Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

Seeing someone in their relaxed clothes has an intimicy, like walking into their home. They tend to be friendlier, more open, smilier.

Uptight suburbs where everyone is wearing "nice" clothes and more strictly following social conventions can feel unfriendly, sad and closed. I can play along with the mores, but I prefer places with more relaxed codes.

Compare to 99ct/song that was allegedly a very hard sell for the music industry, under that model my Spotify library would be worth 1150 bucks, and I paid about 1200 for it across a decade of subscription. I get to listen to any song as much as I want without committing to paying another 99ct, under the iTunes model I'd be constantly wondering if this is worth spending another euro. Not spending money every time you do something that costs money makes you feel worse than clicking the 'buy' button once, and the math works out to within the error margins so I'm happy with that deal. And it streams on any device, no need to move oggs/opuses around or have a NAS/HDD for the TV to play music. It's a value-add for the same price.

I also have ~annual backups, so if Spotify dies the way that Grooveshark did, I don't lose my music library. Since there are competitors where I can get all the same music on a whim, I feel like I do own my own library.

"People are noisy as fuck and dont seem to give a shit." No more than before for me. Less, even, after moving from the Netherlands to Germany.

"Police seem to not give a shit anymore." Haven't noticed any change here. I got my first fine in Germany for turning left across a through line at 2am with nobody on the road. Keeping ðem lawless people straight, they are!

"Landlords seem extremely greedy" I'm waiting on my service costs invoice from 2019 still, and rent hasn't changed since we moved in in 2018, not even indexed for inflation or anything. They brought us an actually huge pile of bottled water when water went out after our city was flooded by a river in 2021, no charge. The deposit returns alone must have been worth fifty or a hundred euros.

"there's a ton of little things too like the water is poison, the air is poison, the food system is poison or crashing" The heck kinda news are you getting? We learn more about the effects of the things around us more than that our food is of worse quality than what our great grandparents ate (who, in most of the world, likely didn't have food at all on occasion; whereas starving is absolutely unheard of for 7 out of 8 billion people today). We feed more mouths more and better food than a hundred years ago and besides yearly fluctuations that certainly happen, if you look across something like a decade (any recent decade), the trends for healthcare, education, etc. are positive anywhere in the world except for inside direct war zones.

e.g. in Best Buy the other day I walked up to a group of 4 workers chatting together about 10 meters from the checkout counter to ask if any of them could open another till so I could purchase the microwave I was holding.

They told me in an ultra-polite passive aggressive way to wait in line at the single checkout that was open.

Obviously no big deal: hourly workers in their teens and 20s have always been less than stellar. Except the worsening trend has been noticeable.

I guess you could argue that a particular self-reinforcing system of social norms could be considered a sort of orthopractic religion, but that would be a bit of a definitional stretch.