Major or minor, doesn’t matter. Just something you’ve been hoping for to happen for years and years, despite many promises and declarations made of that thing happening. Only for it to never happen at all.
Two things come of mind to me.
For America, we will never ever see an Independent take hold of the presidency. It hasn’t happened for over 170+ years and that’s a long damn time since the last time a person representing an independent party has ever held office. The only successes an independent party ever sees is smaller governments or some seats somewhere in the house or senate, that’s about it.
But every election cycle, people are hamming up about how it’s going to be the year for independents, until the primaries come and go and we’re back to falling on two parties. I’ve stopped getting my hopes up and I stopped hoping the moment Bernie Sanders, who originally did run as an independent for the presidential election in 2016, had to turn to running as a democrat because even he realized that was the only way he was going to get votes at all.
One other thing and it’s gaming related is that, there are still Nintendo fans out there hoping for a Mother 3 english release. It’s a game that was released in 2006 and it never left Japan since. Despite all of the re-releases of Mother and Earthbound, Mother 3 has not gotten a localization. It’s been released as a fan translation and I feel that’s the best we’re ever going to get.
It’s been 18 years since it’s original release and I think there’s no point in hoping now for Nintendo to release it. They’re too busy suing people.
It’s worse than that, and better at the same time.
I can’t help noticing that Americans seem to see “climate change” and “the environment” as basically the same thing. That is: if you can just fix the first, you fix the second too.
But that’s just not right. Climate change is only one of the problems we’re facing. We could hit net zero tomorrow, or even net-minus-10% (i.e. draw down carbon), and it would do nothing at all to solve the myriad other semi-unrelated challenges. For example: deforestation, topsoil loss, freshwater depletion, overfishing, microplastic pollution, nitrogen and pesticide pollution, and of course the overarching issues of habitat loss and collapsing biodiversity.
Climate is almost a red herring. The real issue is our entire model of civilization, based on massive disruption of all kinds of natural processes.
The good news, ironically, is that the climate problem is at least somewhat fixable: just stop burning stuff (and then try to reverse the process). And despite the pessimism, we are actually making progress on this! Emissions are peaking earlier than predicted, the future temperature forecasts are better than they were a decade ago. Few people seem to know this good news. BTW: it’s thanks mostly to China, without the Chinese green-tech revolution we would be in deep trouble.
The less good news is that solving climate will not solve the other problems. There are many of them and they are serious.