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.
I think they were just speaking (typing…) conversationally rather than “addressing a global community”. Obviously a comment on an Internet forum is addressing a global community, but it’s not a formal conversation, and as long as you understood the comment I don’t get the need to complain about US defaultism here.
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: …
We’re more aware of it. We constantly drink from a firehouse of outrage and anxiety. Yea technology
Outrage? You should be mad as hell
Exactly this, back in the 1900s your scope was much more limited. Before radio, it was the range of the farthest newspaper. Before the Internet, it was the range of the phone networks. Now we have filled in most corners of the map, you can read resturant menus in Tokyo, place bets on teams playing in Mexico City, and all while sitting in your flat in Dublin. The world has always been a shitty place, its just much easier to be aware of it.
The schizophrenic village elder has foretold the past present and future and he says the future is he gets to diddle your youngest son and daughter.
The past was shit, that’s why we are shit now. But we don’t always have to be shit. Maybe if we work really hard we could be fertilizer for the future.
In terms of crime and violence, the world has never been safer than now. For anyone not a white dude, overall economic and legal situation has never been better than now, though we are in the “one step back” part of two steps forward, one step back.
Environmentally a mixed bag, to some extent pollution is less but it’s spread out more, and the accrual of all the old pollution, it’s cumulative and having more of an impact on our weather and climate, overall I think that’s worse, but people want to compare it to some past that didn’t exist - it was bad before too.
And yes we are WAY more aware of the shittiness now.
People who say the past was better or cleaner often “forget” to remember the negative aspects of the past. It’s also easy to remember the things that didn’t affect us, like a white person remembering going to the malt shop with friends but not remembering that there were no black kids in there either.
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?
There are things that are better and things that are worse
Awareness. Things used to be much worse. Lack of medical knowledge, sanitation, food safety, early warning of natural disasters, and rights.
It’s both. Capitalism runs a boom/bust cycle over each century. The “Great Depression” was about 100 years ago, following which the advent of union reforms and bunch of other things you should read about yourself cuz I forget fixed working conditions for actual people, and then the capitalists spent the next hundred years eroding those rights, basically (heavily oversimplified). the previous century was the same thing. It’s a shitty system and if it’s really the best we can do (hint: it’s not) then we don’t deserve the mantle we’ve placed on ourselves that declares us an intelligent species.
then the capitalists spent the next hundred years eroding those rights
Reforms dont prevent end end stage capitalism, only delays it.
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.
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
Perhaps it would be wise to begin cautiously
The funniest part that they should absolutely include in the quote XD
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!”
No I just don’t think someone telling me things are getting better makes me feel any better
Sure, but there is some comfort in knowing that things have been worse, and our perception is colored by having greater information. Doesn’t mean things aren’t shitty. But it’s a bit easier to swallow.
Why not both?
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
100 years ago there were more things that just happened to us that we couldn’t do anything about. It’s hard to eradicate a virus when you don’t even know what a virus is.
Nowadays we are plagued with completely solvable problems. We could eliminate measles, but dumbasses are afraid of vaccines. We could feed everyone, but we got billionaires to maintain. We could stop destroying the earth, but then who will burn all this oil? We could cooperate on a global scale, but then we might have to talk to brown people, ew. We could stop bombing each other, but then how would we prove to our gods that we’re good people?
So yeah “things” are shittier, because nowadays we have the ability to live in a nearly post-scarcity society but we just don’t wanna.
So yeah “things” are shittier, because nowadays we have the ability to live in a nearly post-scarcity society but we just don’t wanna.
Humankind could have been living in blissful peace for centuries. We’ve always had the ability to not kill each other or fight for resources. But many people, then and now, don’t want that.
The way civilizations/empires/countries have operated has largely been competitive. It’s naive to think we’ll all just come together and solve these very complicated problems.
Saying that people are stupid or racist… I don’t think that barely has anything to do with what prevents all major countries of the world to work together to combat things like disease, climate change, inequality, etc.
Humankind could have been living in blissful peace for centuries.
Nah. This is a unique moment in history - access to objective truth has never been so widespread. In theory, it’s a lot easier to lead people to war if you can convince them that their neighbors’ customs and culture are causing your crops to fail or some shit.
But it turns out that people simply prefer to reject objective truth. So they’ll blame gays for hurricanes and tell people that homelessness is punishment for sin.
Everything is definitely shittier now.
Here’s a brief snapshot of US history between 1962-1974, when my parents were school age.
- Soviet submarine B-59 comes terrifyingly close to starting a nuclear war with the United States (1962). This event was unknown at the time but the threat of nuclear war was very real.
- The Vietnam War begins (1962).
- President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas(1963).
- Alabama governor George Wallace makes the now famous declaration in his innaugeral address, “…segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” (1963).
- The Harlem [race] riot marks the first of numerous violent race riots across the country (1964).
- Malcolm X is assassinated in New York City (1965).
- Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee (1968).
- Bobby Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles, California after winning the California democratic presidential primary (1968).
- 4 College students are killed and 9 more wounded after being fired upon by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University.
- Richard Nixon becomes the first and only US President to resign after the Watergate scandal (1974).
And those are just some of the major highlights. Things have been plenty shitty in the past.
Bring back the USSR
State run capitalism? Gross.
Capitalism gross ew
According to the Grandpa association the good old times are way back before you’re born, so how would you even know?
