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The Shrinking Future: Why More and More People No Longer Expect Life to Get Better
Paperback
General Political ScienceGeneral Sociology
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 24 2026
Pages: 168
Weight: 0.51
Height: 0.36 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The future has not disappeared.
It has become smaller.
In The Shrinking Future, Martin Halber explores one of the defining hidden conditions of modern life. More and more people still move forward in time, still work, still plan, still build, still adapt. But they no longer do so with the same underlying belief that life will become wider, safer, fuller, or more stable than it is now.
This is not just a book about anxiety.
It is not a book about headlines.
It is not a book about one crisis.
It is a book about what happens when the future itself stops feeling expansive.
Across housing, work, family formation, climate reality, public trust, and the fading credibility of progress, Halber shows how multiple pressures have fused into one deeper condition. The horizon has narrowed. Possibility feels thinner. More and more adults are organizing the present around a tomorrow they no longer trust to open.
Sharp, serious, and emotionally exact, The Shrinking Future gives language to a feeling many people already live with but rarely hear named clearly. The result is a powerful work of contemporary nonfiction about contraction, diminished expectation, and the quiet grief of entering the future already expecting less life from it.
For readers who sense that what has been lost is not only security, but scale, this book offers something rare.
Recognition.
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