I remember my childhood mostly as a happy, oblivious one, affordable food, the usual disagreements between liberals and republicans, but nothing unhinged (say taxes, migrants or abortion). At least it looks reasonable today.
Now it’s like everything is unhinged: politics seem to be based on purely emotional reactions and the other side is hell bent on destroying the country: texas starts heavily gerrymandering to secure 5 extra republican seats at the next midterms? california starts lobbying for doing exactly the same and dismantling an independent redistricting commission texas never had.
When I was younger it seemed politics were more rational and cruelty never seemed to be the point of doing nothing. Now we execute people with nitrogen gas, meaning a conscious person has to breathe something he knows its going to kill him during 4 minutes. This is somehow not cruel and unusual. And nobody bats an eye.
I still don’t get how populists can be so popular now, they simplify complex issues most people without a degree in the matter, cannot grasp. This includes me.
I’m now 35 and wonder if I’m already talking like an old person who misses his young days so hard. I see that in people in their 60s and hoped never to become one of them, but here I am. To a younger person I may look like one of those old guys who lives to rant.
Am I going to feel even more detached and depressed with each passing day?
Wages are not keeping up with inflation. The middle class is disappearing.
Fascism is on the rise everywhere.
Basic Education has declined and higher education is less accessible.
Climate change. Worse storms. Lots of animals are extinct or nearing extinct.
Big Companies own everything.
No one can afford a house.
Subscriptions for everything.
Life saving maintenance drugs are insanely expensive. A subscription to live.
Women’s rights being removed.
Natural resources all owned by companies with no oversight.
it’s getting bad.
However. It’s worth noting that the cause of all of these things isnt new.
This is the inevitable outcome of policies from as much as 100 years ago. (200 years ago? Capitalism)
Also. For some groups of people, things used to be much worse in many ways.
So some things are better. But the quality of life over all is probably declining.
Late stage capitalism and the dead internet.
Climate change alone makes it objectively worse. The widespread rise of fascism also I think makes objectively worse. So yeah it’s bad.
I’m 25 and I literally saw an increase to heat waves year after year until 80°-90° was the norm in summer for the northern United States. I live in Pittsburgh now and the weather has shifted from raining 70% of the time, we use to have the gulf stream and mild climates. Now we get droughts after droughts, where’s my goddamn lake effect from the Great Lakes. We are eliminating natural habitats at ungodly rates. My dad who was born in the 60s has MAGA blinders and doesn’t see the effects of climate change. We are now fighting LLMs for clean water in a perilous situation that teetering on ecological disaster in many communities with newly installed data centers. Morally bankrupt politicians rather have a dollar in their pocket and vote for the persuasions of the rich like a puppet on a string. I miss bird watching and seeing bugs splatter on the windshield as you drive across the country, now its a mostly dry and barren trip because of overuse of pesticides and lack of habitats to regrow local insect colonies. Also the world is overpopulated as fuck and nobody can get a job in an ethical manner. You literally have to lie and cheat just to get a job that pays you better than shit, you would think the homeless people were violent and in gangs but its actually the goons on the top of the pyramid that have organized cabals and hired hitmen. So if there’s a better world out there it starts with eating the rich and consuming less of the planet. Probably have to destroy the meat industry and the oil industry but if you say that out load people think you don’t want people to have jobs when you actually think sustainable farming techniques should be widely adopted instead. It just feels like common sense and not even socialist, but apparently I’m a commie stoner who worships the devil to Fox News, and to my parents. They literally raised me to not only to be kind to be people but actually want better support systems for homeless people. My entire childhood was spent in a good nature providing free furniture to newly housed people who had nothing and I’m just expected to think Trump is next Messiah what the actual fuck is wrong with Christianity now a days.
Tldr: Yes we should eat the rich before the eat us
If you’re in the west then it’s worse now because capitalism is reaching the stages of systemic collapse. For people living in countries like China or Vietnam the picture is quite different. They see their lives improving each and every day. They have clean cities, great infrastructure, and a rate of technological progress we can only dream of. Those of us living in the west are living through a similar collapse to the one that happened in USSR in the 90s, but the west is only 13% of the world population.
It is getting worse. Humanity is entering a deeper and deeper crisis. Alienation is growing with each passing year. The inner contradiction in every one of us is getting more intense, which manifests itself in more external conflicts: between people, between people and nature, between everything.
That being sad, this crisis just highlights the slow death of the previous, deeply troubled era and marks the transition to another way of living. The destructive aspect of things, that we all suffer from, is therefore not absolute. It is not going to destroy neither us nor the world around us. It is balanced off by the progress that we’re making.
Take 3d printing, for example. If you think of it, it is actually the (very) beginning of something fundamentally new: local automated production. Automation eliminates the routine part of producing goods, which makes the process creative again, while not compromising on efficiency. This leads to production becoming a means of self-actualisation rather than something that takes away all your freedom. And since the process of making new things gives you value instead of taking it, the need for charging others for using your creations vanishes, giving way to free exchange and collaboration. This, if applied globally, would solve the fundamental issue of our current society, where creating good takes away just as much, making any growth a form of self-destruction. And solving that would spare us of all different kinds of problems, ranging from pollution, wars to emotional abuse.
So I think by getting worse it’s also getting better and these difficult times we’ve happened to live in are still marvelous.
P.S. Apart from 3d printing, there’s, of course, free software movement as well, which in my opinion is also part of the global free production evolution
Apart from politics, which is always pretty up and down, my two biggest concerns for the world are
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Nobody seems to know how to build things any more. Watching companies fumble around trying to build almost anything that has the same usable life as something built 60 years ago, with fewer materials and almost no computers, is infuriating.
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The environment is in a MUCH worse state. I was born in the 80s and I can say anyone my age or older who tells you climate change is a myth is either lying or never went outside. I remember seeing large flocks of birds overhead several times at dusk. Now there’s almost nothing. Insect- and bird-life have largely collapsed, forests look sad and unhealthy, we are getting hot days earlier in the year and rainfall is nowhere near as consistent as it used to be. Do humans move farmland to places where rain now falls? Nope, they pump the rivers dry and make even more problems downstream. The situation is unsustainable and, with so many global leaders in the pockets of oil and gas companies, it is going to get a lot worse.
That said, I would say general quality of life, especially through medical advances has made a lot of people’s lives better.
My observation is that the accomplishments of older times would be entirely impossible today, like basically all the public services we enjoy wouldn’t be possible if they were proposed as a new thing.
Take the post office, if somebody had a big idea for the government to build tens of thousands of buildings and hire over a million people just to move around pieces of paper - they’d be laughed out of the room. Impossible, the government couldn’t and shouldn’t do any of that. All public services: the fire department, the police department, and especially public libraries, that all couldn’t be created in the current political environment if it hadn’t already been built.
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25 years ago the internet was still easy dial up and smart phones were coming out like you’d go to the library with your friends to check your email
MySpace lol
When I was younger it seemed politics were more rational and cruelty never seemed to be the point of doing nothing.
The cruelty was outside our borders. The rational, reasonable debate was for domestic issues. Foreigners got the bullet.
As the empire collapses the cruelty turns inwards i.e. fascism.
“We were just minding our own business invading other countries for oil.”
Person born in the late 70’s here
Although birth of social media took a gigant shit on peoples general mindset and world feels more divided, right wing and missing “street level” empathy, world is still better.
For example in the 80’s autistic people were just mentally retarded, dyslexic people were just stupid, bullying in schools was normal behaviour and part of being young, violence among teenagers was more commonplace, attitude that animals were just biological machines with instinctual reactions and just appearance of some cognition was more commonplace. 80’s yuppie culture made it fashionable to be a wealthy asshole.
In the 90’s home computers became common. Recession had bankrupted many high rolling yuppies. Nerds were no longer beaten for knowing how tech works. Gamer culture was no longer niche phenomenon. Cold war was over and nuclear armageddon was distant thing. Youth culture still had this doom and gloom attitude. Everyone was a flannel wearing tortured skater boy/girl. 90’s was the “tomboy era”, where girls were allowed to dress and act like boys without being socially ostracised. More attention was focused on mental health and colorful spectrum of human mind.
Late 90s and early 00 internet really started rolling, smarphones started to appear, social media was born. World became very small and everyone who wanted was a content creator. Suddenly large portion of population communicated with people outside their country on a daily basis.
This was the best time in the Internet. Search engines started to actually work and new webpages were sometimes an actual joy. Algorithms weren’t corrupting things and polarizing everything. Autogenerated content was yet to come. Internet and social media was infused as essential part of our lives.
2010’s the enshittification started and commercialization was on full gear. 2020 has become the era of stupid. AI, autogenerated content, polarization and dead internet.
But even with all this, I still think it’s now better for the average person than the cold war paranoia world of the 70-80’s.
We are however on a downward spiral and I’m hoping for a counter reaction in coming decades. Hoping that ignorances of past world are just making noise and attracting attention before they vanish for good.
The Matrix was built to resemble the late 90s-00, “the pinnacle of civilization”
Oh shit.
Are you American? I’d really like to know.
Nordic
I’ve (36m) asked my mother and grandfather if I’m overreacting.
My grandfather (104 when he died. He was so “dust bowl” he mother died of the dust in the dust bowl. Dust pneumonia. Yeah can’t get more depression era than that without also being a shoe shine boy at a carnival ): I killed the nazis once. I can kill them again
My mother (80f I asked here again just now. Right now face to face): I’ve never seen this cult behavior before. Never in my life. People will bury their trump flags in the ground and deny they ever supported him. Like the nazis did.
Yes this bad. It’s historically significant how bad it is. People will read about this moment in history and think “I hope my grandfather wasn’t a trumpet” as the look up their ancestors. Grandfathers will lie to their families about what they were doing right now. They will even shame me because all I did was comment online.
It’s specifically bad right now.
It can be both. This is also very specific to the western world and america in general, as other parts of the world have very different experiences, both good and bad
the contradictions are piling up and things are more openly fascist, economic opportunities are shrinking in the west, income inequality is off the chart, yeah things are actually worse
The era of Pax Americana is over. There is a global realignment underway. The future is more uncertain than any of us have known in our lifetime.
For a while there was an idea that globalization would elevate the world. This post war era was the first part of our lives. It turns out America and Europe decided it isn’t acceptable when the world actually started having it good. So now we have to burn it all down and enter a phase of heightened global conflict. We’ll kill each other until we’re tired of that. Then maybe there will be another period of relative peace. Seems to be the nature of humanity.
My dad said that everything “went to shit” once they started privatizing hospitals and public infrastructure.
40 here. Your sentiments are my sentiments.
Fuck this place. But also we gotta fix it.
