Lately I’ve been struggling with this thought.
I can’t tell if life has just become extremely difficult — the world feels unstable, expensive, and stressful — or if it’s more about me getting older. I notice denial about how much time has passed, regrets about choices I didn’t make, and anxiety about the future weighing me down more than ever.
Part of me wonders if the world really has gotten tougher… or if I’m just looking at things through a different lens now.
Has anyone else gone through this? How do you deal with the mix of regrets, uncertainty, and the fear that things are only getting harder?
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One can only carry on, try to make life better and pray. It is depressing, but these are the times of today.
The world is definitely harder, scarier and more unstable now than it has been the last 30 years. Real income has gone down and living expenses are higher (rent and property expenses has grown much more than wages). The US used to enforce world order, now they are not to be trusted and part of the chaos themselves. Political polarization is high and misinformation rampant. We are more lonely and isolated than before.
The world peaked in 2005-2006, then came the financial crisis, smart phones and the algorithms.
Yes
I think that it’s technically more complex, but not harder.
When I think hard, I think of society before technology. Things were much harder just 20 years ago in that regard. For example, smart phones have had more processing power for the last 20 years than we had to land humans on the moon 60 years ago.
What do we do with that kind of power?
Candy Crush 😂😂😂
2 ways to think about it, IMO.
We have more responsibility. More people depend on us, and some people literally rely on us for their survival. We must listen to the noise to make informed decisions, which is stressful.
We thought it was difficult previously, but the penalty was… go live with your parents (for many of us).
So, while I agree that life seems more stressful and harder, those in the past were going through the most challenging times of their own.
How do I personally handle it? I work harder, turn off the noise that doesn’t matter, and focus on the things I can control.
Coke, binge drinking & hookers once in a while help, too.
Its that housing, a fundamental requirement for doing ANYTHING as an adult has skyrocketed in cost. When my mom was 19, she had her first job working as a courier at a local hospital. Her job was just to pick up things in one location, take them to another location and repeat. Low level, entry level work, the type of thing you would expect a 19 year old fresh out of high school to do.
She was able to afford her own 1 bedroom apartment in Riverside CA (where we still live) where only 25% of her income went to rent. The place was also furnished. The apartment is still there, it has aged 50 years, it has not been extensively remodeled. Other than new paint jobs, new carpet and maybe a few new appliances it looks more or less the same as it did in the 1970s. Today the rent is $2000 per month.
In order for someone to pay $2000 per month, and that is only 25% of their income, they would need to be making $8000 per month. Nearly $100k per year. The median household income for our city is substantially less than $100k per year. 19 year old high school grads with their first full time entry level work are not going to make that kind of money. Someone with that job today probably makes $35,000 per year. The rent is $24,000 per year. Nearly 70% of their income would be on rent. The majority of full time jobs in the city do not pay well enough for a person to even qualify for that one bedroom apartment. But my mom pulled it off as a 19 year old with her first full time job. We figure that after adjusting for inflation the apartment today is nearly triple what she paid for it.
People aging into this system, and it has been going on for a while, see this extreme difficulty mode. I am 41. The housing market and job market in our area have not been friendly to the regular person for nearly my entire adult life. There was a period right when I finished high school when the job market was actually decent and apartments were not yet crazy expensive. During the GFC homes got super cheap, but the market for people who needed to buy new homes, people getting started in life, was an absolutely terrible labor market.
Affording a place to live is a fundamental issue. You can have smartphones, you can have TVs, you can have the internet, all fine, all great tools, but if you can’t afford a cheap place to live, everything in your life will be out of whack. We are seeing it with people having fewer children. People say “Oh well its that women are all now super educated high earning professionals! “…. no… they vast majority aren’t… and even those who are can’t really afford to have kids.
When I was a kid, it was common for people to buy homes where the husband worked at like a Home Depot in the Lawn Mower Dept and the wife worked 4 hours a day at an office while the kids were at school. Now that home is $700,000. Think a youngish couple can afford that?
This housing crises adds agitation all over society. It adds a layer of anxiety that makes life feel tense everywhere.
I think it’s a combination of things genuinely getting more complex and chaotic and greater sensitivity to these things as one gets older. When you’re younger — at least, our generation — you tend you be less risk-averse, partly because of biology and partly because you just don’t realize how dangerous and filled with challenges the world can be. So people who grew up in the 90s/early 2000s have experienced the double-whammy of becoming more aware of and stressed about the state of the country/world as that state has deteriorated in various ways. It’s a difficult adjustment, for sure.
It’s a game bro, the further you get the higher the difficulty becomes.
Both.
Even my boomer, French, right wing conservative, « self made » multi millionaire, « work hard pull yourself by your bootstraps stop complaining » boss openly admits that life is harder for us now than it was for his generation, and that we’re inheriting a undeniably broken world.
(The only reason he empathizes is because his son is 26, but still. To have such a guy recognize this says a lot.)
I’m not going to tell you that the world isn’t a dumpster fire these days, because it is. But it’s worth examining how much of a roll the constant drip of bad news delivered via slot machine mechanisms is at play here.
Before smart phones you might read a bad news story in the morning paper or see it on the evening news, and then move on with your day until there’s an update the next day. But now a days we’re inundated with the play by play of every bad thing that happens, as well as everyone’s reaction to it in real time.
This is not good for focus, mental health, or really understanding the world around us.
The politicians (both parties, I can’t stress this enough) over the last 40 years have crapped on the economy and inflated prices like it was their goal. It’s definitely harder now financially.
It’s very complicated. Many things are easier today. Something are harder.
I grew up in pretty harsh conditions and now I live in Canada.
What I’ve noticed is that ‘the basics’ have gotten less secure. When the basic are hard to secure, you are inherently more worried.
For example, in Canada, housing is ridiculously expensive. I find it a genuinely weird Canadian pride themselves on universal healthcare and won’t want to pay a penny for it, but housing is expensive. I’d rather housing be cheap and healthcare be private and expensive. It’s basic needs.
It’s not just physical things however. It’s even ’emotional’ security.
I want to emphasize I’m not speaking on these things as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. I’m speaking on it from the place of physical/emotional/psychological security. Every basic concern that is not secure places you in a state of anxiety. The human brain can only worry about so much before stress starts to overwhelm.
If you look at the past. Let’s say even when the world was worried about the USSR and nuclear war. There was rightly a concern about nuclear war and that gave a certain level concern. But most people were secure in their housing, family, culture… You at least had something to count on.
I can even relate to growing up. I grew up quite poor and literally spent my early years in a concrete block home about the size a room in Canada. But I was secure in my home. Family was pretty secure in so far as the culture goes. There were always external threats and all kinds of chaos, but the home and family were okay.
This is probably a bit of a generalization.
The past tried to keep ‘threats’ external, but keep the internal secure.
Today, the internal is ‘insecure’, but the external is pretty secure.
I’m in Canada and I don’t spend a second really worrying if Russia is going to invade. I don’t think the USA is going to invade despite some funny talk. But I worry about all the internal threats and you live with internal threats every day.
Yes I think we have a lot higher standards and expectations and people are overwhelmed with it all. At the root I blame marketing and capitalism. We have a barrage 24/7 telling us what to do and how to feel. The news/media has everyone scared of their own shadows and thinking that the world is a terrible unsafe place.
As a parent it feels like its 5x harder to raise a child vs when I grew up. I’m made to feel like my kids can’t even leave the house unattended
I think it’s partly misleading, in that I suspect most of us are all considerably more burnt out and lacking in any spare bandwidth since the pandemic (or even a few years earlier than that) than we otherwise would have been.
Some things are technically, on paper, better – and some are worse, but that feeling alone makes everything seem worse regardless of whether it actually is or isn’t because you’ve got so much less to work with from one day to the next.
It’s harder now. Rent is insane, let alone housing prices near denser job hobs. Rent at a mediocre 1bd 600ft apartment when I started as a intern/junior even 9 years ago was $1200/mo (not including utils) literally right next door to the office of a nice office in a tech hub. I was able to afford that on a 65k/yr salary. Now that same apartment is nearly $1700/mo not including utilities and literally nothing has changed. Bare minimum rent for a house now in that city is $2k/mo for something that is in remotely “ok” condition. Everything is just obscenely expensive.
Jobs that are actual careers, not just gig work, are now stupidly hard to obtain because companies love to just farm it out to someone overseas or import someone for cheap to save a quick buck. It all makes me seriously regret not just sucking it up and going into the military. If I had I’d be 3/4 the way into a military career and be close to retiring with a nice pension that adjusts with inflation, giving me a baseline yearly income to not worry about housing or food.
Technology becomes more difficult to create and maintain as we develop it further. And we are pretty deep down that rabbit hole. Layers upon layers upon layers. And we keep adding more.
And there’s more advanced scams, manipulation, deepfakes, etc thanks to that technology.. That being said, it’s easier to survive now. More social programs to keep people alive and (somewhat) healthy. But managing everything and integrating with all the new tech does feel overwhelming, at times.
“Is it harder now?” is probably too vague of a question to be meaningful.
In my experience as a man in the U.S. in my 50s, life feels “very roughly” (again, relegated to vagueness) similar to how it always has been.
There have always been problems here. I remember waiting on gas lines in the 70s, having to sit on the highway for a while in a big line to get gasoline and only on days in which your license plate number matched the odd or even system. I grew up wondering if I’d be blown up by an ICBM from USSR. I inhaled secondhand smoke everywhere, even as a child. NYC looked awful and there was a serial killer on the loose. My video game character in Atari’s Adventure was a square–and I loved it anyway. The president and his wife were consulting an astrologer. And so many horrifying events in the news now and then, here and abroad. And cars were far more dangerous to drive in and people more commonly drove drunk. Major diseases were less treatable. Etc. Etc.
So, some things are better now, some things are worse… Being able to precisely say if things in general are better or worse strikes me as very hard to do. I just try to do what I can to live a reasonably good life.
It has gotten much more expensive, and I am not seeing any good reasons for that. It sounds like 1st world bougie problems, but nothing really changing in my life economic-wise, suddenly I don’t seem to be able to do anything I enjoyed doing a few years ago. It really stinks when you go from feeling like you are having the time of your life to being scared of dining out because I have no idea what its going to do to my bank account. $15 gin and tonics in a $3 a glass beer town is putting a severe damper on my style. I could understand it if there’s a reason for the increase in cost for everything I enjoy doing (have you bought any outdoors sporting gear lately, you need a mortgage to get fishing line now), but there isn’t.
It’s both. But definitely focus more on you.
You cannot change the external world. You do have control over yourself and your inner world. Chose to put your focus and energy on yourself and your relationships.
My suggestion is start doing Wim Hoff breathwork every single morning. Do it before you do anything on your phone or engage with the world at all. Quick cold shower too. Change your routine to start your day 30 mins earlier to fit in Wim Hoff breathing and a shower. Do it every day for 2 weeks I guarantee you will start to notice new things and get either a fresh perspective or a simple sense of relief.
You can do it. Life is difficult but you are not alone. Life’s difficult for everyone and you yourself are very capable… more than you realise.
I made less money when I was 18 and had so much more. I’d need to make an extra $1000 a month to live like I did back then. Life has gotten harder and you’re now expected to to throw away the work life balance to make ends meet. Anyone who says otherwise is in the lucky minority.
No. Live is vastly easier in every possible way, apart from housing affordability.
Even once you purchase a house, young people expect to furnish it within 18 months.
Older generations spent a lifetime slowly purchasing furniture.
Consumer products are vastly cheaper in relative terms.
Some IKEA products cost fewer dollars today than in 1985 (the year that I was born).
Factor in inflation and that’s a vast decrease in relative terms.
https://preview.redd.it/dgb0dzbj8yqf1.png?width=1422&format=png&auto=webp&s=731d8fc30f3970b04dbbe0f547c390e053eb6639
I’m in my early 50’s. I would say this is a hard question to answer.
There are ways I think it has gotten easier. Technology and access to information is wildly better now than it was in the 1970’s or 1980’s. If you’re having any kind of problem at all (medical, automotive, financial, hobby, etc).. you can Google and find all sorts of rich resources to help you solve that problem.
There are ways it’s gotten harder though. There’s that statistic (https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/) about how Productivity has nearly 88% since early 1970s.. but average hourly pay has only gone up 32%. I feel like it’s harder and harder to tread water. As someone who’s lived paycheck to paycheck most of my life,.. it’s been a constant scrappy fight just to survive. In the most recent 2 years I moved cross-country for a job that doubled my pay putting me for 1st time into the very low 6digits.. and I honestly can’t believe how much of a difference that has made in my day to day life. I used to feel like I had this constant grey-fog of worry floating over me that I could never escape from.. but now I have.
Maybe anecdotal.. but I also feel like now there’s a lot more chaos and people doing damage in daily life than I remember in the past. So many things I try to do in my daily life and realize other people seem to be working against me. It feels like nobody really cares about putting in quality work any more. From package-deliveries to food-prep to home maintenance etc.. everyone just seems to be doing the bare bare minimum.
I rent an apartment and about 4 months ago I noticed some growing wet spots in my bathroom ceiling. I assumed the apartment above me was the same layout, so their toilet is directly above my toilet.. which obviously is concerning. The previous maintenance tech said he fixed the upstairs toilet (little did I know at the time that he did not). I assumed it was fixed,. but some of the spots and drip slowly came back. So I had to call maintenance again and the 2nd (different) tech dug into the problem and said the previous tech did not reinstall the wax seal on the upstairs neighbors toilet correctly.. so the leak continued). Thankfully it seems to be correctly repaired this time as they had to cut my bathroom ceiling completely out and for a week or so I could see the pipes and lack of new leaks.
I see that kind of stuff all around me in my daily life,. whether it’s food I’m going to pickup (missing things from my order or etc) .. to sloppy auto-parking jobs (it sucks to come home from a long day and not be able to park in my dedicated parking spot because some big dually pickup truck is over into my parking spot.. because the person simply didn’t care.
Some days I feel like it’s just a long string of me fighting against all those things around me. Packages say they were delivered but they weren’t. Other people in my building trash the Laundry room so I have to clean it up. People at work do something that throws my whole task list off and forces me to pivot to other unexpected things,. etc ec.
I just wish all that would stop. I semi-joke with my friends that “I wish there was at least 1 year where NOTHING HAPPENED”.. so I could catch up.
For me (and this takes a lot of effort).. my strategy has been to plan 3 to 4 paths to whatever goal I’m striving for. So if 2 or 3 of those plans fall through or get unexpectedly undercut,. hopefully I still have another redundant path to that goal. Shouldn’t have to do this,.. but I feel like it’s become necessary. Doesn’t always work.. but I’ve found it helpful. Sucks and is expensive to have to simultaneously be working 3 to 4 paths to a certain goal.. but it is what it is.
Life is genuinely more expensive. Yes. Way more expensive. And most people don’t have money. So financially speaking, it’s harder.
No, it’s harder. The costs of housing are destroying a lot of countries. People are paying so much in rent that they can afford to save for a house. People don’t have a house, so they don’t have kids. My wife and I’s first apartment together was $400 a month. That same apartment 10 years later , with no updates done, is now over $1000 . If the government wants to panick about the birth rates, they need to do something about the costs of rent and single family homes. I more than doubled my income in the last 8 years and my standard of living hasn’t improved.
Yes, Compared to 10, 20, 30yrs ago ….things have gotten worse over-all.
You’re right, the world is getting worse and worse. And things will probably continue in that direction for the forseeable future
More money for essentials, less money to enjoy life as a result. It’s 100% harder. I’m on the cusp of turning 40 and it honestly feels like I had more buying power with my entry level salary 20 years ago than I do now with my senior level salary.
It’s the hardest it’s been since the post war era. Some things are better…media access (movies, music), clothing is cheaper, and communication technology is literally sci-fi level of convenience.
But education, healthcare, food , housing is all more expensive …. Job opportunities few. And society seems oriented to taking money from you at every turn.