I think a lot of people grew up with the internet, and don’t realise just how new it is to have bad news shoved down your throat day after day just to generate clicks
That just… wasn’t a thing before
So I’d say, more aware, plus greedy cunts want to make you aware more often
As someone who grew up with the internet and 28 years clocking in. I want to go back to the internet where the only news we got, was when it was in a category and it didn’t get all in your face wherever you went.
Nowadays, everyone cannot shut up to you about what’s going on, news is 24/7. Even when you think you’ve avoided it, you’ll run into places and people that make the news their identity that have to remind you, everytime, what’s going on. It’s annoying.
The internet back then wasn’t perfect, but it was a hell of a lot more quieter than it is now.
Some things are slightly shittier, some things are way shittier, and a lot of things are a lot better. What do you mean specifically?
Politics and the Supreme Court have gotten a lot shittier since 2016 (like a steep decline, rather than the slight decline before).
The wealth gap has been getting shittier since the 70s. Wages haven’t kept up with productivity, while living expenses have only increased.
The housing market is shitty if you’re young or don’t have generational wealth.
Technology and medicine have gotten way better over the last ~100 years.
General consumer safety has gotten way better since the 50s.
Literacy levels and the rate of high school graduation have gotten way better.
Climate change is killing the planet. Deregulation is making climate change worse. Green energy isn’t coming fast enough.
Capitalism and specifically the notion that corporations have a duty to the shareholders has made companies and products shittier, but TVs are really cheap, and computers are really fast.
Robotics has gotten incredibly advanced, as has AI. Whether that’s shitty is pretty much up to opinion. I’d say it’s neutral, and depends on how they’re used.
Speaking of which, war was already horrifying, and now robots have made it vastly more horrifying. I don’t see any way that’s going to stop.
Food has become either really nutrient dense and amazing or really calorie dense and horrible, depending on how much money you have.
Speaking of money, there are a handful of people who have like half of the money. Maybe the guillotine went out of style too soon.
Video games and movies basically just look indistinguishable from reality now. And deep fakes are about to make it a lot easier to create that kind of realism.
For the most part, high speed internet access has slowly been getting better and better, both in speed and availability. Surprisingly, it’s stayed about the same percentage of the median income while doing so.
Streaming services have gotten so shitty it’s unbelievable that they’re still in business. But piracy has been making a comeback, and self hosting pirated content has gotten a lot easier. Physical media is also making a comeback.
Bigotry has gotten worse as a problem, but not worse in terms of percentage of people who are discriminatory. It’s just that the extreme bigots have basically taken over one of the political parties. (I mean, it basically was the party of bigotry before, but they had the decency to be subtle about it.) The younger generation can hopefully fix that problem as they enter voting age.
That’s all I can think of for now.
So basically anything that affects regular people in the US has gone to shit.
USdefaultism?
If you’re from the US, you’re going to talk about the US. You want people from other parts of the world to speak for you? No? Then shut up
when addressing a global community, writing “US supreme court” or “supreme court in US” instead of just “supreme court” is not a lot to expect and neither is that hard. also your argument is shit.
Awareness. Things used to be much worse. Lack of medical knowledge, sanitation, food safety, early warning of natural disasters, and rights.
both.
and being more aware is the first step to fixing.
People today tend to fixate on the things that are out of their control. Perhaps it’s because we have lost our coping mechanisms. Perhaps it’s because they never learned any. We live in the most technologically advanced point in time we have ever known. Few of us need to go out and till the earth to grow our own food. The majority of us don’t have to physically work as hard as previous generations. Adults and our children find their enjoyment and existential dread by watching tiny screens filled with useless entertainment. Maybe things are fine. We just make shitty choices about what to do with our time, and what we give our attention to.
Great thoughts. I think you did the question justice.
There are things that are better and things that are worse
It’s really all based on what you think has gone shittier.
But for a large part, it does feel like things are just shitter and we’re finding out one by one as to what it is.
My vote is more awareness. Things are definitely not good still you have no idea what we are missing, like a fish in a tank trying to picture the ocean.
That said things were fucking awful back in the day. Don’t worry, this entire way of life is a giant bubble and we will regress to the old norm
Yeah, I’d like to see how many people that would love to go back to the times where if you weren’t a worshiper of God, you’d be branded a heathen and potentially killed at any given day in however they see fit.
And not just any god, but the right god and worship in the right way? People were literally killing each other over whether altars should have rails around them or not and how a church’s middle management should be organized.
Yeah I’ve had people complain to me about being “born in the wrong era” before and I just don’t get it.
Me: What about the lack of modern medicine and death from easily preventable things? What about a crazy high risk of death in childbirth? You and I would be dead.
Me: What about being a second class citizen because you’re a woman?
Me: What about society hating literally any ethnic minority or LGBT person to the point where those friends you have now wouldn’t have been your friends back then? What about them being treated as second class citizens without any rights? What about these people literally being straight up murdered for just existing?
Me: What about periods of famine where people would literally starve to death?
Me: What about an even greater wealth divide than we have now?
Them: True, but it was still a lot better back then.
Me: …
By almost every measure, the world is better than it has ever been. Violence, poverty, starvation are all at or near record lows worldwide. Average lifespans are way up. We are just way, way more aware of what is going on in the world, and bad news drives more clicks than good news.
There are some cracks, no doubt. For example climate change is showing its ugly head, inequality is rising in the US and some other developed countries, and lifespans are taking a slight dip in parts of the US. But, compared to almost anywhere at any time during history, this is a golden age.
[ ] Lie
[ ] Damn lie
[X] Statistics
You know someone’s actually offering a real argument when their counterpoint to global trends almost universally improving basically amounts to “…nuh-uh! Shut up nerd!”
We’re more aware of it. We constantly drink from a firehouse of outrage and anxiety. Yea technology
Both.
The top 0.01% are able to exert more and more influence over the world, and are using it to concentrate wealth even more into their own pockets.
And regular people have access to smartphones that allow them to communicate worldwide instantly. The cost of more basic smartphones has plummeted, so more people have more cameras connected straight to social media.
But it’s also that some things are genuinely worse. I am fairly sure that there are still more slaves alive today than at any other point in history. However as a percentage I believe it’s lower, it’s just due to the world population being so high.
How do you define “things”?
On a global scale and on average, life for humans is getting significantly better than, say, a century ago. The number of people dying from preventable diseases, war, natural disasters has been steadily going down for a while now.
Of course there are many more people on earth than there were 100 years ago, so accumulatively there is a lot more suffering now.
Also, the lives of individual people, the state of certain countries and areas are certainly getting worse.
As for non-human animals… For most of them the world is getting increasingly less habitable and for those who are raised in an industrial setting for human consumption, living conditions are largely atrocious.
I think your question is too broad for a single answer. But you might be interested in this now 17 year old (!) TED talk by the late Hans Rosling, which at least partially answers your question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w
In a goal of progress, it’s best not to compare.
We could argue the world of today is better and in some ways it’s worse.
We don’t burn lead in gas anymore though perhaps in future there will be a better way to provide energy to transportation.
Minority rights are a lot further in many ways than they were before. tomorrow we will be much further than we are today.
The type of slavery we had before was far worse. We could still do better though.
People with 4th stage cancer actually have a chance now where they didn’t before. Hopefully tomorrow there will be a true cure.
Computers have made many jobs easier. Though they do have known flaws that it seems only computer scientists know about. General public still over fantasize computers are capable producing real life level intelligence today. One day someone will fix all those computational faults and then yea, computers will be super powerful but possibly even more scarier. Hopefully after that someone does reign it in…hopefully.
Internet made WFH a possibility which has lead to less impact on our environment with travelling. But it also made a direct gateway for scammers and pedos to be a lot more effective and dangerous. Perhaps in the future there will be a better way to prevent such activity.
On a political level I’d say we are way more polarized compared to what we used to be. This comes down to us though. Not just whoever is president. We are many someones who make up this world and have just as much to answer for acting like monsters while a monster rules a country.
there is always room for improvement.
People tend to be more educated and more empathetic. Violent crime is significantly down to the lowest levels ever, especially compared to the 70s.
What sucks is that some people are becoming irrelevant: old age, certain political beliefs, certain religious beliefs, etc. They are burning down the house on the way out. Also the house of cards that is the economy that was always going to collapse one day is now collapsing.
Socially we’re better off. Economically we’re worse off. I suspect that we go back to a mainly urban and more sustainable form of living like prior to the baby boom.
It’s definitely the latter, I’m afraid.
I’m old enough to remember the days when people actually believed we’d all be zipping around in our personal flying cars - do you have any idea how abysmally ignorant you have be to be to actually buy into that?
