One of the main characters Rory Gilmore is a high school, then college student who wants to be a news reporter even as that industry was already disintigrating. The show pretends like the newspaper industry was viable and thriving when even in the early 2000s it was already falling apart. I'm in my 50s now, and I started real adult life in the early 90s, and I can't remember the last time I had a newspaper subscription. All the friends and family members I have who worked in the news media eventually moved on, because it was a dead/dying industry in the early 2000s. Even today cable news channels like CNN are on their last legs.
Anyway, a whole shitload of life scripts like "news reporter" turned non-viable just during my adult life. In fact, the general idea that a person could go to college, major in any random thing, and graduate and make a upper middle class salary are long gone. In fact, now a college degree can be much more of a burden than a path to success if a kid takes out a student loan; even if they have wealthy parents or grandparents who can finance their education, it's still potentially a big waste of resources that could be better applied elsewhere.
I think the average person experiences systemic economic failure through failure of the life scripts. When the plans they received through their education and upbringing don't work, it's very stressful and difficult to adjust.
One way to interpret the 2024 and 2016 election is the MAGA republicans want to restore the viability of the life scripts that worked in 1955. They think it's possible to use the regulatory system and tariffs to resuscitate manufacturing in the US to bring back high wage manufacturing jobs. Maybe it's possible, but essentially the whole neoliberal program needs to be rolled back and there's no signs of that from Trump who in his first term undid some post 2008 banking regulations. The neoliberal system is essentially a giant parasite that sucked wealth out of the population via the financial system, and banks are a key component of that theft.
What was the neoliberals' vision of the future? What are the life scripts on offer from the democrats? It is the "own nothing and be happy future" where most people are proles who survive on Bill Gates brand bug paste, don't own a house, and get a monthly welfare payment in the form of crypto currency. Some apparatchik class manages the system and preaches about butt sex and pronouns and tells you what the temperature of the earth should be. It's very bizarre to me to see my left wing friends and family continue to recite the bullshit associated with their bizarro world neopuritan religion.
I think neither MAGA nor Bill Gates' dystopia will happen in the US. In fact I think the "belief" based society is a thing of the past and being molded and shaped by life scripts and a failing system is just a recipe for personal unhappiness if not an early demise. The follow on to the neoliberal system is the no-system IMO, well at least for people like me. I think giant bureaucratic entities like countries and mega corporations will falter as well because all that shit is built on training, and really an agreement between the people and the people who run the institutions that the life scripts will work... but now there's no script.
I think the COVID scenario was a sneak preview of the downside of "belief" and following the rando opinions of authority figures and their scripts. It showed that you basically have to assay information yourself and make up your own mind and that the system is predatory and is built on lies. "Should I take the covid juice?" For me it was a clear "no". For most people it wasn't a decision they made, they just went along with what was just a sales pitch from pharma companies. The dopes that run corporations tried to strong arm their employees to take the juice too.
Anyway, it's early days for these changes. The future life scripts will be based on what rando individuals come up with as the system neoliberal corporatocracy system flails and dies off.
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