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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…
the world = US? Cause your irl examples (people are noisy, police, environment quality) are very very US specific. And even then I guess it's hyper local in the US too.
But tbh I'd not be really surprised if you really meant that the world = US
> Police seem to not give a shit anymore. I've noticed what seems to be total lawlessness going on in my world. Folks stealing shit. People driving absurdly dangerously in cars that are not designed to travel like that. (tailgating, lane switch, accelerating at the fastest I've ever seen a beat up Sentra do...) . I never see cops hit lights and sirens at them.
Both of these resonate with me. I perceive it as a general decline in the willingness to enforce any sort of standards of behavior by any means (social shaming or formal enforcement by law). Antisocial behavior like drag racing, speeding through neighborhoods, arguing and even fighting on airplanes, being a grown-ass adult in pajamas out in public, etc. You're likelier to get resistance for trying to enforce any sort of basic decency than to flout old (but not that old...) standards.
The fall of the Berlin Wall was not the end of the Cold War and the paranoia, distrust and apathy you sense now are the culminations of Russia's Eastern German techniques to the West.
We have been in an almost entirely psychological war since 1991. The decline of the West was primarily due to the fact we had a high trust society that foreigners from Europe took advantage of in order to utilize their Old World schemes.
Civilization must conifgure itself around a new, steeper gradient. Only catch: it must use the old gradient to power this transformation.
https://gist.github.com/clumma/214831723c7d567cc343cc0767273...
We've had incredible advances in technology and productivity since then, so why can't we have that kind of economic environment now? What's gumming up the works?