There was a rough period in my life when I wanted to simply abandon everything and live in a van, back when I was living in bugman central in the 2010s. I had unwittingly internalized Landian accelerationism and was living in a nearly empty decrepit apartment and subsisting on Soylent. Little did I know, those were actually the good days, I was and still am content with next to nothing, besides my collection of extravagant knives.
My worldview really has not changed much since university days, and it had been shaped by early life experiences which I won't delve into much detail here, one of which involved a failed relationship in university. The crux of my worldview is this: Western civilization needs rethinking, it is clearly abusive to the vast majority of its constituents who had no choice in being part of it, even if admitting it is painful.
My peers have had arbitrary or scripted life goals: go to university, have a prestigious career, buy a house, get married, have kids. Make sure those kids are able to repeat your own successful life trajectory, repeat ad infinitum. I think that arbitrary goal maximization is an actual mental illness that is plaguing society, those aren't goals which are necessarily beneficial to you. Every civilization on Earth is taunting its constituents: "reproduce so there are more slaves to work for us, and then die as soon as it is convenient for us". Your purpose is not to live and die for yourself, but for the system which subjugates you.
A lot of my peers evidently have not succeeded at those goals, or sacrificed one goal in pursuit of another, it's usually either career or family. Those who simply ignore dating or never had a chance fall back on their careers, and become bugmen. They're concentrated around the same metropolitan areas, which become bugman colonies. To be fair, this isn't strictly a Western phenomenon, but is happening globally wherever there is an economic rat race in place. Cross-pollination of Western ideals has led places like Seoul and Singapore to be not terribly different from Los Angeles and London. Those Asian cities emerged on the world stage in one or two generations, due to rapid economic specialization, or bugman-ification. Specialization is for insects.
I question how much agency I've really had in my own life, or if I just fell into the path of least resistance. My parents and grandparents have had a prestigious background in China, and I have felt the pressure that I am their failson, their legacy is almost guaranteed to end with me. Just a few turns off of the scripted path, plus mild autism, sealed my fate as a latter day imperial eunuch minus the genital mutilation. Unlike the imperial eunuchs of old, who become sterile in exchange for a high-ranking position of power, latter day bugmen trade their productivity and skip having a family in exchange for worthless currency and status-signalling baubles. To quote Dostoevsky, "your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing".
Human civilization itself has had a relatively short history, emerging from around 10,000 B.C., compared to the anatomy of modern homo sapiens being around 200K years old. The Chinese civilization as we know it only emerged around 2,070 B.C., and is considered one of the oldest continuous civilizations. Many states (dynasties) have come and gone, but its culture and people are more or less survived by modern day descendants. I feel disconnected from this past and my own genetic heritage.
I still do not understand why people would chose to reproduce under conditions of absolute misery, other than biological urges. Ironically, it is under poverty conditions where fertility rates are highest. At some primal level, the only goal of life is to self-replicate. As sentient beings, we can override any biological programming, but are most people just self-replicating NPCs? If improving material conditions will basically end humanity as we know it over the long term as it is correlated with low fertility globally, why not intentionally fall into a Malthusian trap? Forget about the rat race, education, careerism, etc. Just have children and live in poverty, this was most of human history anyways.
The idea that one's actions in this life will affect them in whatever afterlife they believe in, does not seem compelling enough to most people. As a lay Buddhist, I would give up everything and just become a monk if I had enough conviction that I'm trapped in the cycle of saṃsāra and need to escape, but we can't all just be monks. Besides, it would only be some sort of temporarily relief once I've spent good karma and reincarnate as a lower lifeform, like a vermin.
The Agenda
Live in the pod, eat the bugs.
The conspiracy theory that there is an elite cabal at the World Economic Forum steering human civilization towards a dystopian future is compelling. However, this is assuming they know how to achieve their goals (they can't in the long run), and a dystopian future does not require malice on their part. Totalitarian rule by coercion works until it doesn't, although it can certainly last more than a human lifetime.
What is perhaps far more likely is instrumental convergence towards the same patterns of behavior. Each state seeks maximal exploitation of their constituents, and the same levers are pulled to control mass psychology towards their objective. It doesn't matter if the state in question is capitalist, communist, or socialist, the ideology is subservient to extracting as much value from human capital as they can.
The USA might as well be a corporation, not a nation. Its "rules-based order" lacks orderliness as evidenced by the rampant homelessness and petty crime in its major cities, has arbitrary rules which are selectively enforced by the whims of unelected bureaucrats, and it definitely isn't based. At least it could be run more efficiently if it didn't have to cosplay as a democracy. When the odds of an election are pretty evenly split 50/50, it probably doesn't matter what that decision was anyways. What will likely disintegrate the USA is the lack of cohesive national values, as they can't even agree on foundational documents such as the Bill of Rights or the Constitution anymore.
The bugmen have no choice but to submit to the will of Machiavellian technologists and shady bureaucrats. There is the ever looming implication of political violence if they fall out of line, as Mao stated political power comes from the barrel of a gun. We got technological surveillance capitalism not because a bunch of nerds in Silicon Valley wanted to seize political power, but because the deep state made it profitable. The public sphere of the Internet has been largely subsumed by corporate platforms, and thus has become a soulless wasteland, the Web as we know it is more like a dark forest. The corporate platforms are propaganda machines, "World War III is a guerilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation" as opined by Marshall McLuhan. He foresaw what the Chinese now call "unrestricted warfare", all sides recognize the information war and everyone is a participant.
I see no worthwhile future for most of Western civilization in my lifetime. As much as I would like to wrap my yellowy worm-like body into a cocoon and metamorphosize into a beautiful butterfly and fly free, I am trapped and I can't escape.