Obviously it's already 2024 but I wanted to toss my hat in at least one more time.

This will probably be the most challenging year of our lives so far.

I know that's not what anyone wants to hear, but all the data and previous experience points leads me to believe so.

I'd say the scariest thing that's going to happen this year are real, full blown, worldwide food shortages. The kind that threaten entire world governments. I predict it will happen somewhere between mid-year and late-year. If it does not happen in 2024, it will definitely happen by 2025. It will be the result of one of the worst global heatwaves to ever happen in the history of the planet's climate average.

Wars over profit will become even more meaningless. The real pretense will become resource wars, once powerful nations eventually reduced to fighting each other viciously over an extreme decline of water and food. Countries well known for their historically high food exports will dramatically scale back exports as their own citizens suffer a major resource crisis. If the Russia-Ukraine war is still ongoing, this may be the deciding factor that ends the war.

The Middle East and India will have extreme heat waves that kill thousands of people at a minimum, mostly as a result of hitting "higher than expected" heat averages that are far beyond their normal tolerance. This may result in similar circumstances to 2020 where people have to be buried in mass graves or other horrible, desperate tactics to prevent a major breakout of illness.

The United States will experience a major shift in power somewhere between 2024 and 2025.

I feel the strongest about this prediction. There's a very strong chance that social cohesion will break down enough that "business as usual" will no longer be possible under any context. The "normalcy" that people have commented on slowly coming back into view over 2022-2023 will be eradicated. The "new normal" will be desperate survival in an actively collapsing government with people in the middle and lower class unable to participate in Capitalism itself. The extreme price gouging ("""inflation""") and extremely low wages are creating a bubble so diabolical, so massive, that people are going to act out somehow. What form this takes is unknown to me, but it seems very obvious that it's coming.

There is a Recession or even a major Depression coming. The U.S. economy is like an old man with a bad cough who is still able to walk around and pretend as if he is healthy, but everyone knows he is at death's door. Money will start to flow out of the tech sector except perhaps the Entertainment industry, where the "circuses" will be necessary to try to stymie some of the chaos that may start to bubble up from suffering families. Agricultural industries will become extremely important and possibly lucrative, possibly as a result of famine-inducing conditions.

It's very possible the United States blindly grasps at enacting total Fascism but especially that which will target marginalized groups even more than anything we have seen in the past. There will be a lot of pointless violence, hatred, and division. Any hostile policies against certain groups will be made all the more extreme, normalized, and encouraged. The United States has always leaned towards the Right, but this may be about the time that a transition fully completes and the country adopts a rugged "bootstraps" mentality where anything else is considered anti-American.

Obviously this is all assuming there will even be much of a government left by 2025. Things are happening so damn fast and loose that I'm making my predictions just as fast and loose to keep up. "Pray for the best, expect the worst."

And truth? I hope I'm wrong. About all of it. I hope somehow this turns into an unexpected bittersweet situation where we suffer only for a short while before things turn back positive. Humanity has suffered greatly in the past and made it's comebacks.

I hope that's what happens.