What if the dynamic really is cyclical?

Rather than the end state of this wave, what we should be looking for, is the next cycle/wave building in its shadow. The reset back to a more stable situation and the building back up from there.

So where is energy accumulating and where is it dissipating? Obviously there are a lot of political fights going on over just that, but energy tends to be more about economics, than politics.

The current wave has been about enormous technological advances, but driven by a financial feedback loop that has started to go parabolic, like some metastatic cancer. It has transferred ever more wealth to the core, while leaving ever larger swathes of the rest struggling to get by. Given the Ancients had devised debt jubilees as a circuit breaker to moderate this dynamic by at least some 3500 years ago, it's not like it's a high tech issue. More like the more we focus on the details, the stupider we seem to get about the bigger picture.

That's why I think it should be imperative to really figure out what is the reality, rather than assuming we can just project out our current direction. Even if those controlling the media think we should do just that.

The politics, the economics, the technology, the culture, it's reaching the point of reductio ad absurdum. There is no there there.

Eliminating sex, because our infantized culture is hung up on puberty, the metaverse, ten thousand people own everything and everyone else starves, cryptocurrencies, because the other financial mediums have become to corrupted, so create more, the US starting wars with Russia, China and Iran, because the MIC makes enough money off it to buy any politicians necessary, etc.

Not to mention the various patches applied to our theories of physics, because the current models, methods, assumptions, axioms can't be wrong, they just need finer turning. And glue, and strings and paper weights....

When do we start to understand the consequences eventually outweigh the impulses?

There is no pot of gold at the end of the narrative arc. It just breaks down and something else starts.

The future is a continuation of the past, until it becomes a reaction to it.