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?
The world is not the USA. The USA is getting worse. The USA is an unhinged shit hole. Things are getting better where I live in Mexico. We have a popular leader that is pushing popular social programs and as the US kills itself we’re taking the opportunity to get closer to the rest of the world, build new infrastructure and sort out the American created cartels and chaos. China is getting better, they lifted millions of people out of dire poverty. Much of the rest of the world is doing just fine. There are always problem parts and hope simultaneously.
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.
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
So the conclusion would be:
This world is awful! Let’s fix it, so it can be as awful as it used to be.
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.
I’ve been watching BBC Archive footage from the 80s recently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yfE9Ihr8F0
Everyone has the exact same fears as they do now: Russian interference, outcompeted by China, being a US lapdog, the price of housing, education standards, rich/poor divide.
All the exact same talking points we have today. We havent changed that much in 50 years just different gadgets.
(Though the absolute rich/ absolute poor divide is a lot bigger
Better gadgets and more inclusion for minorities and LGBTQ+ people. But plenty of incredibly vocal people that act like those rights are fascism, oh and numerous other rights are at risk.
Its a lot of better, and we’ve come a long way. But we’ve also come nowhere.
This was immensely interesting and helpful, thank you. I’m a millennial and reading your perspective is huge to me. I wish more things like this were shared openly, honestly, with an analytical perspective, from more people.
Thank you. This made my day.
You probably noticed that I ran out of time after 00’s
I mean, 10s and 20s were short, but I figured that was because they are most recent and don’t need to be talked about as much. Is that not why?
True, but how the world actually changed due to arrival of the world wide web and it’s commercialisation became apparent in those years.
And I do have to admit that I have slight skew of perspective.
It’s in the age of 25-30, when your career takes off and your children are born, your world kinda freezes. Mentally you see yourself as 30 years old till you’re well over 50. Your memories kinda clump together and time runs faster and faster. Song that’s playing on the throwback show feels like it was released last year.
Not sure if your brain clocks your memories in relation to life lived.
Realities of old age and appearance of new generation finally makes you wake up. You have arrived to your midlife crisis. This is what people older than me tell me. I’m still not 50, although first grandchildren are probably not far off.
The thing is that your world view also freezes. I notice that I’m still dragging along somewhere in the early 2010s
I’m 35, probably won’t have children because I’m queer, and I’m already meeting younger generations and being violently shaken awake by my appearance and that my country is full of people who don’t seem to exhibit signs of self awareness.
I thought stupid people were relatively rare, but it’s like there’s a neverending supply of ignorance, hatred, vitriol, and the same bad logic/rhetoric that I’ve been trying to undo for the past 25 years. It’s like every year, there’s a new crop of some dumb myth that I haven’t heard since 2010, each time I hear it, it’s being parroted more and more confidently and belligerently.
My life stretches out in sisyphean walls of rhetoric at every front. Gaming, art, exercise, sexuality, politics, philosophy, or all number of micro topics like how to not use wet oven mitts or that if you own a car you have to actually maintain it. It’s like I’m witnessing the speed of evolution and have too high of expectations.
Maybe this expectations came from early internet and my world view is also stuck in the early 2010s. But if that were the case, then how does me as an American at my age, you who is Nordic at your age, and a friend of mine who is ten years younger and an immigrant all have overlap? That makes no sense and leads me to believe a lot of these things are NOT inherent to our age, but maybe to the state of the world itself.
Coming from the 70’s (US) as well the thing is things were generally getting better. The trend was upward although I would say economically that sorta ended in 2000 while technologically it was more around 20teens (excepting open source). The thing about politically, especially with freedom and rights, its been sorta back and forth but again felt more two steps forward one back pre 2k and one forward two back afterwards. Its starting to feel all back and no forward this year.
Are you American? I’d really like to know.
Nordic
Nerds were no longer beaten for knowing how tech works.
Looking at the nerds fucking things up right now, I’d say they could stand a few extra beatings.
The Matrix was built to resemble the late 90s-00, “the pinnacle of civilization”
Oh shit.
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.
This is exactly it. For Westerners just feeling the weight of the military-industrial complex, this feels unbelievable. The reality is, we were ignorant. Maybe we knew that Bush invaded Iraq, and had seen the pictures of Obama’s drone strikes in Yemen, but seeing those events could never match the daily toll of knowing you’re being targeted every single day. The few times that these crises bled onto US soil (Kent State, killings of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor, police brutality at BLM protests, Jan 6th insurrection) it felt like an unbelievable atrocity, but this was what the anti-war movement was trying to highlight.
I thought I understood what was being said because I knew the facts. Trump’s reelection showed me how wrong I was.
“We were just minding our own business invading other countries for oil.”
In the 90s, as a kid in Quebec, I thought racism, sexism, homophobia were all things of the past. Boy was I naive.
Through the 90s and visiting various areas of the US, those things were always there but not discussed in the open. People would say disgusting shit to people they thought they were safe saying those things to.
We’ve come to the point where people will say they aren’t racist but will still defend racist views and say racist shit but it’s not all brown people, just certain ones.
We’re probably about 6 months from having these assholes walk around with armbands.
I’m from the Western US, they basically told us MLK delivered a banger speech, some people matched on DC and the country was cured of racism. We’re all 100% equal now!
Hearing my neighbor say “I’ve got nothing against black people, I just wanna own a few of em.” made me skeptical.
in my opinion the civil war around 1800 did not actually abolish slavery. it just made slavery more efficient.
instead of killing your slaves through hard work (which means you have to buy new ones) you can just work them longer if they live longer, i.e. that’s why working conditions improved. at the same time, slavery got renamed into “prison labor”. it’s essentially the same thing.
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.
I feel this. I keep thinking of what gandolf said to frodo and I very much feel like frodo.
I’m 36. I just told my mom I want to l go to France to ollattend a clown college. The shame in those eyes.
Sometimes the story isn’t what you wanted
40 here. Your sentiments are my sentiments.
Fuck this place. But also we gotta fix it.
A tad older. My response was the same as yours. I dream of fixing it but how?
Then I remember so many people voted or walked towards this. A handful of greedy have been pushing this and other humans were happy to enable it, and millions more accept it.
Which leads me to think maybe I am the minority.
but how
I know this sounds cliche as, but I just try to fix it one smile at a time.
Mum used to tell me this story and it has stuck with me for more than forty years.
Two kids were walking at the beach when they saw thousands of beached fish, gasping for their lives. So one kid picked up a fish and threw it back in the water. The friend said, “there’s thousands of them, you’re not making a difference!”. “Well, I did for that one”.
Welcome to being a Doomer. 90s was according to several sources the best time ever in human history, the peak that is.
“The crux of the problem is that, geopolitically and demographically speaking, for most of the last seventy-five years, we have been living in that perfect moment. At the end of World War II, the Americans created history’s greatest military alliance to arrest, contain, and beat back the Soviet Union…What is often forgotten, however, is that this alliance was only half the plan. In order to cement their new coalition, the Americans also fostered an environment of global security so that any partner could go anywhere, anytime, interface with anyone, in any economic manner, participate in any supply chain and access any material input – all without needing a military escort. This butter side of the Americans’ guns-and-butter deal created what we today recognize as free trade. Globalization. Globalization brought development and industrialization to a wide swath of the planet for the first time, generating the mass consumption societies and the blizzard of trade and the juggernaut of technological progress we all find so familiar. And that reshaped global demographics. Mass development and industrialization extended life spans, while simultaneously encouraging urbanization. For decades that meant more and more workers and consumers, the people who give economies some serious go. One outcome among many was the fastest economic growth humanity has ever seen. Decades of it…But all things must pass. We now face a new change in condition…”
- Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization
This book is: Something
Top comment here describes it better then I can;
https://goodreads.com/book/show/58782897-the-end-of-the-world-is-just-the-beginning
This is a very US-centered comment. It’s ridiculous to say the 90s was the best time in human history during the same decade when the USSR collapsed and living standards for millions of people dropped substantially. That should automatically exclude the decade from “best in human history”, if you consider humanity to include all of humanity.
You’re completely correct.
I stand corrected.
Grew up watching news of Palestinians and Israelis killing each other. Good thing that was 40 years ago.
In late 2023 there was a video of a tower in Gaza being hit by israeli missiles, and the media were calling it misinformstion because it was a clip from like Jan of that year
Free Palestine
Twenty-five years ago many slurs now rightly shunned were still part of common speech.
Twenty-five years ago marriage equality was not even on the table.
A lot of things are worse now, but a lot of things are better, too. I’d say right now things are worse than ten years ago but you can’t go much farther back without it getting murky.
The US was better but we were on course for this. Earlier laws restricting suing of international companies, the patriot act, citizens united, etc. Honestly beyond all of this is the lack of shame. Like I don’t think people are necessarily worse than they used to be but there was a vague agreement of what was bad and good and bad people wanted to hide being bad. There was shame. We seem to be living in the age of shamelessness. Like nazi types used to hide under klu klux klan robes but now they make youtube videos about how other races are inferior and the woke members of their race are race traitors. Again the roots go way back like the greed is good thing from the 80’s.
Most news is bad news and you certainly are exposed to more (bad) news these days than decades earlier. That certainly must be one factor why you can get increasingly bitter about the world.
But that doesn’t mean that the situation hasn’t gotten worse. It definitely has.
The three main factors are (although #2 and #3 are related): increasingly problematic climate change and exhausting the planetary resources too quickly while at the same time polluting it more and more, increasingly ruthless neo-liberalist capitalism (leading to increasingly poor regular people and increasingly rich rich people), and the rise of right-wing extremism / fascism (related to the previous factor because whenever the population is worse off, they tend to vote more for right-wing populists lying to make everything better and knowing the true causes, while in reality they deflect from real problems and will make things even worse for the general population, and faster). And since we have the internet, local fascism doesn’t stay local. It spreads globally.
Yes. The contradictions of capitalism are only getting worse. Workers, care givers, nature, social institutions, racialized people and countries, all can only be exploited and expropriated so much. But capitalism demands more and more. So it will continue getting worse until successful revolutions. But you don’t have to feel detached about it. You can try to understand it, tell others about it, look around for awesome people struggling against it, maybe even find ways to help them. I started reading Nancy Fraser’s new book “Cannibal Capitalism” it’s short, tries to be accessible and it explains how all those areas of struggle I mentioned above are connected.
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.
