“We just can’t keep on living like we’re living… We just can’t keep on pushing to the limit…” — Paul Davis, “Do Right,” 1980

One of my greatest fears in my lifetime has been overlooking important warning signs and continuing to do the same things while everything around me is going to you know where in a handbasket.

There have times I’ve felt like we’re all partying down and deliberately ignoring the warning signs of a hangover. Why change anything while we’re having such a good time? Let’s enjoy ourselves!

That brings to mind the Aesop fable about the grasshopper and the ant. The grasshopper is fiddling and having a good time while the ants are working hard at transporting food for storage over the coming winter. When the snow arrives, the grasshopper faces serious hardships while the ants are safe and cozy.

This theme played a huge role in the Broadway musical and movie, “Cabaret.” Though I generally regard musicals like neighborhood fireworks displays, Bob Fosse’s film production in 1972 was an outstanding exception.

Though most folks know the general plot, the story is about well to do Germans, French and Americans in the 1930s flocking to the Kit Kat Club in Berlin to consume alcohol, flirt with sin and debauchery and pretty much get away from the troubles of the world. There’s not much wrong is getting away from it all occasionally, these folks almost make this quest for entertainment and fun an obsession.

The result is the collapse of Nazi Germany all around them. And too many of them didn’t know what hit them. There were almost totally unprepared.

A similar, but less devastating theme appeared in the elegant television series “Downton Abbey,” the story of an aristocratic British family just after the turn of the 20^th century. Lord Grantham and his family members and servants do not seem to be aware of the growing societal changes that are surrounding them.

After the end of World War I, which essentially ushered in the era of a manufacturing economy and a rising middle class, the Granthams are shocked and puzzled by what happened. And just like the poor souls in “Cabaret,” they are woefully unprepared.

Perhaps the most significant shock in American society over the past 50 years, besides Sept. 11, 2001, was the gas shortage crisis. I remember a gas station attendant (now obsolete) telling me in late August 1973 that gas prices were about to make a huge leap.

The massive price increases had a huge impact when we learned that the price of everything else would skyrocket as well because it costs money to move goods and services.

Once again, we seemed unprepared. And it turned out there was no real gas shortage, just a new political era in which the U.S. would be pushed around by OPEC.

I can’t get over this feeling of impending doom — the prospects that we’ve partied too long and ignored climate change, so the chickens will be coming home to roost and we shall pay for our arrogant sins. I also continue to fear an economic crash because I believe the economic system we’ve built is unsustainable because of wealth inequality, leading to either some kind of revolution or the rise of an authoritarian strongman.

I base my fears on my lifelong study of history. And I fear, as Georges Santayana warned us, “Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”