'climate change, the war in ukraine, covid-19, immigration, and global economic turmoil...'

"which of the following issues has, over the past decade, most changed the way you look at your future?"

aka. the four horsemen of the apocalypse (and then some).

horsemouth will give you his opinion on the matter and then compare it to  survey results from 11 european countries: EU states germany, france, poland, italy, spain, denmark, romania, portugal, and estonia; and two european countries outside the EU – britain and switzerland.

(what no ireland, greece, czech, slovakia, austria, norway, sweden, finland, latvia, lithuania, hungary, slovenia, croatia, bosnia, serbia, macedonia, montenegro, albania, bulgaria, turkey?)

climate change 

horsemouth expects to be the big issue for the rest of his life (though that doesn't mean the others will go away or that it will become a sufficient priority for the ruling class, assuming that is still within their power to do anything effective about it).   

only in france and denmark do people choose climate change as the most important crisis. 

horsemouth expects this to be huge with millions  of people becoming climate refugees (possibly even a billion), famines, droughts, epidemics, wildfires, hurricanes. in fact he expects it to go proper biblical (and to stay proper biblical for most of the 21st century). 

the war in ukraine - well that's big in estonia, poland and denmark. horsemouth expects the war to drag on until the country is in the condition of syria. he expects it to get much scarier when donald trump becomes president because he will basically abandon ukraine to be defended by europe (and then we will get to see what european words are worth). 

covid-19. horsemouth thinks that this is the crisis just gone that people are doing their best to forget about. 

some wish to see it as an outbreak of authoritarianism, some as an example of the state stepping up and doing what it was capable of, some see it as a giant hand-out to the rich that will distort the economy for years to come. it was all of these. it was a proper global crisis but it is just the foothills of the shocks to come. 

on a personal level horsemouth took lockdown and such like as an opportunity to rethink what he was doing. he has stepped back from the world of work into the shadows of the economy. so far it all seems to be going ok. 

immigration. horsemouth never regards this as a problem. it is kind of like the weather - it just happens. the state under which horsemouth lives has an ageing  population it needs immigrants and workers of many sorts (because it needs people to work and to pay taxes to fund the pensions for the ageing population). in germany people regard this as the big issue. in britain it is surprisingly low down people's list of priorities (at least in the survey) not that you would know this by british domestic politics. 

global economic turmoil, now this horsemouth pretty much expects as standard. he agrees (in general if not in the particulars) with the international communist current here; 

'since the first world war, capitalism has been a decadent social system. it has twice plunged humanity into a barbaric cycle of crisis, world war, reconstruction and new crisis...'  

horsemouth had one of his earlier bands paraphrase part of this as 'boom, slump, war, reconstruction...' (but that was in the 90ies where war was seen as an actual threat).  in general he thinks that capitalism is fundamentally unstable and that these crises are not aberrations but how it operates - capitalism will not fall over because of its crises, it will simply work out how to make the workers pay for the crisis and then roll on. 

the italians and portuguese point to global economic turmoil as the major thing that has influenced their thinking (perhaps the greeks would too - if they'd been asked).

to horsemouth global economic turmoil (aka. capitalism) is where things are and where they are going (driven, to some extent, by climate change which will now drive immigration and global economic turmoil). covid-19 (or indeed the next pandemic) is off the radar once again (until it hits). 

 and yet for horsemouth the wilderness (aka. retirement) still seems pretty cool. he's not too bored.  he is still quite frustrated though. maybe that will ease with time.