Sorry for the delayed response. This ended up being a lot longer than I thought, but I wanted to be pretty thorough, and thinking this all through was good for me.
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Conflict is an unavoidable part of life. We even often experience conflict within ourselves. Under more ideal conditions, this conflict, and conflicts between individuals and between parts of society, would be resolved shortly after coming into being and peacefully. However, when this conflict is blocked by oppressive forces, it can't be resolved and stress builds up and gets worse until reaching a breaking point at which there an explosive shift, like the sudden earthquake-triggering slips of the San Andreas Fault.
The obvious oppressive forces are the physical ones, like the police and military. At the present I think they are stronger than ever. The US Military budget is the highest it's ever been, the police are becoming increasingly militarized (as we've seen with the Ferguson Riots and Stop DAPL), and new surveillance technologies give the state more knowledge and control than ever before. Ostensibly, this is to keep us safe from Terrorism, or from the Chinese or Russians. However, the government, acting in the interest of corporations, is really using our fear (whether it creates that fear or not) to enforce greater control at home. At the end of the day, all this control is keeping us playing a game where the odds are increasingly stacked against the majority, to keep us working and consuming and profiting a minority.
If you don't work or aren't even deemed valuable enough to be given work you won't be able to afford the basic necessities of life, which are not yours by right but owned and rented out by the capitalist class. If you don't work, either by being in debt, or getting caught stealing, or acting our in anger and desperation, you are thrown into prison, where you will be punished and made to work more. If you get out of prison, you are now politically disenfranchised.
We are caught in a vicious cycle where corporations gain power, and can lobby politicians or buy elections to influence the government: give themselves contracts and subsidies, write strict IP laws, remove regulations, free-trade agreements, keep psychedelic drugs illegal, or, especially insidiously, cut funding to social services/infrastructure, then turn-around and privatize those services/infrastructure. As they get richer and more powerful they can further influence the government.
As economic inequality grows, so does this power imbalance. I said wages have stagnated since the 70s. A large part of why, is that trade agreements opened up new markets to US companies, also the US move away from the gold standard made US dollars the defacto world currency. This allowed US companies to move financial capital overseas and build new factories and exploit cheaper labor, pitting workers in different parts of the world against each other. US factory workers had to compete with the Chinese, Mexican farmers had to compete with heavily-subsidized US agriculture. So now, despite leaps in productivity, workers are making less real income than in the past. This coupled with the rising cost of college, housing, and medical care has meant standards of living are falling in the US, a problem that I think will be exacerbated as automation starts to become more prevalent (especially when self-driving trucks replace truck drivers, which I think could happen in the next 20 years).
But, the problem isn't just money. Those with money aren't necessarily happy either. Often this money comes at the cost of sacrificing 40 hours or more a week to a job you do not like for the someone else's profit, and submitting to their rules and their schedule. Work can also be dangerous for your health, sitting down all day, or risking an accident while commuting. If not physically, then mentally, either stressful or boring. The effects of the job also follow you home as the more you work a stressful job, the more you need to relax, the less time or energy you have to learn, to build relationships, to pursue other long-term goals that will help you become self-actualized, and instead you chase after the short-term highs of things like tv, alcohol or prescription painkillers, or spend money to fill the voids in your life. As the Situationist writer Raoul Vanageim put it in The Revolution of Everyday Life, “We do not want a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation is bought by the risk of dying of boredom.”
Also, climate change is starting to have greater world impact. We are starting to experience more devastating droughts and floods and larger storms. Not only will we have more directly devastating disasters like hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, but also more indirectly devastating disasters like the drought in Syria that exacerbated political tensions and helped spark the civil war there. Flooding from sea level rise will create millions more climate refugees, and increasingly disasters will have a more devastating effect in relatively insulated western countries. Further, ecosystems are being destroyed, starting with the most fragile, like the arctic and the coral reefs, and the loss in biodiversity not only means the loss of billions of years of evolutionary timelines, but could also mean it will be harder for the Earth and humans to recover. And our current farming practices, which rely on fossil-fuel based fertilizers and pesticides, are destroying and polluting soils and habitats. I'm not sure what will happen to the environment, since for most of us our everyday lives are so detached from it and it's hard to see the damage we're causing or relate to it.
However, I have hope that things are changing. That though many things are getting worse, people are waking up to the causes and it can't be much longer until we collectively can't take it any more and are forced to act. Perhaps, this action will be more than a set of political reforms that relieve the tension but do not eliminate the root causes, like the New Deal, and many of the reforms of the 60s and 70s, like the Civil Rights Act and Clean Air and Water Acts. However, the more the dominant parts of society continue to fight against those reforms, the more likely there will be major upheaval when we finally reach the breaking point.
But major upheaval doesn't necessarily mean violence. I think it is more likely, and more desirable, that we instead go through a social revolution, that starts on the personal level, with people becoming aware of their psychological pain and conditioning and its causes, and leads to long-lasting changes in society and our values. I think psychedelic research will be instrumental in this, and these drugs represent a new, more holistic, paradigm in how we understand and treat mental health. I think there is also growing acceptance of alternate lifestyles. Maybe my experience isn't typical, but me and many of my friends are growing disillusioned with the middle-class lifestyle that we had been automatically pursuing. We are all currently in different stages of figuring what we really want to do and that there are many more options out there than we were conditioned to believe, though the risk of financial insecurity and lack of any clear path forward makes it difficult to commit.
But I don't think I'm alone. I want to bring up the Bernie Sanders campaign as sort of a sign of what's to come, that a lot of young people are become more aware of the world around them in a way, it feels, like my parents never were. It also showed that young people are increasingly not getting their information from cable news, which overall promotes a pro-corporate, centrist position and cable itself is a powerful in propagating the values of consumer society and manufacturing consent for our political system. Also, that they are moving to the left politically, and open to the sorts of policies that were popular in the late 60s and early 70s, like universal health care. Specifically, the Bernie campaign seems similar in a lot of ways to the McGovern campaign of 1968, especially since both campaigns succeeded in rallying young people around a progressive agenda but ultimately lost to a more traditional centrist Democrat. I think other western countries are following a similar pattern with the rise of candidates like more left leaning candidates like Corbyn (in the UK) and Melenchon (in France), who represen the wave of the future, even if the immediate trend is towards the far-right, xenophobia, and nationalism with people like Theresa May and Marine Le Pen.
I hope, however, that history does not repeat itself this time. For instance, I hope the rise of the internet as an organizing tool (something also shown by the Arab Spring) means that we can build more decentralized and democratic networks to compete with the prevailing economic and political powers without creating an exploitable bureaucracy and new ruling class. I also sincerely hope that all this growing dissent is not just channeled into electing one single candidate or passing a few temporary reforms and getting complacent again. Ultimately, I think the change must be personal to have a lasting effect. Fairer policies could make our lives more comfortable, and even give us greater opportunity to reach our personal potential, but the impetus is on us to change our own lives - not to blindly submit to authority or our social roles and reproduce the oppressive system - and to build the kind of lives and communities we want for ourselves instead of just following someone else's picture for society.
"The hopeless don't revolt, because revolution is an act of hope."
-Peter Kropotkin