381–390 of 835 posts
It's kind of fanciful but who knows
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I'm 21 and I think everything's going to shit as well... is it doomerism or reality? Politicians appear increasingly corrupt and selfish. Geopolitics are becoming less stable. Innovation is coming to a standstill. The average person just wants a decent job, a nice place to live, and maybe a family. All of these are becoming more and more difficult to achieve. Is it any wonder kids are checking out of life en masse?
Try turning off the news, avoiding social media sites (Reddit, Twitter, HN, anywhere people share bad stories), and getting more in person interaction. You don’t need to be invested in the finer details of global politics or stories of violence hundreds of miles a way. Disconnect and recharge. Reconnect with people around you and enjoy the world as it exists, not for some representation of all the terrible things on…
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A European nation casually invading another European nation, something we thought was now unthinkable not too long ago.
Um, Serbia invading Kosovo ring a bell ? Before that you had decades of Cold War fear mongering, preceded by WW2.
Naivity perhaps, but after that crisis was resolved many political observers thought that Europe was on a path to a forever peace.
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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 happ…
Reminds me of this tweet by Derek Thompson (writer at The Atlantic ): In 2022, we: - Reversed organ death in pigs - Made the first embryo from stem cells - Made a pan-influenza vaccine - Saw the beginning of time - Got best-ever results from cancer & obesity therapy trials - Maybe cracked the case of multiple sclerosis From: https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1600864770751860737 ( https://archive.is/pi95L )
Researchers want to slightly oversell their discoveries, and the media wants to misunderstand to oversell them even more. Humbug 9 times out of 10.
I think you're way off base. It's called rosy retrospection, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection . As you already mentioned in your comments, you're judging the past disproportionately more positive that the present. If you really want to know if everything is declining, try measure it everyday for the next five years. For example, every day, rate your personal well being, track how (un)happy you are wit…
When faced with a sinusoid, humans seem to extrapolate exponentials in both directions. Take the business cycle, where the good times appear to approach a "new paradigm!" just before a large correction, and the bad times seem like they'll never end.
This is reminiscent of my previous struggles with cyclothymia[1], for example. Furthermore, the perception of impending calamity was contributing to the stress and worsened the symptoms further. (I wonder if there is an analogy to be drawn here as well, but I suspect this part is much less generalizable.)
At the same time, it makes sense for people to have heightened awareness of "the bad times": each cycle represents added stress to the system, and with a heightened probability of calamity (eg. becoming insolvent / suffering a mental health emergency).
[1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17788-cycloth...
This is pretty much just the inevitable consequence of a market-based, individualist society that is obsessed with removing any standards or expectations on behavior, cultural output, language use, dress, or anything else. Unfortunately, I don't expect things to improve until people start caring about their local communities (i.e. the other people around them) and "Society" in general in a concrete, actionable way, a…
Yes. Your prescribed remedy reminds me of Scruton's oikophilia.
What interests me most about the current zeitgeist is that there is an generalized, or at least spreading, feeling of emptiness. What replaces religion to fill this gap for a new generation who is not religious? (including myself) Something very clear, a philosophy of life of some kind that people can adopt to feel like they are part of something bigger, without that something being a fictional being. And without dev…
I suspect what you are sensing is society's vulnerability to the Neichian überman.
[https://www.songlyrics.com/baz-luhrmann/everybody-s-free-to-...]
A lot of this is related to inequality, value of labour detaching from wealth, and the increasing unaffordability of life. The material conditions of regular people are continuously getting worse as more and more of their income is stripped away by rent seeking oligopolies, mainly increasing housing costs but depending on your jurisdiction all sorts of other costs (eg. cable and mobile phone costs an issue in some pl…
> A lot of this is related to inequality, value of labour detaching from wealth, and the increasing unaffordability of life. Inequality is declining by every measurable metric in the United States. Edit: To answer the folk naysaying with their ten second Google searches, the income inequality rate has declined between 2007 and 2019(1), helped by a strong wage recovery in the late 2010s. The share of wealth held by th…
Is this a direct measure of inequality? I suppose it depends but I would say yes?