Not really.  Probably.

If you have 21 minutes and 42 seconds to spare, you might enjoy getting really depressed listening to this few-years-old presentation by professional doom-and-gloomer James Howard Kunstler.  If you can get past the sweeping generalizations and–umm uh-uh-uh–not-so-smoth-talkin’ verbal ticks, he does make some interesting if fairly obvious points with a pleasingly biting sense of humor.

The presentation’s money quote, highlighted in this New Yorker piece (registration required):

“We have about thirty-eight thousand places that are not worth caring about in the United States,” he’d told the audience, while showing a slide of a bleak intersection separating a Wal-Mart from a Target.  “When we have enough of them, we’re going to have a nation that’s not worth defending.”

If that kind of thing gets you going, the New Yorker article will introduce you to several of “The Dystopians” who, as you might imagine, are having something of a heyday at present.