important edit: I’m not American
Recently everything is just feeling really off. Life has always had problems and everything, but I feel like in the past 1-2 years the quality of life has significantly started rampantly going down and companies are getting exponentially greedy and billionaires exponentially crazy.
2 years ago you could use the internet normally. Nowadays it’s not even fun anymore, everything is full of ads, terms and services are getting more and more disgusting, everything’s becoming paid, but it’s also getting more and more addictive. The people are also getting crazier every day because of rage bait content taking over.
Things that used to be normal are becoming impossible to afford now. I live in one of the richest countries of the world and after paying rent (for a studio) and food I can barely save anything. Kids start working at 14 and at 18 they are grinding 12 hour night shifts while living with their parents to be able to buy a shitty apartment WITH 80% LOAN in their 20s, that they’ll pay for 40 years.
I know everyone else is feeling it too, but did it just randomly start getting exponentially worse in the past few years or am I the stupid one?
Comments
No, it’s pretty much always been bad in many ways.
I’m mid 40s and even though I’m not American, I can safely say that the world “changed” after 9/11. That’s a definite threshold of life going from one form to another. It feels like it was a gradual decline since then.
There’s probably a name for this sensation but people feel this way over time, especially as they age. It is a version of the “back in the good Ole days” things were better fallacy and it is common. So recent times always feel like things are getting worse even though by most standards they’re the same or better.
It’s been getting worse since September 11, 2001, and even more so since Trump started his racist birther campaign in 2015.
Nah it’s been a slippery slope since we caged all the Japanese people who were American citizens in WW2. Government with more control lead by less capable people every cycle. And normal people having less of a voice, ability or desire to do anything about it.
The world’s been feeling a lot smaller these days. Don’t know if that’s good or bad.
A lot of models that track societies over 250 year cycles, 125 year cycles, and 80 year cycles, as well as data science (cliodynamics) all point to the fact that the 2020s and perhaps early 2030s would be an extremely hard time for us.
You’re not stupid, it’s just time for us to transition as a society. I sadly think it’ll be a rough ride in the next 5-10 years globally. Rougher than WW2.
Our GDP per capital is 8 times that of the Chinese. Our lives are much much better, You should be proud.
Its always been bad. The rapid sharing of (mis)information and hyper focus on engagement over truth on social media platforms is what really supercharged everything, IMO. When the algorithms switched to ultimate engagement in order to put as many ads in front of your face as possible, the world changed for the worst.
We have also raised a generation (GenZ) who is not equipped to decipher truth from online fiction/propaganda. Add in a dash of COVID isolation and here we are.
Unfortunately its likely going to take another type of technology that transfers value from the current ecosystem to get away from this.
It’s always sucked. But it’s definitely getting worse. Or better, depending on how much you smoke.
I think we are getting old – ‘back in my day’
Did you think “Burn corpo shit” was just a quirky line not a solution to most problems?
No
Yes, the Maya calendar is not a joke.
Every night since 2014
The world is fine. It’s the people on it that are the problem.
It only takes one individual to cause an accident that changes everyone’s direction and plans.
It’s happening because of trade wars for corporations and politics, they raise the prices, we can’t afford, the stocks drop, they buy buy buy, they fix prices, stocks go up, they sell sell sell, we lose money for a few months, they make millions.
This year is the boiling point. People are waking up to the horrors of capitalism and things are finally going to go down so good things can go up
I did an art project about these themes last year and a lot of older (60+) folks I showed it to pointed out that they felt something pretty similar in the 1970s. Even with the companies getting greedier. And I thought about it, and I think there’s a lot more nuance to be had, but, its kind of a good point. Like my family has kept some of their fancy clothes from the 1950s-90s, but there’s barely anything from the 70s. I asked my mom why and she said most of the clothes they had from that time disintegrated. And looking at old photos of first communions and stuff that tracks. The fabric they were wearing looked like the stuff cheap Halloween costumes are made of. Not to mention the constant paranoia about nuclear annihilation, the fuel crisis, fears about new dangers in the world.
What we’re going through now is new, and in some ways a lot worse, but it’s not entirely unheard of either.
The day Harambre died, we entered the cursed timeline.
No. It happened gradually. We’re all frogs in a pot.
It’s called Late Stage Capitalism. Shits about to crumble.
….. well we have terrible politics going on right now with a president who’s mission is to absolutely destroy our economy for the rich to buy it up again…., so yeah you’re about right.
Id say it started about 5 years ago. Everything was changing for the worse. More bad news personally and worldwide since. Just kept building year after year.
Consumer experience is garbage. Ads, shit products, shilling garbage, etc.
Late stage capitalism – like it or not – is creating unfavourable conditions for many. Financially many are not doing well post covid. Recessions and inflation are more a threat than before.
The internet has us polarized and fed into an addiction cycle of being sad and elated at our phone screens. We see and are obligated to do, way more than any human in history really has, day to day.
The world order is having a shakeup, domestic politics everywhere is super spicy now.
So yeah, shit is pretty fucked right now. But it’s also pretty okay. There’s a lot of perception we lack in terms of history, it wasn’t golden 50 years ago and it won’t be in 100 from now.
It’s all cycles of good times, bad times, chaos and tension, and order and release.
Really seems like once Trump came onto the scene it’s just been downhill since then. I don’t see it getting any better for a long time either. I think he has done decades worth of damage.
Everything went to shit after Covid lol
it’s as if the world leaders knew there was a catastrophe coming and are trying to get everything they can before it happens. their blatant greed, not caring about the masses, the redoubts in new zealand… makes one wonder.
Here’s my take:
I think all of us are spending way too much time on the internet, like most of the younger generations. It’s normal for you to get overwhelmed by the content you consume, considering the algorithm shows you content in way to cause fearmongering, or even worse- warmongering. There is no way suddenly the world’s going to turn in to a utopia or the other way.
I think it’s also the uncertaintity and anxiety that comes with growing up, your body chemistry changes. It takes sometimes to get used to the next phase of your lifetime.
I have a feeling that everything went downhill since 2010. And especially the last 5 years.
I feel like we are building up to a big chaotic event and things won’t settle down until after that happened. Like we are a bunch of frogs in boiling water.
I think if you would show the news today to someone in 2010 they would be in total panic. But we got used to it by living in this timeline. It’s crazy.
I know it sounds stupid, but I feel like everything started really getting noticeably worse after Kobe Bryant died.
I’m 58. I’m addicted to my phone. My attention span is crap. My relationships strained. Work is hard.
I think some technology isn’t good for us. Or it needs to be monitored. It’s a scary world we live in
What rock have you been living under where the internet could be used normally 2 years ago lmao
If you really want to know, you can go down the r/collapse rabbit hole. People talk about the red and blue pill, well collapse due to climate change is the true test.
The elite are well aware of the realities of climate change, tipping points, and the modeling about what that will happen. This is why the insurance companies are dropping people because they have to. Corporations are starting to make moves and billionaires are too. Things are not going to get better. We have 8 billion people on this planet and it’s impossible to stop climate change and there is no technology that can be deployed on a global scale to stop it. The latest science says we will be at 2 degress of warming by 2045 (or sooner) which means many more floods, fires, hurricanes, droughts that will wipe out our food supplies and seriously disrupt supply chains. Limits to Growth says the global population will be 4 billion by 2100.
Not really. The world is better than it has been for almost the entirety of human history. Some of the things you’re noticing getting worse are actually getting worse, but that’s for fairly straightforward reasons that have been applicable for a long time already- and to some extent the craziness of the present is just the breaking point for some trends that have been building up for decades or even centuries.
Yes, that night was January 20, 2025.
You’ve been very sheltered.
No, no, no…the world’s been hot trash for 1000s of years.
Most things do not get ugly overnight. They slowly deteriorate because we don’t always perceive how our current paths are hurting us. This is due to the necessary actions required to address the situation (aka sacrifice) and we humans long for passive (aka no sacrifice) fixes.
It’s not until things become irreversible or undeniable that we start to blame and address how things truly have changed. As good changes don’t matter and only bad changes matter these realizations often involve accepting massive bad changes that then we must sacrifice to fix or can no longer ignore.