consequences which "social media" and the internet more broadly have wrought. Congress did a good job of hitting a number of them at their hearing yesterday:
I fear that what we're seeing today - the polarization of the populace, the mainstreaming and intensifying of antisemitism - is just going to continue. It has become such a big business model for so many people.
4. I now feel much more intense doubt about the potential of the merging of man and machine.
I do still suspect that in the next 20 years we'll get to a very "sci-fi" future with android beings and technologies which we can't even imagine now. But I have much less faith in those who would create such innovations.
Elon Musk recently announced one of his companies had inserted a computer chip into someone's brain. Ten years ago, I would have been thrilled and fascinated by this development. Now I'm skeptical for one reason: I do not trust Musk at all, about anything. The idea of trusting a man who promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories, who has empowered the world's Jew-haters with his platform - trusting him with your very brain? Are you fucking stupid?
5. I do see a ray of light, but it too comes with worries and fears: it looks like psychedelic medicine and therapies could be the transformative unknown which actually could have a positive effect on culture at a global level.
As I've tried to survive PTSD these last few years, there really have only been two approaches which have had the most consistent and effective results: medicinal marijuana and psychedelic medicines. (Psychiatry, talk therapy, and neurology have proved very hit-or-miss.) Here I have a moment for optimism. These very old tools, now properly understood as medicine and spiritual aids, could be revolutionary in the treatment of trauma.
And I've come to understand that much of the pain, hate, and radicalism in the world really comes from this. People experience some form of trauma, and then they do whatever they can to distract themselves from dealing with it properly - including becoming bigots, terrorists, and worshippers of all manner of ideological idols. Psychedelic experiences and the mental peace that comes from proper use of marijuana can counter this, breaking people out of the painful internal prisons where they’re trapped.
But I'm not entirely sure that it will. I fear that, in trying to get there, many wrong turns will be made. Many people might be harmed instead of helped, and the quest for profit will corrupt efforts to really help people.
If we can't trust our billionaire tech overloads to put chips in our brains, can we really trust them with this powerful medicine that can transform people's whole worldview and self-understanding in a few hours?
By the way, it's worth mentioning here something that’s now helped me tremendously, and could help you too - and it's entirely legal. Amanita Muscaria is the mushroom - the red and white toadstool made instantly recognizable by Super Mario Brothers. And all over the internet, there are places to buy gummies and other products which provide it, neatly packaged in therapeutic dosages.
Perhaps it will be part of this potential psychedelic revolution - the federal government and FDA can't easily regulate mushrooms and plants that grow naturally. The psychedelics which are illegal now - LSD and psilocybin in particular - do have potential to help people when used properly. But you don't need to wait for the laws to change here - Amanita Muscaria is effective and less intense than these other substances; thus, it’s easier to manage and dose properly. Give it a try if you've been struggling with trauma, depression, or other issues which have not been helped by today’s conventional treatments.
So there you go. I suppose this makes some degree of sense - most people aren't going to be as optimistic and full of sunshine at 40 as they were at 30.
But please - I may be wrong. Maybe there is reason for optimism for our world in the 2020s and beyond. What am I missing?
“The God of Israel is a God of the Desert.”
The previous pieces in the “Axis of Genocide” series:
Mainstream Political Positions Argued in Extreme Ways: A Manifesto of Sorts
The Vicious Vladimir Putin Is a Disgusting Antisemite Who Is Helping Hamas
Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Conversion to the Wrong Christianity for the Wrong Reasons
A Huge Collection of Statistics That Reveals Americans' Ignorance and Moral Confusion Today
Click here to read Volume 1 of the “Antisemitism and Culture” series and volume 2 here. Ten of the most important installments from this series for better understanding this Substack’s approach to fighting hate include:
7 Reasons This Christian Hippie Became a Zealot Against Jew Hatred
2 Numbers Which Reveal the Overwhelming Level of Human Devastation Wrought by the Holocaust
7 Great Counterculture Authors Who Inspire My Writing and Zionist Activism
How to Revive King & Heschel's Black & Jewish Anti-Racism Prophetic-Activist Partnership
Happy Belated 40th, Dave! For me, that birthday was, mostly, a day like any other.: I showed up for work--and any special shared meal (or activity) were fit in to what my upcoming days off could allow. The reassuring part was the major life project that I was then implementing with my fiancée.
What advice can I offer? Maintain your health, pursue your career, and, if you can, regularly put some money aside that will help you realize important projects.
Happy birthday hon. It’s a dark winter for many of us. My son is fighting in Gaza at the moment. I appreciate your strong support for Israel. And your writing. It’s deeply personal and informative too. Feel better soon.