Yes, I've read about this mindset too, I think with regard to people in the gulags in the Soviet Union - there's no way to know what the future will hold, so you really can't plan anything, and therefore people just stop thinking about the future.
I've also read (this was in regard to post-Soviet Russia during the nineties) Americans reacting to post-Soviet pessimism and unwillingness to think about the future as basically the cause of a lot of Russia's problems at the time, which now strikes me as getting the causation exactly backwards: it was the problems that made people pessimistic and unwilling to look forward.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2020-04-19 03:19 pm (UTC)I've also read (this was in regard to post-Soviet Russia during the nineties) Americans reacting to post-Soviet pessimism and unwillingness to think about the future as basically the cause of a lot of Russia's problems at the time, which now strikes me as getting the causation exactly backwards: it was the problems that made people pessimistic and unwilling to look forward.