Wars in Europe and the Middle East, more than a hundred armed conflicts worldwide, protests across France, attempts to overthrow elections in the US, extraordinary concentrations of wealth, the rise of AI, and a warming planet: the world looks as if it were burning. Are we witnessing a transition to a new world order, or the beginning of a long period of darkness? What can we say about the next ten to fifteen years without pretending to be prophets?
The Pleasure of the Apocalypse
Imagine a dinner party in Berkeley, Berlin, or Paris. Someone announces over the second bottle that this is the end: the climate, the machines, the fascists, billionaires buying democracies, take your pick. Notice what happens at the table: Nobody objects. The mood lifts, the discussion becomes more lively. Why is the end of the world such an interesting topic?
We have an attachment to the idea of our own undoing. We created it: climate change, the AI revolution, and a capitalism that no longer bothers to pretend that it requires democracy. It all adds up, with very little effort, to a story of self-induced collapse. The media likes to sell stories, of course; panic converts into revenue more reliably than hope. But the algorithms only amplify older scripts. Fear is stronger than hope. Everything that rises must fall. And beneath these lies the oldest Western plot of all: history is not self-liberation, but a countdown to the apocalypse. Who does not feel guilty? We may have lost our faith in providence, but we have kept its dark twin, the certainty of catastrophe. Even the secular mind still lives in the floor plan of the Book of Revelation.
There is a peculiar pleasure in this. To diagnose civilizational collapse from an imagined point in the future, looking back at the ruins, absolves us from the tedious work of living in the present. It also flatters us: we get to stand at the grand climax of history rather than muddle through one of its noisy middle chapters.
What happens if we drop hindsight bias, catastrophizing, and prophetic scripts, bring some realism and common sense into the forecast, and ask where the global system is actually heading?
The System and Its American Center
We are globalizing fast, which means America is losing its centrality. To see the next decade we have to stop looking at nations one at a time and look at the system they form, where every society faces the same task: reform its institutions while finding a livable balance between geography, history, and its place in the network.
Begin with the United States. We treat the post-1945 order as the natural state of affairs, when it was an aberration born of Eurasia’s self-destruction. Between 1945 and 1960 the United States commanded nearly 40 percent of global output and produced half the world’s manufactured goods; in that brief window Washington signed mutual-defense treaties with more than sixty nations. The historical baseline, measured since 1880 across depressions and world wars, is leaner: about a quarter of global output from less than five percent of the world’s population. Much of the friction in global politics today comes from the gap between the obligations of 1950 and the weight of the world in 2026. The Cold War Pentagon was built to fight two regional wars at once; it is now barely equipped for one. Its interventions, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, were miscalculations or failures.
Donald Trump obscures this rebalancing by converting every structural shift into personal theater. He is an aberration in the history of the office, and his term will end. His successor will likely restore diplomatic manners, but no successor can restore the postwar monopoly. The retreat from policing distant conflicts will continue under a president who does it more politely.
Retrenchment is not decline. Beneath the noise, the United States keeps the fastest metabolism of any large society: deep capital markets, magnetic universities, a culture that tolerates creative destruction. For the coming decade it will remain the center of invention, and it holds one further advantage over its rivals that has nothing to do with technology: its population is still growing.
Maturing Europe, the Chinese Ceiling, and the Middle Powers
Now place Europe and China into the system. In the 1980s Western Europe produced a third of global output; the EU and Britain together now produce 17 percent, heading toward ten within a generation. With seven percent of the world’s population, Europe accounts for a quarter of global welfare spending. Mario Draghi read these numbers as a verdict and told Brussels that the continent faces slow decline and agony without deregulation and stronger investment. He is right about the arithmetic. But something is happening that the numbers cannot capture easily. Societies mature. As populations age and shrink, citizens lose interest in imperial power and GDP races; they want better lives, more time, more culture, less work. Europe is pioneering a post-growth form of life. The catch, and the reason the French are in the streets, is that a mature society must still pay for its schools, hospitals, and energy inside a competitive world system, with fewer workers each year.
China faces the opposite problem: not too little ambition but a ceiling on it. Forty years of Chinese labor and engineering built the greatest manufacturing base in history, but its dynamic society remains locked inside a political monopoly. The leadership studied Budapest 1956 and Moscow 1989 and drew one rule: no Chinese Gorbachev. Because opening a Leninist monopoly even slightly brings the whole structure down, the party systematically trades economic vitality and intellectual freedom for control. They already know that a one-party state inevitably breeds corruption, and by 2035, China will discover that one cannot lead the next wave of innovation with the brightest minds under police supervision. It will make this discovery, as we will see, while growing old and losing millions of workers.
Because none of the three blocs can dominate alone, the coming decade belongs in part to the middle powers: India, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, and, instructively, South Korea. The Korean peninsula is a controlled experiment in how a society relates to the global system. The North chose isolation and military paranoia and became a human and economic wasteland. The South integrated, reformed its institutions, and fused advanced manufacturing with an extraordinary cultural reach; Seoul builds the ships and semiconductors the world runs on and makes the films and music the world watches. Soft power is not decoration. It measures a society’s ability to make its way of life attractive to the rest of humanity, and that ability is about to become decisive for reasons that demography will supply.
Acceleration and Its Dialectic
We are growing together through science and technology, and we are splitting apart through politics. How can a world do both at once?
The Frankfurt School’s diagnosis remains highly relevant. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno argued that the triumph of instrumental reason, the calculating intellect that masters nature without asking which human ends are worth serving, does not by itself make us freer. We fall for the illusion that new inventions will dissolve old problems and produce new human beings, when in fact we wire twenty-first-century breakthroughs straight into nineteenth-century contradictions. The war in Ukraine, fought increasingly with drones and machine targeting, is this madness in its purest form: the most advanced technology on earth in the service of the oldest quarrel, a border.
Habermas upgraded this diagnosis and gave it an institutional perspective. Social life, he argued in The Theory of Communicative Action, is split between the lifeworld, the everyday realm where citizens talk, reason, and build solidarity, and the system, the steering mechanisms of money, technology, and administrative power. In a healthy democracy the public sphere is the sounding board through which the lifeworld holds the system accountable. Under present-day capitalism the system colonizes the lifeworld. Digital platforms, which could have created the first global public sphere, were captured by capital instead and used to fragment attention, build echo chambers and paywalls, commodify intimacy, and sell tribal grievance back to the aggrieved. The social media feed is instrumental reason staged as entertainment, as the culture industry takes off and builds strong feedback loops.
Five Shifts
The friction between scientific acceleration and social inertia becomes visible in five shifts already underway.
- Power moves from software back to hardware. We speak of the cloud as if humanity had floated free of the earth. The virtual world rests on copper mines, high-voltage grids, data centers, and thousands of miles of undersea cable that need navies to protect them. By the late 2030s the first fusion demonstration plants and mass-produced sodium-ion batteries, built from salt rather than scarce lithium, will begin to loosen the grip of petro-states and mineral cartels. Power will belong to the societies that can permit, build, and defend this physical foundation. Here Draghi is right, and Europe should worry.
- Artificial intelligence becomes an economic actor. Within a decade AI systems will act in markets as semi-autonomous participants rather than tools, and if quantum computing arrives on schedule they will model biology and design materials at speeds that make today’s supercomputers look like calculators. This sharpens rather than retires the oldest question of political economy: who owns the machines, and who merely rents a life from them?
- Humanity leaves the planet. Before the end of the next decade, permanent lunar stations and the first crewed preparations for Mars will turn space from a stage for national pride into a laboratory and an economic frontier. Public science and private capital will do the work, mostly in the United States and among its allies, with China racing close behind.
- Aging societies redefine success. Across Europe and East Asia populations are shrinking, and a shrinking society cannot win on mass. Its strength will lie in the attractiveness of its way of life: whether talented people want to join it. I return to this below, because it is the shift that organizes the others.
- Democracy depends on reclaiming the public sphere. A purely technical civilization cannot generate the moral trust it needs to hold together. By 2035 the defining political struggle will no longer run between left and right but between engineered tribalism and communicative reason, the shared commitment to argue in good faith and to yield to the better argument. The democracies that endure will treat human attention as a civic commons rather than a mineral to be mined.
The World of 2040: A Planet Divided by Age
The deepest of these shifts is the least dramatic, because it has already happened in the maternity wards. The world’s population, 8.2 billion in 2024, will pass nine billion in the late 2030s and then slow toward a peak of about 10 billion around 2084. Sixty-three countries, among them China, Germany, Japan, and Russia, have already passed their peak; this group will shrink by roughly 14 percent over the next thirty years. Nearly all remaining growth will come from low- and lower-middle-income countries, above all in sub-Saharan Africa, where about three in ten of the world’s babies are born today and half will be born by the end of the century. Africa will be more than half urban by 2035. The global median age is 31; in Niger it is about 15, in Japan about 50. By 2040 the world will be divided less by ideology, or even by wealth, than by age.
Consider what this does to the three blocs. Europe and East Asia will be old societies with large retired cohorts and shrinking labor forces. China joins them: its population has already peaked, it is already older than the United States, and by 2040 it will be losing workers every year, a country that grew old before it grew rich. The party’s bargain, growth in exchange for obedience, becomes hard to honor when there are fewer people left to grow with. The United States, alone among the great powers, stays comparatively young, and it does so through immigration. American advantage is not only its military or Silicon Valley, but demographics and the age structure. It is also an advantage a nativist politics can throw away. The surest way for America to lose the twenty-first century is to close its borders.
On the other side of the divide, South Asia and Africa will be young, urban, and short of capital. India’s working-age population keeps growing into the 2040s; Nigeria, Pakistan, and the Congo are climbing toward the top of the population rankings. Whether this youth becomes a dividend or a catastrophe depends on jobs, and jobs depend on capital and institutions, most of which sit in the old world. The old hemisphere needs workers; the young hemisphere needs investment. They are made for each other, but they are politically allergic to each other: most aging electorates vote against migration.
The central contradiction of 2040 is therefore not labor against capital. It is the old against the young: pensioners who depend on the labor of people they will not accept as neighbors. In a shrinking society labor becomes scarce, and scarcity should raise its price. But AI arrives at exactly this moment as a substitute for labor. Every aging society therefore faces a choice between two remedies for the same shortage: admit people or deploy machines. Japan tried machines first and is now quietly admitting workers; Europe is tempted by the same sequence. A society that chooses machines over people will be richer and emptier, and its pensions will depend on who owns the machines. Marx’s question returns in a new form: who owns the means of computation, and will their returns fund the retirement of a nation that no longer reproduces itself?
To go back to Habermas: The public sphere is where a society decides who belongs to its “we.” That decision is not theoretical when more than a third of the children in German schools have at least one immigrant parent, when Seoul recruits the foreign workers that a fertility rate of 0.75 makes unavoidable, when Italian villages pay families to move in. The struggle between tribalism and communicative reason will be fought, concretely, over whether an old society can decide to open up and welcome the strangers it needs. South Korea’s lesson applies here too: the ability to make one’s way of life attractive to outsiders is no longer soft power. It is how a shrinking society survives.
In 2040, the world will not have ended. It will be older, more urban, more African, and more interdependent than any world before it, with lunar stations and fusion plants and long waiting lists at the geriatric clinics. None of the inventions will rescue us from the inequities of capitalism or the pathologies of racism; technology changes what we can do and never decides who we are. A mature person knows she is mortal and makes room for those who come after. A mature society does the same. Waking from apocalyptic dreams means realizing that humanity is neither dying nor saved. It is growing up, and growing old, and the work of building a just society for the people who will inherit it remains entirely in our hands.
Demographic figures: UN World Population Prospects 2024, medium scenario; national median ages and the Korean fertility rate are approximate.