The grayscale suggestion is pretty interesting. I was skeptical it would make any difference, but I tried it and my home screen instantly felt more calming to look at at. It seems like we really underestimate how much visual complexity exhausts us.
Not sure how long I'll keep it like that, but I think I'll leave it for now as I've been trying to minimize my phone for a while now (biggest difference was removing social media apps and disabling most notifications). If you're a busy person with a lot of demands on your attention, I highly recommend it.
The only example I can think of is water. While it's not gone, the quality and cleanliness has decreased over time. There are many areas where you can no longer consume seafood due to high pollution levels. Same with swimming or drinking (boiling used to be sufficient to clean water, but it certainly isn't anymore).
Even "safe" seafood is only recommended to be consumed 2 times a week now due to the build up of heavy metals.
It's also true that we'll always been able to purify water for consumption/use, but there is a cost to that and I don't see that cost decreasing.
I'd much rather see public investment in projects that will make the world livable once energy and resources are no longer cheap. Rail transportation in particular. Every car a person is not required to own to live in America would save them ~$10,000 a year in costs today. When cars and gas are more expensive, they'll save even more. Those savings might even save them from losing their home or going hungry if things get bad.
In particular, I look at suburban areas with no stores or workplaces for miles, where the only transport option is the car, and I struggle to see how they won't become blighted slums (like what Detroit's became as it shrank) when gas and cars are too expensive for the average person to afford.
There were a lot of words here to simply fall back on the argument that innovation will solve every problem and do so before there is significant suffering. I agree that life will always go on, but this idea that consumption and quality of life can do nothing but rise when it is so dependent on the limited cheap energy and resources that we only learned to exploit a century ago is insanity to me.
Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked. It won't be the end of the world, but we will all be poorer and there will be suffering while we adjust. I too hope for some near free energy and material source to appear somehow and prevent this, but I struggle to see how you could blindly expect this to occur, not even entertaining the thought that even if such an innovation exists, we might not be able to discover it before the consequences of our current behavior sets in.
Not sure how long I'll keep it like that, but I think I'll leave it for now as I've been trying to minimize my phone for a while now (biggest difference was removing social media apps and disabling most notifications). If you're a busy person with a lot of demands on your attention, I highly recommend it.