Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

We added tap to pay, which has made things much quicker. My tap to pay was failing, but my card was old, I got it replaced and it works really well for me. I wonder how much internet connectivity is a factor here.

Certain vehicle models people do not want to let in front of them. Other people only let you merge when you send the correct messages in a very specific and intricate language communicated using your vehicle. I believe I have mastered this vehicle language and driver psychology, and I personally rarely have an issue merging. I also don't drive a big, new or expensive car, which probably helps.

People abusing the customer service model necessitated changes to customer service delivery in some companies. Abuse meaning any call not strictly required, or any longer than is strictly required, or asking for anything which is not reasonable to ask for given the price that is being paid.

I'm not presuming that any of the above apply to the above commenter or anyone else specifically, these are sort of general observations about society at large.

Further, I think many changes that people see as negative are also the inevitable consequences of the behavior that they also see as normal. For example, if a gigantic disparity in wealth/income is flaunted, people are surprised or upset when others are jealous of that wealth, though it should be an obvious outcome. There are many, many examples of this that could be given.

Have you come across this meme?

Bad times create strong men, strong men create good times

etc.

Let me know your thoughts.

We live in a loop.

Remember that we still have unlimited source of food and water, that should be enough to be happy and optimistic, but probably we need a world war (again) to value what we have now.

Remember when we were free to work in whatever we wanted, do whatever we wanted, go out or not, travel or not, spend hours on the internet doing things like discussing on hacker news with the fridge full?... good times...

There are a lot of things that don’t cause “actual harm” (which is itself a very narrow and short-sighted metric to exclusively focus on) but are probably important to worry about. Clearly people care about “cultural things” even if you personally don’t care.

This is just personal but anytime I feel similar to the OP, I watch something by Hans Rosling [1] or Anna Rosling [2]. Although 10 and 5 years old respectively, I feel the general sentiment is still true - that human progress is slow, in the background and might be ebbing and flowing in your specific sub-population.

And when compared to the present, media narrative driven present its hard to see the improvements happening across the global population.

It helps me put stuff in perspective - of course mileage may var (and maybe it's just helping me delude myself into getting out a funk but it works!).

[1] Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

[2] See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income - Anna Rosling Rönnlund https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw