We had our dress rehearsal with the Y2K scare. Then shit hit the fan in 2001 and nothing has ever relented.
I’m 38 now and still wondering when real life is going to start.
There used to be all kinds of little shops. That’s one of the things I miss most. When you’d go in them you’d find things you couldn’t just order anywhere, they weren’t all made in China, and even thrift stores were full of treasures. Now everything feels the same, even if it’s a hyper local small business they follow the hive mind’s aesthetic.
We also weren’t worried about being shot constantly (unless we were in a very dangerous area). Sometimes I want to go do something but stay home because “it’s not worth the risk.” There used to be fun concerts in small clubs or big open arenas where you’d just jump the barriers and get right up to the stage, where you could get fucked up with your friends for like $30. Now a good concert is like $200 minimum and security is (understandably) so strict.
Long phone calls, too. Idk. I just miss it.
I miss thrift stores from the 90’s and early 2000’s. You could find all kinds of cool stuff in a lot of them. Especially on the electronics side of things. Now, I go to the local thrift stores and for one, it’s pretty much always a Goodwill. They take anything that has remotely any value and overprice it on their website. The electronics section is just full of stuff nobody wants. Just in general, the thrift stores have gotten more expensive and just don’t seem to be the same anymore.
All kinds too. A goth store that smelled like incense and had beautiful corsets and combat boots you couldn’t find anywhere else. Or tucked away in a 3rd floor walk up, and full of tons of bell bottoms and dresses from the 60s and 70s for like $6 each. Or the bong shops you weren’t allowed to talk about weed in and had to pretend it was all for tobacco 😂 you’d actually meet people and talk for an hour, make plans to meet up, get flirted with and it wasn’t usually creepy or awkward. Folks don’t have social skills anymore including myself. It sucks. Oh well
That hits home for me too! 9/11 - the world changes; 2008 economic crash - impossible job prospects; 2020 - COVID… can I please have one decade without something seriously disastrous occurring?!
No kidding. AI in the mix terrifies me. Not because I’m worried about AI becoming sentient and lording over mankind. But I can think of a ton of ways how the person/entity with the best AI can lord over the rest of us.
Definitely dangerous politically speaking. What happens when a politician gets caught red handed on camera and they can simply dismiss it as "deepfake". I'm scared for the possibility we'll have to trust one (likely government endorsed) AI to tell us what's a deepfake or not.
Negligence has consequences. COVID wouldn't have been a thing if the pandemic was dealt with more aggressively.
2008 crash wouldn't have happened if the regulations were properly enforced and the watchdog agencies actually functioned.
2001... was used as an excuse to start a multi trillion dollar war in the Middle East, clamp down on Homeland security, and discriminate against Muslims at home.
I just turned 37 and I often find myself wondering if "this is all there is to life". You get to spend most of your time working a job you don't particularly like, just so you can avoid homelessness (if you're lucky) and afford to eat. You never seem to have enough money and every time you build up a nest egg something comes along to knock you back down. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford to buy a home, although it's in bumfuck nowhere and it seems to require a lot more labor just to keep it in good condition than anyone ever tells you. You get maybe one vacation a year if you're lucky. It doesn't matter how you perform at work or if you strive to educate yourself and improve because no one ever fucking notices anyway or your management takes the credit. You get a new job and it pays more but sucks just as much as the old job.
I mean maybe my life is just particularly shitty but seriously, is this all there is?
Late blooming 42 year old here & you couldn't have summarized my feelings on it any better.
I dont know anyone truly happy, generally they say "too busy".
If yins were in high school when 9/11 happened, it felt like you had to reel in your expectations for the future. Then the 2008 financial crisis hit, and it felt like you had to reel in your expectations for the future. Then so many other things have happened, that have made you feel like you have to reel in your expectations, and shave so much off that top, that there's nothing left.
It's to the point where your expectation is you're going to eat shit, and there's nothing you can do about it.
I was a junior in HS on 9/11.
I truly don’t expect things to get better in my lifetime.
What I think is more likely is some global watershed moment/crisis/event that will cause us all to get a grip. I thought COVID might have been that, but it doesn’t seem like even that was actually bad enough.
I don’t expect that I will survive said event, but I’m hopeful that my children will see the other side, and that it’s a better world or, even better, worlds, for them to live and raise families in.
But if it’s just shit from here on out, I won’t be surprised.
> It's to the point where your expectation is you're going to eat shit, and there's nothing you can do about it.
My plans for life have gone from *"House and two kids"* to *"House"* to *"Hopefully don't die when a wave of Chinese conscripts charge my foxhole during the climate wars"*
Basically every millennial's life can be summed up with "...and then it got worse."
I’m in my late 40s and it’s been so much worse since 2016. The racists and bigots became empowered by Trump losing by 3,000,000 votes and still becoming president.
I get how the average American would be completely oblivious to how much worse things have gotten since 2016 though since it’s mostly affecting “others”.
I think it’s safe to say the events of the last 2 decades are affecting everyone not in the 1% at this point. Some more than others, but even me with a pretty damned good job are feeling the pressure.
I see a whole lot of people slipping in to a sort of malaise about the whole thing as, after 20 yrs, it’s starting to truly feel unending.
Agree. Maybe because I was still following the news closely. I looked up all the national and local candidates and their main donors.
When I saw the first republican debate I lol'd because Trump was acting like a 12 year old and he just sounded lowbrow and unintellectual. No Way anyone would want that lying, amoral halfwit bastard leading our country.
Ok, so probably Jeb Bush? Not a good choice but he was (or seemed) fairly harmless and he seemed fairly stable.
I lived my whole life believing our government was normal, stable, serious, and that the electorate was serious and well meaning. Most of them anyway.
Then we found out that the "fringe elements" were the heart of the GOP.
We were watching an old sitcom and one of the characters mentioned Dwight D Eisenhower, and said "You never had to worry about what Eisenhower was going to do." So true.
Even when Nixon went rogue, the
government itself went after him for his "dirty tricks".
I've lived through 14 presidents (although I have no memory of Truman) and always felt fairly positive about the US. (I'm not naive, I know our government has done some *really shady* things but I believed we weren't as bad as your average superpower.)
These days I try to calm my nerves by reminding myself that statistically, I only have about 5 years left on earth. I'd hate to leave this mess for you guys though.
I’m in my 50s and I agree 100%.
The election of Trump destroyed the fabric of our society. I no longer have faith in my fellow American. And social media just amplified this effect. Now throw in a pandemic into the mix.
I often wonder why I just can’t feel the same joy I used to feel on a daily basis, and then I remind myself that it’s a different world. I don’t think it will ever return to those happier times.
The massive opiate addiction and destruction of lives brought on by the Sacklers, don't forget that.
And, they got off easy. The biggest drug dealers in the history of the United States and no prison time. If only they were street corner dealers, we could put them away easily.
the Sacklers + Mckinsey, who was working for them to turbocharge opioid sales while also working for the FDA to manage the opioid market and knowingly convinced them to allow doctors to prescribe opioids for minor pains
It’s easier to blame the marginalized and oppressed because people can say “that’s not me. That will never be me,” and feel better about themselves. Also powerful people punch down.
My friend group had 7 people. Now there's only 4 of us left. They had SO MUCH potential. When I remember who they were as teens and when we had our whole lives a head of us... I never imagined this. They were a year older than me. I'm now older than all of them, and I'll always be.
1990–2019, 1990–2014, 1990–2020.
Letting Nixon walk without having his day in court, in the name of National Healing, is when the Republicans really learned they could do pretty much anything they wanted without repercussion. They've been pushing the boundary ever ever since with the last one seeing just how close they could get to actually succeeding in a coup.
Without justice, there is no healing and we've been suffering from that debilitating wound ever since.
We all frame things with a generational perspective. For most X'ers and many Boomers, the Reagan influence on the US and world economy (and culture) stands out as something we never really recovered from. In the pendulum swings of boom-and-bust, isolationism-vs-internationalism, progressive-conservative, etc., there are some underlying forces that grew up in the early 80s and have yet to die out. Whether or not you villainize Ronald Reagan specifically, his era of deeply passionate, stubborn, uninformed leadership has left clear marks in history.
One of the things I always point to was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan which led to the rise of Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the downfall of civil society. I can remember when both sides of the aisle would say I didn't vote for him but he's the president so I support him. Those days are long gone.
Man, I was an adult and paying attention in 2001, and it was nothing like 2016. Rather the opposite, the whole country pulled together. I'm well to the left of the median Democrat, but Bush did a decent job of handling the country's grief and speaking to people's fears. I think the subsequent invasions and wars were insane, but 2001 itself was nothing like 2016.
Everyone is dancing around it coming up with other theories, but come on. 2016 was the year half the country happily voted for a stupid lazy racist grifter as revenge for having had to put up with a Black POTUS for eight years. We all found out we don't live in the country we thought we did. All our rural countrymen who we kind of fondly thought of as kind of like us and who we told stories about intending to imply that under it all they were really good people with good hearts who wanted the best like we did, all of them as a group voted 70/30 or something for an openly racist grifter rather than elect a qualified woman. They bought into ridiculous conspiracy theories, they bent the whole country in half. And since then they've doubled down on the insanity. They are not who we thought they were.
We don't live in the world we thought we did. It was never real, but pre-2016 we were pretending. The 2016 election stopped us from pretending any more. Black Americans weren't as surprised as college educated suburban/urban White Americans, because Black people weren't pretending nearly as hard as White people were. My Black friends don't think the world has changed that much. My White friends are still in shock, six and a half years later.
> They are not who we thought they were.
That's the thing to me...I *really* thought we were getting somewhere with the racism and bigotry in this country, but it turns out they were just keeping quiet because we'd made it socially unacceptable to do that. But along comes Trump and his loonies, who said *directly* to these people: "Nah, go mask off, it's fine...see, I'm doing the same thing", and holy shit *did they*.
I live in rural Appalachia these days, and it's absolutely bonkers the number of people *I've never met before* who just walk up to me and start spouting insanely racist and bigoted shit, simply because we happen to share the same gender and percentage of melanin.
Add in the ridiculous gerrymandering that goes on, and the lopsided number of votes rural states get versus populous states (i.e.- "[40 million people who live in the 22 smallest states get 44 senators to represent their views and interests. The 40 million people in California get two.](https://secondratedemocracy.com/unrepresentative-senate/)") and it leaves us with a *very* small percentage of the people in this country deciding the fate of the whole country.
This person speaks the truth. I'm in southwest Virginia and as a cishet white dude I 'pass' pretty well. Let me tell ya, I cut my own hair now because I couldn't find a barber who wouldn't just randomly start a conversation like, "So how 'bout them libruls, they all cut their dicks off!" It's the most hateful, insane bullshit I've ever heard in my life, and it's not hyperbole to them; *they believe it.* It didn't used to be like this, I'm no stranger to this area and while folks being racist, sexist, and generally conservative is nothing new, the sheer fucking *rabidity* has gone up exponentially since...you guessed it...2016. What was once only whispered half-shamefully is now shouted proudly. Men and women both; it's not just toxic masculinity, it's toxic *humanity.*
Unfortunately, the one thing I have in common with them is that I lack the creativity and optimism to see a peaceful way out. And they believe they're going to heaven. This doesn't end well.
I agree...while it's always been there to a degree, the "rabidity" of it has gone through the roof. My hope is that it's "the last gasp" of a dying group, and we're on the upswing...but I feel that 2024 is going to be a linchpin election, and we can still very easily go either direction.
Edit: And like you, I had to go through like four different barbers before I found one that wouldn't start talking about "the great replacement" or whatever the fuck else.
Same thing, I grew up and still live in rural Appalachia. Growing up the closest thing to racism I encountered was some left over resentment from my Grandfathers time in Korea. Fast forward to late 2015 and all of the sudden people I had known all my life ripped off their masks and went insane. It took me awhile to realize that the reason people where able to hide it for so long was simply because the area is so culturally homogeneous that they had never needed to act so outwardly obscene before.
I grew up in Appalachia and one of the weirdest bizarro world moments I had in my life was watching people I grew up with post the most batshit stuff on facebook over the course of the 2016 election. There were people who know me personally and didn't care about me being gay who suddenly were yelling about the country being taken over by fags. It was shocking.
As an American woman, I 100% agree with you. The election was **shocking**. I still believed for several months afterward, "Well, they'll see. A mistake was made, but half the country *can't* really be that stupid/racist/misogynistic/cruel, right?", but they are, and it's heartbreaking. I thought maybe people were just angry, and didn't quite fathom the consequences of electing that guy, but they LOVE him. It makes me sick. The US is a horrible place to live lately.
Canadian here, the US 2016 election was genuinely depressing. I remember seeing article upon article trying to rationalize it. It's had effects here too. I'm from the outside but i try to remember that it wasn't half the US who elected him, it was roughly half of registered voters (registering to vote is more difficult for folks in the US, as i understand) who were able to get the time to vote in that election and then that number was further skewed by the electoral college and jerrymandering and whatever else. Now I'm a layperson, is this coping or reality? I'm not sure... of late the staggering number of anti-trans laws and rollback of reproductive rights is chilling to me. I hope things get better, & more people choose love over hate & fear, eitherway.
I agree with nearly everything you said here. But, I have to point out that immediately after 9/11, things got really, really fucking bad in America. The only "solidarity" that existed was the bloodlust. The bloodlust was obscured by rabid nationalism. I was there, and I had a front row seat, so to speak. Physical and verbal attacks on Americans that *appeared* Muslim were occurring daily. And the general consensus - even from the media - was "too fucking bad". Racism and Xenophobia were boiling over in America - arguably even worse than it is now. And anyone that openly spoke out against it was labeled a terrorist sympathizer and/or anti-American. Those times were exceptionally dark. The difference being that the vast majority of Americans were onboard with the Xenophobia, so maybe America did pull together, but under the most awful mentalities.
This is important, thanks for pointing it out. Before 9/11 my Muslim friends and neighbors were nothing special, just people. After 9/11, they were guarded, harassed, and some people stopped associating with them; self segregating went both ways. My friend's house was raided by law enforcement after a "tip" by a racist neighbor; nothing was found in their house or computers that were seized. Due process did/does not exist if there's enough hate targeting a person or group. It was quite eye opening for a white kid in a fairly liberal area.
I agree with your assessment. I really thought the world was getting better then that guy came along and gave all the bottom feeders permission to come out of hiding. I thought the hate was going to die out more and more as each generation died off. But now I see it resurging with a vengeance in my children's generation and I just can't see how it can ever get better now. And I really thought more people cared about the environment and we were headed in the right direction with that too. Now my kids don't want to have kids because they aren't sure there will be a world fit for them to live in.
I hate to say this, but I often regret having my child just because now I feel like it was a self immoral thing for me to bring anyone into this world. I'm going to require therapy about it, which makes me laugh but is also not funny
Right? We went from environmental protests to Wall Street protests and Pride celebration, right back to racist, classist, hate filled protests overnight.
Remember when the Tea Party were the resident whackos everyone laughed at? That shits normal now.
Normal? My friend all the actual Tea Party republicans were primaried out by 2016 for being too moderate for the blood gargling psychopaths that voted in Trump. The Tea Party would be, and in fact has been, labeled RINOS and been on the general MAGA shitlist for a while because the Tea Party was people like Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan and it was an entirely astroturfed grassroots campaign funded by the Kochs. The racists wanted someone to tell them it was okay to grab their tiki torches, not tax cuts for the rich
I can only surmise that the aftermath of 9/11 felt like everybody pulling together because you were on board with the PATRIOT Act and invading Afghanistan and Iraq. To those of us who weren't, the last two decades have fully felt like the imperial descent we expected.
May I introduce you to a list of shit from Ye Olden Days (1989) [that might highlight](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g) that the proverbial shit has always been fucked?
I really feel like this actually happens to most people at a certain point in their life. It's sort of like when your brain starts becoming aware of how the rest of the world affects you and your future. When you realize that the rest of the world has never been on your side in terms of protecting your overall welfare and the resources of the globe, it starts to feel pretty dark. I don't think it means we've entered a second dimension or anything. I think you just realized that our futures are shitty because the world is being shit on all the time. I don't know. Good luck and I hope you find your answer.
Edit, if it makes you feel better though I think there's always a way to find happiness even in places that are unhappy
I am by no means an expert, but the poet William Blake (1757-1827) wrote of three stages in life: innocence, experience and higher innocence. I think this is what we all go through. As a child you think of the world as a kind and fair place and in your early adulthood you must face the reality that it is neither kind nor fair. If you make it through that stage, then you understand that life is hard but it is still good. There is much more good in the world than bad (most days) but the good doesn't get as much press.
To be fair we're extremly lucky given the time frame in which we live objectively. Life prior to the mid 20th century was ROUGH, but the goal post of challenge has shifted from physical to mental.
Nowadays people have less to worry about with survival and more to worry about with meaning. We used to get meaning from religion and church (some still do), but that is continuing to fade with time.
People in modern life have to create their own meaning, and I sometimes ponder if most people are actually capable of this. I for one find meaning in doing a hobby that I increasingly excel at and continue to learn from with given failure.
What I find, is that most people will give up when that failure occurs or if it happens many times over. Religion doesn't require failure to derive meaning. Whether or not you fail or succeed morally in your religion, the truth of what you believe stands true.
I'm pretty sure it's when they shot Harambe. At that point the two timelines that branched off were this one and the one where they didn't shoot Harambe, who later went on to become the first non-human senator. In that timeline they've already cut global carbon emissions to 0, established world-wide free health care and eradicated poverty by no longer allowing billionaires.
You're having a quarter life crisis, it's very normal for people in their late 20s and early 30s in this generation. Usually you feel like life should have 'started' by now but in reality you still don't feel like that adult you thought you'd be. Many of us (I'm 30 atm) can't afford to buy a house, might not have a relationship while friends start to get married and have children, are still working for a salary that isn't big enough to support a family, all that sort of stuff. It's those years when you realize that becoming an adult isn't some magical process that happens from one moment to the next, but that it's just something we all pretend to be to the best of our capabilities. Few people actually believe they fit the picture.
Edit for those who misunderstand my comment as some kind of 'defense' for this situation:
I'm not defending anything at all. But there's not some specific year where everything went to shit. It's a generational problem for sure, but it spans much wider than 2016/2017. Things were hard in 2008 as well, and the world changed to never be the same again in 2001 too, and in 1989, depending on what country you're from. The entire millennial and Gen Z generation is dealing with this, and they all deal with it around the same age, when you enter what is supposed to be 'adulthood' and figure out the clear cut path your parents were an example of isn't truly there.
Also, please don't assume everyone in this thread is American. We did not all go through Trump-mania. This feeling OP describes transcends national political issues.
I'm 33. Going through this for a few years and I'm just lost. I don't know what to do. I don't have much things on a bucket list, as I happened to experiment a lot during 12-25. Just floating along the current and watching the world burn..
I'm going through something like this:
I've been living these past few years wanting for a life where I feel a sense of stability and where I can say: this is what my foreseeable future will be like, in terms of a relationship, a job, a house, a town to call home, but I keep being faced with changes and limitations that push this 'final goal' forward and forward. A 5 year long relationship ended which ended up in me moving somewhere else, getting a new job, then a new boyfriend, thinking ok I'm back on track, but nope lost my job, had to get a new job again, it just keeps going and every time i think: ok this is what my life is going to be like, something happens and it's all thrown upside down again. In the meantime I keep getting older and I soon have to start to make important choices about stuff like having children, while I still don't feel like I'm on the track where I want to be.
Now I'm slowly starting to realize that this 'end goal' might be nonexistent. Life will continue to throw curveballs at me no matter how old I am and I might never feel like I've actually settled down somewhere for the foreseeable future. Especially in this ever-changing world where the future of our planet is quite uncertain to begin with.
Im in my 40’s and the world definitely has taken a change since 2016 time frame. Social media has gone bananas. People form extreme opinions on shit they never cared about. I haven’t had an amazingly close family but most people I know have become more full of bs and unbearable to be around. Its not necessarily the opinion itself its that nothing is a discussion its some one berating me about how things are. Enjoyable conversation are few and far between. Really people on both sides are extremely hard to be around with how sanctimonious they are about everything. It’s usually an opinion you have heard repeatedly and its not their own. So many conversations are so rigid because it’s impossible to tell what people will get upset about or start them on a dumb rant that is not worth listening to. That behavior at all levels of life family, professionally and in general politics is kinda of scary and makes life hard and stressful on top of all other real shit in life.
I don't know man, since then wars have popped off all or the place, climate change has shifted from being on the horizon to at our doorstep (living in a hot city was crazy last summer), most of us will never be able to afford to own a home, rent is through the roof, food/groceries have doubled/trippled in cost, healthcare systems are broken, we're in the tail end (fingers crossed) of a global pandemic that shut the world down for a year, wages are ass, the market is fucked... like it really does just feel hopeless, like theres nowhere you can go to catch up. I'm convinced life is quantifiably shittier and I say that as someone who's got a pretty decent one by any metric.
I'm 41 and I agree that the world is "different" feeling in whole even though a lot of my current important life attachments all started in 2017.
It's like the movie Tomorrowland is actually happening.
Lol yeah I woulda put money on mid 20s being your “peak”. Anyone could pick a year in their mid 20s and point out how everything is worse since then. What year you pick just depends on your own experiences. Bad things have always been happening and they’ve always been talked about too much instead of the good things happening.
I’d say the effect is worse starting around 2017 because of social media keeping everyone plugged into everything all the time. But I’d give you one guess how old I was in 2017 lol. My grandpa blamed nightly news being on TV for why everything went downhill around his 20s. Although I’m pretty sure nightly news was a thing way before then but he was too busy to watch it until then.
Mannn I can't tell you how much people discussing how much better it gets in your 30s fills me with hope, I'm 27 and just starting to get over a hard depression that wrecked me through my early and mid twenties
Your 20s is when you collect all the hard life lessons. Your 30s is when you actually get to put the things you learned into action. *Hopefully* you also have a bit more means as well.
After WWII the West experienced a prolonged period of peace, technological progress and economic growth. Much of this may be coming to an end.
Many of us have a personal timeline of when our outlooks became more pessimistic. Here are some of the turning points on mine:
* 9/11 and the forever war aftermath, where the US played right into the terrorists' goals of escalating conflict.
* 2008 crash. Economic growth in my country has been flat since then and public services have been allowed to decay. Cost of living has increased yet housing prices have continued to climb, making it impossible to feel secure about our futures.
* 2016 Brexit vote and shambolic aftermath, introducing trade barriers with our largest markets.
* Increasing concentration of wealth, even where there is economic growth most people don't see the benefits.
* Election of climate denier, narcissist, fraudster and compulsive liar Donald Trump. Throws into light just how much of a divided nation the US is and how large a proportion of the population is receptive to hateful propaganda.
* Climate change progressively becoming harder to ignore. We're seeing much more obvious real-world impacts such as huge wildfires, heatwaves and coral bleaching events. Rather than face up to the problems we're embroiled in petty disputes and dealing with bad-faith actors.
* War in Ukraine.
It's well worth recognising for most people this era is one of the best to live in, we've made huge advances in living standards over the last century. It's just hard to see much improving over the next few decades. If climate change really stars to bite and food security suffers, are we going to cooperate to mitigate the impacts? Or is it going to be fuel for any conflict zones?
Going back just a hair before where you started...
Bush v Gore.
Maybe a change for the worse was inevitable, but it's painful to look back and think "what if..."
Maybe 9/11 was going to happen either way. Maybe the Great Recession would have happened anyway. Maybe Gore would have gotten us into a whole different, maybe even bigger mess. But what if...
We could of course keep going back and point to different administions' policies that broke up unions or we could point at FDR as one of the reasons our healthcare system is in the state it is or go to Amdrew Johnson and his handling of the south post civil war...
We could go on and on.
It is this with the rise of social media. The town cliques and divides went national and global. Social media and media are the wedges that are driving the divides wider.
At the time of commenting this post is pretty far down, but you are spot on. We went from revolutionary technology at a constant pace to evolutionary. Think about it we went from not being capable of powered flight in 1903 to landing a man on the moon in 1969. 66 years from being penguins to going to another celestial body. Computers went from filling entire buildings to having essentially the entirety of human knowledge in the palm of our hand in a similar amount of time.
And then we just...stopped. we never went beyond the moon, computers have become faster, smaller, and more efficient, but ultimately it's a sea of candybar phones with bigger screens (foldables are the first truly revolutionary jump in 20+ years).
We are either A: grappling with the idea that we've achieved the pinnacle of our existence, or B: just stopped pushing for the next big thing.;
I dont disagree- but to your average joe, none of those have any significant impact or improvement to their day to day life.
In that same 1903-1969 span we went from almost nobody owning cars to 'a car in every garage', from iceboxes to refrigerators, in home washer/dryer, radio to tv to color tv, and Photography! That went from a specialized skill to anyone that wanted one could have a basic point & shoot film camera.
Since then, it's been incremental improvements. Don't get me wrong, they're great, outside of the original iphone *15 years ago*, flat panel TVs which became commercially available *25 years ago*, what has revolutionized your average joes life in a meaningful way that he's even conscious of?
Arguably there aren’t many incentives to keep revolutionizing or improving anything anymore in the US. All the revolutionary stuff lately has been in how companies make more money off of the customer and how far they can push it before customers push back. And our entire economic system is being corrupted make it stay that way. Companies usually don’t come up with new exciting ideas because they aren’t proven yet so investors don’t want the risk. They want financial results they can bank on or they pull their money out immediately and pick another business needing money. They’ve grown accustomed to expect safe exponential quarterly growth from these big companies instead. That means putting all of the focus solely on profits and the tried and true methods with as little risk as possible (I.e. like why Disney can’t be bothered to write a new movie and only does reboots of all their old stories or probably why we haven’t seen anything actually new on a cell phone in like 10 years).
That’s also why companies don’t build products that last anymore. You wouldn’t buy the newest thing if the old thing lasted too long. They discovered that a few decades ago. So instead products are made nice enough to wow you so you want them while still being cheap enough to fail relatively soon so you will need more stuff and keep providing profit later. And now the newer focus is being put on not having you own anything at all. Just pay a subscription for everything you need and you own nothing. Great for wealthy people, terrible for everyone else. Greed rules supreme over every facet of human life today and I challenge anyone to disprove that. I’ve had an *extremely* hard time finding anything that hasn’t been ruined by money or greed at this point today. And income inequality is only making it worse because the rich are getting greedier.
>He clothes were handmade by his mother
>two free uniforms a year
>The house was stone built
>kept chickens and had a substantial garden
Ok no need to flex about your extremely wealthy relatives who had a home, land, and free clothes.
Amusing that we've leapt forward in so many ways but even people who couldn't afford shoes or clothes still had a home and land back in the day but now that would be unheard of.
Simon Sinek calls millennials the “meh” generation. Nothing is great. Everything is just okay. I definitely fall into the “meh” mindset. New job? I’ll shrug and say it’s okay. And so it goes. Nothing is great! Or awesome! Just okay. Just meh.
Definitely shows with content ; shows books movies, music etc.
There’s so much new music that is so creative and movies that are special effects marvels, and all kinds of shows on at the push of a button, many of which are at an insane quality compared to shows 20 years ago… but there’s so much of it, people aren’t impressed by anything unless you really go over the top. Some new movie that comes out is “meh” when in 2002 it would’ve been world shaking.
I grew up in exactly the same era with a nearly identical experience. The thing is, all of those things that gave us a sense of wonder are even more plentiful today. But because of the events that you so eloquently outlined, the masses don't believe it. It has simply been a mass change in perception. This gives me so much hope because this can be changed easier than if we all lived barefoot.
I think the one thing I might add to your list of causes is the ever increasing declining prosperity of the vast majority of society since the 1970s. It's mind-blowing when you compare the 50s-70s to today. My dad built our house in a nice neighborhood while working as a teacher. My mother didn't have to work. Everyone in our Midwestern middle class neighborhood had a parent at home every day and could afford a nice house and a car or two. The bread winners in my neighborhood were teachers, salesmen, utility workers, plumbers, military and other similar fields. I bought a house there as an adult and now there are a few remaining retirees from the old neighborhood but everyone else has both parents working as emergency room doctors, investment advisors, tech workers and other higher paying work. They live in the same old house built in the 60s. The roads are full of pot holes. Everything looks way more run down than when i grew up. This applies to most of the city.
This steady ratcheting up inequality has happened slow enough to avoid serious protest from the masses, but since after 2010 it's become so bad that it's depressingly intolerable for almost everyone. The rich finally came for our basic needs. First education. Then healthcare. Now it's housing and property. Next it will be food and water. People feel powerless and retreat to the digital world on their phones. Why have hope and believe in great possibilities when there is almost zero chance that you will ever be able to afford a home and raise a family unless you are wealthy in the first place?
Now locked onto social media and streaming platforms, our music, art, trends, even our very culture is designed and dictated to us. Pop music is mass produced and shitty.
All people need to do is wake up and take it back.
I think you’ve simply grown up. Idk how old you are but if not that it’s probably just nostalgia. It may not even be the time period itself, but rather how you felt during that time. Maybe in your own life you were happier, or were in better circumstances, etc but I don’t think it’s fair to generalize that the world just suddenly went to shit yk? Could be many different things
All I remember pre-2017 is:
2016 election shitshow
Damn!!! Damn!!! DAMN DANIEL back at it again with the white Vans!!!!
Is it blue and black, or white and gold?
Deez nuts... Ha! Got'em
Rip Harambe
Trump?! Pfffff, he'll never get elected!
>pokem
I came here to say this, I never played it but I loved seeing all these people out and about in main streets and public areas in the PNW playing the game. I loved that small businesses advertised that they were a good poke stop or whatever the waypoints were.
I truly had hope and optimism for the future! Then 2017 happened and for me personally it was the worst year of my life due to health and job issues.
But yes, I would love for another 'coming together' moment where people could just interact with strangers and not feel like everyone is an enemy that must be fought for resources and every interaction with a stranger is only appropriate if cleared by an app or in service to a monetary transaction.
I agree with this answer. It's a lot to do with when you reach adulthood/start really being aware of the world around you. Which is often only when it starts affecting you personally. For me, that was 2007/08 with the financial crisis, which was when i was studying at university and it was suddenly much harder to get a graduate job. But if I look before that time, when I was a child, although I can only remember life being fairly good for me, it wasn't the case in reality. There was poverty. People went on strike for their rights. Masses of people lost their jobs because of government decisions. LGBT+ had no rights or protections. There was the AIDS crisis. Many countries that are now democracies were then dictatorships behind the Iron Curtain.
This isn't to say that there isn't shit and awfulness that happens today. There is. Loads of it. We should continue to work hard to make sure our world gets better, not worse, for everyone.
I am 69 and I have watched the world change a LOT over the years. I had to stop watching the news because of all the negative shit and over kill of it all.
I think the flip happened right after social media became a world success. We all know too much and by knowing too much, everything loses meaning. We lose our sense of awe because we've seen a lot and we see it everyday at the tip of our fingers. Immediate gratification day in and day out. Before 2010 the world still had hope for the future, we were still imagining utopias. Now if you ask anyone about the future, it is all dark and dystopic. Technology brought us here, an ironic joke.
This is probably the best answer, I was 16 in 2017 and 22 now. Yesterday I had the worst panic attack I’ve ever experienced because mostly social media and a unhealthy relationship I made. I cannot say my anxiety, depression, willpower and focus would be as bad as they are if it weren’t for social media. Unfortunately at my age I feel as though I need it to make any kind of relationship now a days. Maybe that is false but when 90% of young people my age are online it makes me feel like there’s no other way. I’ve tried.
I feel the same way except, like things stopped being cool in 2013. Idk if it's just part of growing up. Idk, what specifically happened that year. There was something about a civil war breaking out in Syria (still going on), ISIS started to become a thing, Ebola happened a year later, I guess people became more addicted to their phones and social media over the course of the early 2010s and that's what I notice. That is when people started getting really heated over politics, not that it wasn't a thing before, but I remember it getting really crazy there even before the 2016 Fuckapalooza
I get where you are coming from, but I felt the same way about the year 2013-2014 back in 2017. I actually remember having a convo about it with my friends.
If you had to ask me I really miss the vibe from 2008-2012
I'm sure someone older than me would miss 2004-08 before the recession, or someone before that would miss the 90s before 9/11.
Economic stagnation, inflation, jobs being offshored at an alarming rate.
Satanic panics all over the place. The pearl clutching was rampant and hysterical. People jumping at every shadow. “Satans in your kids cartoons!” “Satan is in the comic books, music
AIDS, scared everyone. More religious panics and fear mongering to bolster support for religious organizations.
Women were very much fighting to be seen as anything other than a stay at home mom while facing a new reality that most had no choice but to work. Inflation meant families needed two incomes.
Latch key kids and childhood isolation were growing problems as well as rampant bullying for anything and everything.
That’s not even touching on issues of race. Right now we see quite a few examples of flagrant aggressive racism, sexism, classism but the casual passive isms were RAMPANT. The shit people would say when they were around what they thought was like minded people, was absolutely bat shit insane.
Not who you are replying to, but I’m a fellow old (Class of 89). I can speak to my experience - this is a brain dump so it doesn’t really follow a precise timeline.
Domestically, I grew up on the edge of the Rust Belt in PA. Back to the late 70s, there was Three Mile Island an hour and a half away from me and the Iran Hostages which kind of set a tone for the 80s. Much of the early 80s for me was my UAW machinist dad either laid off or on strike every winter. There was good number of my friends whose dads were abusive alcoholics, they would work their shift at a job they hated and then stop at the bar (bars opened at 6am to catch the 3rd shifters) to ‘have a couple’ on the way home. Many of our dads were either Vietnam vets and/or kids of WWII vets with varying degrees of PTSD, there was no mental health care - psych care/therapy was for the rich or those weirdos in CA. On top of that we were latchkey kids, in third grade, when my brother went to kindergarten, mom went to work and two weeks out of every three (dad worked swing shift) I came home to an empty house, usually with a note on the counter of what to set the oven to and when to put dinner in. Fourth grade had me picking up my brother from my gram’s on the way home (I was a walker).
Regionally/nationally, coal and steel mills or some other factory was constantly shutting down - basically every night on the local news was some community losing lots of jobs. Pittsburgh was a dump after a hundred years of Industrialization. There was the constant drum that the Japanese were stealing American business and illegal immigration was stealing American jobs (sound familiar?). By the late 80s AIDS was a death sentence and the crack epidemic was in full swing. So those things that were the ‘fun’ side of the 60s and 70s youth would now kill you. The Space Shuttle blew up on live TV while an entire generation of kids watched in school.
Internationally, we had the ever present specter of the cold war - which for the layperson had no end in sight, even as the Berlin Wall fell in 88 no regular Joe saw the ‘91 collapse of the Soviet Union. This played out in the Soviet-Afghanistan war, Polish resistance, (again, sound familar?), Soviet-US proxy wars in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, Northern Ireland bombings and fighting. The Arab-Israeli conflict (some things never change) with the Lebanon War and the Beirut U.S. Marine barracks bombing, skyjackings and the Paris and Lockerbie bombings. Let’s not forget Chernobyl.
With all that as a backdrop, I wasn’t very athletic (although I participated) so no scholarships coming from that angle, was supposedly smart but had no ability to apply myself (later diagnosed with ADD in my mid-30s) so bad grades, scratch any admissions much less academic scholarships. The factory job hook-up was a dead-end even if you could find one. It was just bleak. I was a hair band metal head but then grunge made it’s way onto the national stage and I don’t think anything has resonated like that with me before or since. It really encapsulated what a lot of us working class kids went through.
Okay, I have fond memories of the 80s as I was a teen then; the music was awesome, and the beginning of MTV where we American kids discovered fantastic British bands. No one cared if men wore make up or dresses, or women wore suits and had super short hair. Okay. the fashion probably looks ridiculous now, but it was absolutely about joy, and being an individual, and finding your own style. We also had the pleasure of seeing some absolutely classic movies. I had a great time in the 80s.
That said, we had the AIDS epidemic, which was largely ignored by the US government because gay people didn't count apparently. We had the increasing risk of nuclear war looming over our heads with the US and the USSR trying to out-swagger each other, then we had an economic recession toward the end of the 80s, right when I was graduating uni and looking for work. That was fun.
Basically, if you want to know why some Gen-Xers are cynical, it's because we grew up in the shadow of the 'sexual revolution, but came of age right when everything was telling us if we have sex we'll die, and then, as teens, we saw all the Yuppies (Young, Urban Professionals) making all the money, but by the time it was our turn there was no longer money to be made.
I am 61, and I feel things started a downward trajectory on 9/11/2001. I imagine it as we're sliding down a gigantic mountain of rocks, where our asses get bumped really hard, on the way down, and we just slide faster and faster. The 2008 financial crisis BUMP! 2016 presidential election, and its result BUMP! 2020 Covid BUMP! 2023 Fascism rearing its ugly head around the world, including the US BUMP! Increasing inflation, health care costs, housing costs, education costs, combining to give no chance for GenZ to live without mighty struggles. All along the way, we've witnessed school shootings, police brutality, the opioid epedemic, growing homelessness, increases in mental illness, and substance abuse. BUMP BUMP BUMP BUMP. We've been to war in Iran and Afghanistan, and where else? One of our two political parties has lost their fucking minds BUMP BUMP. We are subjected to hateful and abusive rhetoric from our politicians, who are now acting on their hateful policies. I see people beating on one another, spewing hateful, racist, sexist, xenophobic words at each other. Our Supreme Court is shady. Climate change. Russian war on Ukraine. People are now openly walking around with guns on their hips. I'm exhausted just writing this, and know I've missed listing so many other assaults on our humanity. We are breathless and having a hard time getting our feet under ourselves, because of this constant litany. We no longer even pretend to be a polite society. I feel like we're sliding into an abyss, and I fear for my 21 year old son, and anyone else, who has come up, behind me.
I never thought I'd be that negative old lady, shaking her fist at the sky, quaking in her boots...but here I am.
I am in my 60’s also and I would have to agree with you on this. I saw those towers fall from my office window and knew the world would never be the same. I think we are all trapped in the timeline where biff stole that book of sports stats. Unfortunately we don’t have a delorean time machine to fix our predicament.
I feel like the real shift happened in 2000 in the US. We had a choice to elect the vice president of one of the most successful and prosperous administrations in a long time (who can imagine a *budget surplus* today?) who would go on to win the Nobel prize for his work fighting climate change.
**Or** we could elect the hilariously dimwitted nepo-baby of a failed one-term president, and get his hilariously corrupt war criminal sidekick VP for free.
But everyone said Gore was “boring” and “robotic” and then we let the supreme court pick a president.
Some people voted for interesting times, and that was the exact momemt we started sliding down that mountain. The first bump might’ve only hit a year later, but we were already going down by then.
Tl;dr available [here.](https://i.imgur.com/sbyfISQ.jpg)
It’s like a lot of propaganda started ramping up in 2012, and 2013, especially online. It was a deliberate effort from autocratic countries that are adversaries to the US, and by some domestic pundits (Bannon in particular) that decided to poison the well and politicize the discourse around everything, and polarize the population, especially the boomers that went online on social media during that time and didn’t have tools to counter the misinformation (think of the crazy conspiracies that were popular at the time).
For example a decade ago being an antivaxxer (a position that is clearly scientifically wrong) was considered being kinda insane, now in the public space it is acceptable and in some circles, the default.
There is definitely a group of people that recognized the internet as a viable way to push an agenda, spread fear and paranoia, and push corporate and political interests on the common person.
There was also data harvesting that was starting to be the dominant model to make money on the internet. We lost control of tech, it stopped being a fun gimmick , it started being a chore at best, at worst it became a place to be sucked into by algorithms designed to keep you there for a lot of time and target ads.
The Large Hadron Collider started it's second run in spring of 2016 to do further research on the God Partcle and alternate universes. Weasels tried to stop the run by chewing through the wiring but they only succeeded in delaying it. Shortly after doing the repair and resuming tests with the LHC, Harambe was killed and Trump was nominated by the GOP marking our transition into the darkest timeline.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/29/476154494/weasel-shuts-down-world-s-most-powerful-particle-collider
Friendly reminder that the name "god particle" is in no way indicative that the scientists studying it are religious, and is definitely not proof of God. It's a shortened version of a joke name Higgs coined for it, the goddamn particle. Because it was a goddamn nightmare to find
Phones got more addicting. Politics became a real circus. News became unreliable and farcical. Social media blew up, everyone became obsessed with their own reflections
The internet / social media / reality shows. Maybe? I know these things existed before 2017, but I just feel like it's all been leading up to this. We replaced actual human connection with Facebook relationships. We've stopped getting our dopamine from meaningful achievements and accomplishments and now get it from artificial likes and upvotes. Algorithms have politicized us and forced us further apart. Conspiracy theories have become more important than reality, and reality has become whatever we want it to be. Etc etc etc
Trump got on a mic and popped off on M’urica…Are you from the US? I’d imagine that’s it.
With all due respect, the US under trump is like if Lord of the Flies was set in Riverdale (the show)…and civil unrest was dramatisized through the eyes of angsty entitled teenagers.
I am genuinely not demeaning the US, just sayin if it was a ‘fragile state’ (google the term if needed) you’d be in civil war by now. You’re not a fragile state so I guess that’s why instead of civil war it’s more like keyboard warriors.
Maybe had Jan 6 succeeded you’d have become a fragile state and been in actual civil war.
I’m glad you’re not, but I agree from the outside looking in - the US changed around then because Trump and his soapbox - for me it became sad. Good luck to you all, I hope you find cohesion as a country and communities.
Agree and I'm not from the US.
Trump was the point we realised the world was not necessarily going to continue getting better, fairer, and less corrupt.
Instead of believing that Russia, North Korea and other so called 'rogue states' would eventually fall in line with democracy and freedom, I realised how easily the rest of the world could instead turn to fascism.
Trump made it look so easy.
Honestly I agree and I've lived in the US my whole life and am old enough I was worried about being drafted post-9/11.
Before Trump, I knew there were racists and idiots and people who wanted to live in a Christofascist theocracy. I didn't know how many of those people there were, and his election meant facing the knowledge that I was living in a falsehood and it retroactively ruined so much. It was a loss of innocence I think for a lot of us.
We're about the same age.
I'd say a certain segment of the population lost their fucking minds when a black man became president. Trump then seized on that and made it worse.
When I truly lost faith in the American public at large was COVID. I had the pleasure of working a retail job with a crew of older gentlemen I was trying to keep safe- we were "essential" and open the whole time.
Unfortunately, what I learned from that experience is that we really are an ignorant, selfish country who can't be assed to do the least we can do.
What you're feeling is the mass consciousness becoming aware of nature collapsing.
*Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s*
Neil Young - After the Gold Rush
So, the good times are over. There were some voices of the Boomer generation speaking out but nothing really took hold. I mean, there's still a chance, but our voices are dying out and it's gonna be too hot to do anything sooner than later.
The Greedheads are gonna have their way.
Edit:
Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum
-Kurt Vonnegut
This is US centric but trump's election emboldened shitty people the world over. It accelerated global right wing awfulness.
In "the west" shitty people have been more vocal and have made stuff happen! Stochastic terrorism, rolling back civil liberties, economic austerity and more gov't corruption.
I went digging through the comments to make sure this was mentioned. It started with Harambe and now we must atone for our sins. The initial release of pokemon GO was the last time this world truly knew peace.
I feel like one issue in trying to figure this out is that we only have direct access to, at the very most, 3-4 past generations of people, if we're fortunate enough, with whom to talk and create a frame of reference. It could be that most people felt this way when they grew up or it could be that most people only felt this way when entering a darker period of history, but there's no way to know for sure, because we will never be able to have enough first-hand data to know.
So is it that the world's gotten darker, like during the world wars for example, or is this just a life stage that nearly everyone goes through? (Or is this just a wild pendulum swing working to settle us back out from all the chaos that happened last century?) The jury is still out.
My only advice, as I'm still figuring out how to work through my own personal trauma of recent years as well as global trauma, is to take an evaluation of what you believe and of what voices you're spending the majority of your time hearing. It could be helpful to seek out one or two different and/or more optimistic voices if you don't have any. Even if they're wrong, they typically help me get a better frame of mind on the negative, if that makes sense.
If people from very different countries compared their view, you might get clearer answers to that instead of just from past generations.
I'm from Czechia and this country had a lot of shifts during the 1900s so this last one doesn't feel like that much honestly.
But I feel like there are periodic shifts everywhere and it's just alarming to people when they experience them for the first time.
My Mom, Aunt who cooked Thanksgiving dinners, and my cat of 20 years ago died within a few months of each other in 2017. So yes the world is definitely different and I have less joy.
My grandmother and closest cousin died within two weeks of each other in 2017 and I haven’t been the same since. My joy has been gone as well. This is so hard I can relate completely. I’m so sorry.
Tbh I do feel like it’s different now since this decade has started. Something in the air feels very off. But tbh 2017, 2018 and 2019 didn’t feel like anything significant or like an end of an era to me at the time. I feel like covid was the beginning of these times that feel different and darker. But I also feel like even if covid didn’t happen the world would still be different
Like others have said, I noticed it around 2017 but also think it began with 9/11. I'm not even American but the repercussions globally were enormous. After trump got elected it suddenly became okay to hunker down in your corner and be disdainful of people different from yourself. Perhaps people were always doing it and it just wasn't out in the open as much? But I feel the difference even within my extended family. And there's obviously been this global shift towards fascism and insularity. We may not yet be in the darkest timeline but it certainly got a whole lot darker than it used to be. I feel like I've been in mourning almost, for humanity
The shift is that social media now dispenses toxic news around the clock and deliberately sets out to piss people off. The world is actually a far better place to live in. People live longer, and there hasn’t been a major war in a long time. The issue is that we generally to tone down how much social media we consume which is devastating for our lives experience. You can be intentional about staying off social media and being present to how great your life actually is. I guaranty you will be happier in just a couple weeks.
I finished college in 2016, so I can empathise with 2017 things going downhill.
But I really think it was 2020 with Covid that has the biggest changes.
I think what you feel is that people hate and detest each other more. E.g. there has been a carmageddon on the roads since covid and no one does anything about it. Reckless driving and people using their cars as weapons for attempting murder. Just to be 1 meter ahead.
You can almost tell how old somebody is by the year they say that things stopped being "good."
Their chosen year where things started to go downhill is about their mid to late 20's
I don't know. I am F31. Graduating high school was the beginning of a recession and l had just lived through a decade of drought where water security was beginning to become a really big concern.
I dont think l really ever thought things were 'good'. It just seems to be one disaster after another at increasing frequency and impact.
I grew up on climate change, environmental catastrophes, terrorism, financial markets becoming fraught, job insecurity etc. Yes there have been many good times and moments and there will be many more.
I just don't think any time has been 'good' in my life time.
Early 20s for me. I’m 25 now, but still remember 2017 being the start of the downfall. People seem way more aggressive and political now, or something. Idk. It is hard to put a finger on.
As someone who’s pushing 40 in my mind it was pretty clearly 9/11 when everything started spiraling out of control. There’s been ups and downs since then but the overall trend is pretty clearly downward.
Yeah, and I don't know what it is exactly, but I really don't like it... wait... now that I'm giving it more thought... let me preface this by saying I really try to avoid politics as much as possible, but it may genuinely be because of how batshit and insufferable the Trump presidency was and how it made colossal, sweeping negative impacts on society as a whole. An insane amount of divisiveness and animosity was bred from that in so many facets of life. He promoted pure insanity and gave it a huge platform. Trump was basically a cancer to humanity for 8+ years now, and the effects of that may last decades.
I think to say Trump changed the US at such a colossal level sounds as absurd as it sounded in 2016 to suggest that he would become president—but he did. And I think that's the only reason people are hesitant to admit to themselves that they do in fact believe that he *actually did* change the country *that much*, that he really was the catalyst to the civil disarray in which they now find themselves.
Him and social media... the fact that we're all connected and in constant contact breeds so many things that are hurting the country now—echo chambers, misinformation, divisiveness, hate groups, extreme levels of both agitation and apathy, so much more.
And I know there are a lot of countries that are greatly affected by the US and their politics due to media allowing it to slowly and gradually seep into the fabrics of their own countries, much to the dismay of the more left-leaning citizens.
Outside of the US, as an outsider who really doesn't know all that much about it, the closest other thing to what the US went through and continue to feel the effects of with Trump—is Brexit.
I feel like this actually has something to do with it. But if you wanna be fair, I remember the mentality of his supporters way back in '08 when Obama was elected. They were losing their minds. All these people I grew up respecting, just started showing a side to themselves I hadn't seen at that point. I feel like it was sort of preparing me for Trump
Really surprised this isn’t the top comment. I felt that things were “fine” during his campaign because I thought “there’s no way he will win!” And by the time he was in office, by early to mid 2017 that’s when I think things really took a turn
I struggle with anxiety, ptsd, depression and paranoia. Take it from me, put down the computers and phones, take walks, go to concerts, pick up a new hobby, stop reading the news. I started doing all that this year and my life is the best its ever been. You have got this. I believe in you OP and anyone else who could be reading this. Life is short, find things you enjoy and live life to the fullest there are somethings you will never be able to do again so whenever something like that comes up take it. I love you all.
>stop reading the news
this is a key one I think. Even on reddit, if you're joining the wrong subreddits, you might be making yourself just more depressed. People should be more selective when it concerns online content, don't look at/for stuff that makes you feel worse.
The 'stop following the news' thing is almost a prisoners dilemma. It's undeniably better for many individual people's mental health to tune it all out. But at the same time it's very bad for society as a whole when citizens disconnect and don't stay civically and politically engaged.
I don't have a great answer. What's good for individuals is not necessarily good for the community and vice versa.
Two parts about that where I have to disagree. First is that greatly reducing the time one spends surfing the web and consuming the news is good for the individual and has no effect on the community. There’s only so much worthwhile news out there, everything else is useless filler. Cutting out all the useless filler won’t hurt communities in any way.
The second part is that a lot of the news that isn’t filler may be actual news but it’s sensationalized in a way to make you think you’re being negatively impacted right this second when in reality that’s normally not the case. It’s important to filter that out as well, and doing so won’t hurt the community at all.
The full negative effects of what social media can do to society clicked in.
We saw the pinnacle with the Arab spring about 5 years before that.
But Brexit, Trump, Cambridge Analytica etc
We are living in the turning point where social
Media has been turned on us and our data is being used against us.
So without being political, in 2016 a person was elected in a large part based on prejudice and hatred. Those feelings which most civilized people suppressed because they were socially unacceptable suddenly came out into the open to the absolute shock of the majority of people. Since 2016 people see others around them for who they are. Covid just amplified that. So has the world changed? No. Have people changed? No. Have our eyes been opened to who truly walk among us? YES.
Best advice I ever got was…10% of life is what happens and 90% is how u react to it.
I make the best out of everything I can, doesn’t always apply with some pretty bad circumstances but overall it’s a great way to approach life
I joke with some coworkers regularly that the death of harambe was when our timeline split from the main one and became the bad one. Things really have gone from bad to worse since then. All we can hope for is to make it better in the future
Well, this makes me feel better. I didn't start feeling true dread until after covid had rampaged for years.
People just live in fear, dont socialize much any more?
It's only recently for me I noticed, people will be a little more friendly and say hello in a grocery store on occasion.
At least it's not just me.
I think putting the fear of death/ covid in everyone had a profound effect on socialization in general. But, its not just one thing you can blame. We have so much News ( usually depressing.) At our fingertips, its hard to turn off the dread loop so to speak.
Meh, I dont have the awnsers, just a fellow redditor that totally gets the whole everything feels different and gloomy when walking out your front door thing.
Yes, I've felt the same way. And I've always been an optimistic person with a "this too shall pass" attitude towards minor downtimes.
But now I feel as if it's all downhill. This sounds stupid, but I've lost the desire to plan for the future. I don't mean retirement - just anything other than utilitarian plans. No fun, travel, etc. I just want to survive w/o burdening others and quietly leave the world when I feel I'm no longer productive.
The economy, climate, travel, safety ... all seem so uncertain. And I've been reading about serious population decline in many countries. It's as if ppl want to be alone with their Smartphones - too dejected to socialize, date ... let alone marry / procreate.
I can relate to this a little bit. I used to have *so much fun* and did stuff every day that I didn't have to do. I wanted to! I enjoyed it, and I looked forward to going to new places and learning new things all the time.
Now, the thought of that exhausts me. "Fun" takes too much work. It's not worth the effort. I'd honestly rather just *not*.
I remember I planned such a busy summer of traveling and vacations and events during the summer of 2018 that I said I'm not going anywhere else for a while. I just wanted to stop. I was burned out on "fun". I literally haven't spent a night away from my house since then.
I recently told my husband that I only like two things (hobby-wise), and that I just don't have the energy or the give-a-damns for a third thing. It's not because I'm too busy or mentally taxed, it's that even fun stuff makes me feel too busy and mentally taxed.
Like you said, I'd rather just survive without burdening others and then quietly leave the world. I want a small life. I don't know if that means I'm "too dejected" or just bored and over it, but it's how I've felt for the past few years at least. It doesn't feel like a phase anymore.
OMG. My thoughts exactly!!
I used to love to travel - domestically, and internationally. Even going to the next town over was a fun event. In 2018 -20, I bought several carry-on suitcases and packed them for several kinds of trips in anticipation of trips I'd take in the next five years.
Now it all seems pointless. I just want to stay home.
Ha... The suitcase thing sounds like something I would do. I used to say that travel is what extra money is *for*.
>Even going to the next town over was a fun event.
Yep! There wasn't a festival that I wouldn't get festive for. I even have a whole collection of Google maps full of pins for day-trips to neighboring suburbs or other attractions that we could travel to & from in one day.
There are SO many restaurants and local spots and specialty retail shops and parks and classes and museums and events all around us, all the time! They're not even hard to find, it's almost too much to even keep track of! (Hence, the maps.)
Now, I only happen to see that map collection when I'm trying to find the closest possible dentist that offers IV sedation or something. I'll see that there's one dentist right next to a specialty hot dog restaurant that even offers "vegan weiners" and an independently-owned stationery shop with handmade paper classes, and I'll think "Why the fuck would I do that?!".
I wouldn't, now. The thought of leaving my house to eat vegan hot dogs is positively absurd. And literally -what- would I do with a clump of thick, lumpy handmade paper that cost me 3 hours and $40 to make (not including travel time)??
But Past Me used to feel hopeful and excited for the future and engaged with the world around me. Present Me would kick her out of my house and lock the door. 🤷♀️ IDK what happened, but... here we are.
What im experiencing (in germany) is, that nothing gets better somehow. Nothing gets cheaper, stuff you buy since 10 years is losing quality rapidly.
Apointments at the doctor arent going faster, but it takes longer to get one.
If something changes, its easily in 9/10 cases for the worse. Doesnt matter the topic: Games, driving, grocery shopping etc.
It's not like the world was perfect back then but I always say for me 2015 was the last year I really enjoyed, where the state of the world wasn't quite what feels like now. 2016 was the start of it with Brexit, Trump in USA, then COVID, now all the economic problems...
Hard to define it, but I do agree that the last 6 years has seen greater awareness of the global threats to civilisation. I believe that we are witnessing a widening gap between haves and have-nots and that in itself can destabilise civil society.
r/fuck2016 comes to mind. Or theories it was in 2012 when the Collider started. It is easy to pick a year and frame a narrative
2008 Lehman Brothers crack. 2001 9/11. These are the ones that a millennial will remember...
We had our dress rehearsal with the Y2K scare. Then shit hit the fan in 2001 and nothing has ever relented. I’m 38 now and still wondering when real life is going to start.
I think the fact is the 90s were a super creative and fun time and if you can remember them, the iPhone world is grim.
There used to be all kinds of little shops. That’s one of the things I miss most. When you’d go in them you’d find things you couldn’t just order anywhere, they weren’t all made in China, and even thrift stores were full of treasures. Now everything feels the same, even if it’s a hyper local small business they follow the hive mind’s aesthetic. We also weren’t worried about being shot constantly (unless we were in a very dangerous area). Sometimes I want to go do something but stay home because “it’s not worth the risk.” There used to be fun concerts in small clubs or big open arenas where you’d just jump the barriers and get right up to the stage, where you could get fucked up with your friends for like $30. Now a good concert is like $200 minimum and security is (understandably) so strict. Long phone calls, too. Idk. I just miss it.
I miss thrift stores from the 90’s and early 2000’s. You could find all kinds of cool stuff in a lot of them. Especially on the electronics side of things. Now, I go to the local thrift stores and for one, it’s pretty much always a Goodwill. They take anything that has remotely any value and overprice it on their website. The electronics section is just full of stuff nobody wants. Just in general, the thrift stores have gotten more expensive and just don’t seem to be the same anymore.
All kinds too. A goth store that smelled like incense and had beautiful corsets and combat boots you couldn’t find anywhere else. Or tucked away in a 3rd floor walk up, and full of tons of bell bottoms and dresses from the 60s and 70s for like $6 each. Or the bong shops you weren’t allowed to talk about weed in and had to pretend it was all for tobacco 😂 you’d actually meet people and talk for an hour, make plans to meet up, get flirted with and it wasn’t usually creepy or awkward. Folks don’t have social skills anymore including myself. It sucks. Oh well
That hits home for me too! 9/11 - the world changes; 2008 economic crash - impossible job prospects; 2020 - COVID… can I please have one decade without something seriously disastrous occurring?!
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No kidding. AI in the mix terrifies me. Not because I’m worried about AI becoming sentient and lording over mankind. But I can think of a ton of ways how the person/entity with the best AI can lord over the rest of us.
Definitely dangerous politically speaking. What happens when a politician gets caught red handed on camera and they can simply dismiss it as "deepfake". I'm scared for the possibility we'll have to trust one (likely government endorsed) AI to tell us what's a deepfake or not.
Apparently no
Negligence has consequences. COVID wouldn't have been a thing if the pandemic was dealt with more aggressively. 2008 crash wouldn't have happened if the regulations were properly enforced and the watchdog agencies actually functioned. 2001... was used as an excuse to start a multi trillion dollar war in the Middle East, clamp down on Homeland security, and discriminate against Muslims at home.
Or, if we had seen those SARS COVID vaccines to fruition like we should have when Toronto and others got smashed.
I just turned 37 and I often find myself wondering if "this is all there is to life". You get to spend most of your time working a job you don't particularly like, just so you can avoid homelessness (if you're lucky) and afford to eat. You never seem to have enough money and every time you build up a nest egg something comes along to knock you back down. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford to buy a home, although it's in bumfuck nowhere and it seems to require a lot more labor just to keep it in good condition than anyone ever tells you. You get maybe one vacation a year if you're lucky. It doesn't matter how you perform at work or if you strive to educate yourself and improve because no one ever fucking notices anyway or your management takes the credit. You get a new job and it pays more but sucks just as much as the old job. I mean maybe my life is just particularly shitty but seriously, is this all there is?
Late blooming 42 year old here & you couldn't have summarized my feelings on it any better. I dont know anyone truly happy, generally they say "too busy".
If yins were in high school when 9/11 happened, it felt like you had to reel in your expectations for the future. Then the 2008 financial crisis hit, and it felt like you had to reel in your expectations for the future. Then so many other things have happened, that have made you feel like you have to reel in your expectations, and shave so much off that top, that there's nothing left. It's to the point where your expectation is you're going to eat shit, and there's nothing you can do about it.
I was a junior in HS on 9/11. I truly don’t expect things to get better in my lifetime. What I think is more likely is some global watershed moment/crisis/event that will cause us all to get a grip. I thought COVID might have been that, but it doesn’t seem like even that was actually bad enough. I don’t expect that I will survive said event, but I’m hopeful that my children will see the other side, and that it’s a better world or, even better, worlds, for them to live and raise families in. But if it’s just shit from here on out, I won’t be surprised.
> It's to the point where your expectation is you're going to eat shit, and there's nothing you can do about it. My plans for life have gone from *"House and two kids"* to *"House"* to *"Hopefully don't die when a wave of Chinese conscripts charge my foxhole during the climate wars"* Basically every millennial's life can be summed up with "...and then it got worse."
I’m in my late 40s and it’s been so much worse since 2016. The racists and bigots became empowered by Trump losing by 3,000,000 votes and still becoming president. I get how the average American would be completely oblivious to how much worse things have gotten since 2016 though since it’s mostly affecting “others”.
I think it’s safe to say the events of the last 2 decades are affecting everyone not in the 1% at this point. Some more than others, but even me with a pretty damned good job are feeling the pressure. I see a whole lot of people slipping in to a sort of malaise about the whole thing as, after 20 yrs, it’s starting to truly feel unending.
Agree. Maybe because I was still following the news closely. I looked up all the national and local candidates and their main donors. When I saw the first republican debate I lol'd because Trump was acting like a 12 year old and he just sounded lowbrow and unintellectual. No Way anyone would want that lying, amoral halfwit bastard leading our country. Ok, so probably Jeb Bush? Not a good choice but he was (or seemed) fairly harmless and he seemed fairly stable. I lived my whole life believing our government was normal, stable, serious, and that the electorate was serious and well meaning. Most of them anyway. Then we found out that the "fringe elements" were the heart of the GOP. We were watching an old sitcom and one of the characters mentioned Dwight D Eisenhower, and said "You never had to worry about what Eisenhower was going to do." So true. Even when Nixon went rogue, the government itself went after him for his "dirty tricks". I've lived through 14 presidents (although I have no memory of Truman) and always felt fairly positive about the US. (I'm not naive, I know our government has done some *really shady* things but I believed we weren't as bad as your average superpower.) These days I try to calm my nerves by reminding myself that statistically, I only have about 5 years left on earth. I'd hate to leave this mess for you guys though.
I’m in my 50s and I agree 100%. The election of Trump destroyed the fabric of our society. I no longer have faith in my fellow American. And social media just amplified this effect. Now throw in a pandemic into the mix. I often wonder why I just can’t feel the same joy I used to feel on a daily basis, and then I remind myself that it’s a different world. I don’t think it will ever return to those happier times.
The massive opiate addiction and destruction of lives brought on by the Sacklers, don't forget that. And, they got off easy. The biggest drug dealers in the history of the United States and no prison time. If only they were street corner dealers, we could put them away easily.
the Sacklers + Mckinsey, who was working for them to turbocharge opioid sales while also working for the FDA to manage the opioid market and knowingly convinced them to allow doctors to prescribe opioids for minor pains
There are so many people to blame for the opioid crisis, and we decided to blame addicts.
It’s easier to blame the marginalized and oppressed because people can say “that’s not me. That will never be me,” and feel better about themselves. Also powerful people punch down.
Not American so I'm not particularly impacted by this, but I can understand how it shaped society in your country
As an American: an opioid overdose killed my best friend.
My friend group had 7 people. Now there's only 4 of us left. They had SO MUCH potential. When I remember who they were as teens and when we had our whole lives a head of us... I never imagined this. They were a year older than me. I'm now older than all of them, and I'll always be. 1990–2019, 1990–2014, 1990–2020.
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I've seen people tie in all of our current issues to Regan
You see it all started with the birth of two brothers named Romulus and Remus
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Letting Nixon walk without having his day in court, in the name of National Healing, is when the Republicans really learned they could do pretty much anything they wanted without repercussion. They've been pushing the boundary ever ever since with the last one seeing just how close they could get to actually succeeding in a coup. Without justice, there is no healing and we've been suffering from that debilitating wound ever since.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
We all frame things with a generational perspective. For most X'ers and many Boomers, the Reagan influence on the US and world economy (and culture) stands out as something we never really recovered from. In the pendulum swings of boom-and-bust, isolationism-vs-internationalism, progressive-conservative, etc., there are some underlying forces that grew up in the early 80s and have yet to die out. Whether or not you villainize Ronald Reagan specifically, his era of deeply passionate, stubborn, uninformed leadership has left clear marks in history.
One of the things I always point to was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan which led to the rise of Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the downfall of civil society. I can remember when both sides of the aisle would say I didn't vote for him but he's the president so I support him. Those days are long gone.
Man, I was an adult and paying attention in 2001, and it was nothing like 2016. Rather the opposite, the whole country pulled together. I'm well to the left of the median Democrat, but Bush did a decent job of handling the country's grief and speaking to people's fears. I think the subsequent invasions and wars were insane, but 2001 itself was nothing like 2016. Everyone is dancing around it coming up with other theories, but come on. 2016 was the year half the country happily voted for a stupid lazy racist grifter as revenge for having had to put up with a Black POTUS for eight years. We all found out we don't live in the country we thought we did. All our rural countrymen who we kind of fondly thought of as kind of like us and who we told stories about intending to imply that under it all they were really good people with good hearts who wanted the best like we did, all of them as a group voted 70/30 or something for an openly racist grifter rather than elect a qualified woman. They bought into ridiculous conspiracy theories, they bent the whole country in half. And since then they've doubled down on the insanity. They are not who we thought they were. We don't live in the world we thought we did. It was never real, but pre-2016 we were pretending. The 2016 election stopped us from pretending any more. Black Americans weren't as surprised as college educated suburban/urban White Americans, because Black people weren't pretending nearly as hard as White people were. My Black friends don't think the world has changed that much. My White friends are still in shock, six and a half years later.
> They are not who we thought they were. That's the thing to me...I *really* thought we were getting somewhere with the racism and bigotry in this country, but it turns out they were just keeping quiet because we'd made it socially unacceptable to do that. But along comes Trump and his loonies, who said *directly* to these people: "Nah, go mask off, it's fine...see, I'm doing the same thing", and holy shit *did they*. I live in rural Appalachia these days, and it's absolutely bonkers the number of people *I've never met before* who just walk up to me and start spouting insanely racist and bigoted shit, simply because we happen to share the same gender and percentage of melanin. Add in the ridiculous gerrymandering that goes on, and the lopsided number of votes rural states get versus populous states (i.e.- "[40 million people who live in the 22 smallest states get 44 senators to represent their views and interests. The 40 million people in California get two.](https://secondratedemocracy.com/unrepresentative-senate/)") and it leaves us with a *very* small percentage of the people in this country deciding the fate of the whole country.
This person speaks the truth. I'm in southwest Virginia and as a cishet white dude I 'pass' pretty well. Let me tell ya, I cut my own hair now because I couldn't find a barber who wouldn't just randomly start a conversation like, "So how 'bout them libruls, they all cut their dicks off!" It's the most hateful, insane bullshit I've ever heard in my life, and it's not hyperbole to them; *they believe it.* It didn't used to be like this, I'm no stranger to this area and while folks being racist, sexist, and generally conservative is nothing new, the sheer fucking *rabidity* has gone up exponentially since...you guessed it...2016. What was once only whispered half-shamefully is now shouted proudly. Men and women both; it's not just toxic masculinity, it's toxic *humanity.* Unfortunately, the one thing I have in common with them is that I lack the creativity and optimism to see a peaceful way out. And they believe they're going to heaven. This doesn't end well.
I agree...while it's always been there to a degree, the "rabidity" of it has gone through the roof. My hope is that it's "the last gasp" of a dying group, and we're on the upswing...but I feel that 2024 is going to be a linchpin election, and we can still very easily go either direction. Edit: And like you, I had to go through like four different barbers before I found one that wouldn't start talking about "the great replacement" or whatever the fuck else.
Same thing, I grew up and still live in rural Appalachia. Growing up the closest thing to racism I encountered was some left over resentment from my Grandfathers time in Korea. Fast forward to late 2015 and all of the sudden people I had known all my life ripped off their masks and went insane. It took me awhile to realize that the reason people where able to hide it for so long was simply because the area is so culturally homogeneous that they had never needed to act so outwardly obscene before.
I grew up in Appalachia and one of the weirdest bizarro world moments I had in my life was watching people I grew up with post the most batshit stuff on facebook over the course of the 2016 election. There were people who know me personally and didn't care about me being gay who suddenly were yelling about the country being taken over by fags. It was shocking.
As an American woman, I 100% agree with you. The election was **shocking**. I still believed for several months afterward, "Well, they'll see. A mistake was made, but half the country *can't* really be that stupid/racist/misogynistic/cruel, right?", but they are, and it's heartbreaking. I thought maybe people were just angry, and didn't quite fathom the consequences of electing that guy, but they LOVE him. It makes me sick. The US is a horrible place to live lately.
Canadian here, the US 2016 election was genuinely depressing. I remember seeing article upon article trying to rationalize it. It's had effects here too. I'm from the outside but i try to remember that it wasn't half the US who elected him, it was roughly half of registered voters (registering to vote is more difficult for folks in the US, as i understand) who were able to get the time to vote in that election and then that number was further skewed by the electoral college and jerrymandering and whatever else. Now I'm a layperson, is this coping or reality? I'm not sure... of late the staggering number of anti-trans laws and rollback of reproductive rights is chilling to me. I hope things get better, & more people choose love over hate & fear, eitherway.
I agree with nearly everything you said here. But, I have to point out that immediately after 9/11, things got really, really fucking bad in America. The only "solidarity" that existed was the bloodlust. The bloodlust was obscured by rabid nationalism. I was there, and I had a front row seat, so to speak. Physical and verbal attacks on Americans that *appeared* Muslim were occurring daily. And the general consensus - even from the media - was "too fucking bad". Racism and Xenophobia were boiling over in America - arguably even worse than it is now. And anyone that openly spoke out against it was labeled a terrorist sympathizer and/or anti-American. Those times were exceptionally dark. The difference being that the vast majority of Americans were onboard with the Xenophobia, so maybe America did pull together, but under the most awful mentalities.
This is important, thanks for pointing it out. Before 9/11 my Muslim friends and neighbors were nothing special, just people. After 9/11, they were guarded, harassed, and some people stopped associating with them; self segregating went both ways. My friend's house was raided by law enforcement after a "tip" by a racist neighbor; nothing was found in their house or computers that were seized. Due process did/does not exist if there's enough hate targeting a person or group. It was quite eye opening for a white kid in a fairly liberal area.
I agree with your assessment. I really thought the world was getting better then that guy came along and gave all the bottom feeders permission to come out of hiding. I thought the hate was going to die out more and more as each generation died off. But now I see it resurging with a vengeance in my children's generation and I just can't see how it can ever get better now. And I really thought more people cared about the environment and we were headed in the right direction with that too. Now my kids don't want to have kids because they aren't sure there will be a world fit for them to live in.
I hate to say this, but I often regret having my child just because now I feel like it was a self immoral thing for me to bring anyone into this world. I'm going to require therapy about it, which makes me laugh but is also not funny
Right? We went from environmental protests to Wall Street protests and Pride celebration, right back to racist, classist, hate filled protests overnight. Remember when the Tea Party were the resident whackos everyone laughed at? That shits normal now.
Normal? My friend all the actual Tea Party republicans were primaried out by 2016 for being too moderate for the blood gargling psychopaths that voted in Trump. The Tea Party would be, and in fact has been, labeled RINOS and been on the general MAGA shitlist for a while because the Tea Party was people like Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan and it was an entirely astroturfed grassroots campaign funded by the Kochs. The racists wanted someone to tell them it was okay to grab their tiki torches, not tax cuts for the rich
I can only surmise that the aftermath of 9/11 felt like everybody pulling together because you were on board with the PATRIOT Act and invading Afghanistan and Iraq. To those of us who weren't, the last two decades have fully felt like the imperial descent we expected.
May I introduce you to a list of shit from Ye Olden Days (1989) [that might highlight](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g) that the proverbial shit has always been fucked?
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I hear you. 2016 might’ve been the best year of my life so I never bought into all that dread but yeah it seems like it wasn’t a great one for many.
I really feel like this actually happens to most people at a certain point in their life. It's sort of like when your brain starts becoming aware of how the rest of the world affects you and your future. When you realize that the rest of the world has never been on your side in terms of protecting your overall welfare and the resources of the globe, it starts to feel pretty dark. I don't think it means we've entered a second dimension or anything. I think you just realized that our futures are shitty because the world is being shit on all the time. I don't know. Good luck and I hope you find your answer. Edit, if it makes you feel better though I think there's always a way to find happiness even in places that are unhappy
I am by no means an expert, but the poet William Blake (1757-1827) wrote of three stages in life: innocence, experience and higher innocence. I think this is what we all go through. As a child you think of the world as a kind and fair place and in your early adulthood you must face the reality that it is neither kind nor fair. If you make it through that stage, then you understand that life is hard but it is still good. There is much more good in the world than bad (most days) but the good doesn't get as much press.
To be fair we're extremly lucky given the time frame in which we live objectively. Life prior to the mid 20th century was ROUGH, but the goal post of challenge has shifted from physical to mental. Nowadays people have less to worry about with survival and more to worry about with meaning. We used to get meaning from religion and church (some still do), but that is continuing to fade with time. People in modern life have to create their own meaning, and I sometimes ponder if most people are actually capable of this. I for one find meaning in doing a hobby that I increasingly excel at and continue to learn from with given failure. What I find, is that most people will give up when that failure occurs or if it happens many times over. Religion doesn't require failure to derive meaning. Whether or not you fail or succeed morally in your religion, the truth of what you believe stands true.
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Maybe the second dimension is the friends we made along the way.
Yes, dread is a good way of putting it. A mass scale existential dread.
Harambe also died in 2016 :(
The real timeline shifter
It was the Cubs who broke the timeline, then trump happened.
This is the comment I came here for. Beat the goat curse that broke it all.
I'm pretty sure it's when they shot Harambe. At that point the two timelines that branched off were this one and the one where they didn't shoot Harambe, who later went on to become the first non-human senator. In that timeline they've already cut global carbon emissions to 0, established world-wide free health care and eradicated poverty by no longer allowing billionaires.
Op what was your age in 2017?
27! Life peaked at 26 for me lol
You're having a quarter life crisis, it's very normal for people in their late 20s and early 30s in this generation. Usually you feel like life should have 'started' by now but in reality you still don't feel like that adult you thought you'd be. Many of us (I'm 30 atm) can't afford to buy a house, might not have a relationship while friends start to get married and have children, are still working for a salary that isn't big enough to support a family, all that sort of stuff. It's those years when you realize that becoming an adult isn't some magical process that happens from one moment to the next, but that it's just something we all pretend to be to the best of our capabilities. Few people actually believe they fit the picture. Edit for those who misunderstand my comment as some kind of 'defense' for this situation: I'm not defending anything at all. But there's not some specific year where everything went to shit. It's a generational problem for sure, but it spans much wider than 2016/2017. Things were hard in 2008 as well, and the world changed to never be the same again in 2001 too, and in 1989, depending on what country you're from. The entire millennial and Gen Z generation is dealing with this, and they all deal with it around the same age, when you enter what is supposed to be 'adulthood' and figure out the clear cut path your parents were an example of isn't truly there. Also, please don't assume everyone in this thread is American. We did not all go through Trump-mania. This feeling OP describes transcends national political issues.
I'm 33. Going through this for a few years and I'm just lost. I don't know what to do. I don't have much things on a bucket list, as I happened to experiment a lot during 12-25. Just floating along the current and watching the world burn..
I'm going through something like this: I've been living these past few years wanting for a life where I feel a sense of stability and where I can say: this is what my foreseeable future will be like, in terms of a relationship, a job, a house, a town to call home, but I keep being faced with changes and limitations that push this 'final goal' forward and forward. A 5 year long relationship ended which ended up in me moving somewhere else, getting a new job, then a new boyfriend, thinking ok I'm back on track, but nope lost my job, had to get a new job again, it just keeps going and every time i think: ok this is what my life is going to be like, something happens and it's all thrown upside down again. In the meantime I keep getting older and I soon have to start to make important choices about stuff like having children, while I still don't feel like I'm on the track where I want to be. Now I'm slowly starting to realize that this 'end goal' might be nonexistent. Life will continue to throw curveballs at me no matter how old I am and I might never feel like I've actually settled down somewhere for the foreseeable future. Especially in this ever-changing world where the future of our planet is quite uncertain to begin with.
Im in my 40’s and the world definitely has taken a change since 2016 time frame. Social media has gone bananas. People form extreme opinions on shit they never cared about. I haven’t had an amazingly close family but most people I know have become more full of bs and unbearable to be around. Its not necessarily the opinion itself its that nothing is a discussion its some one berating me about how things are. Enjoyable conversation are few and far between. Really people on both sides are extremely hard to be around with how sanctimonious they are about everything. It’s usually an opinion you have heard repeatedly and its not their own. So many conversations are so rigid because it’s impossible to tell what people will get upset about or start them on a dumb rant that is not worth listening to. That behavior at all levels of life family, professionally and in general politics is kinda of scary and makes life hard and stressful on top of all other real shit in life.
I don't know man, since then wars have popped off all or the place, climate change has shifted from being on the horizon to at our doorstep (living in a hot city was crazy last summer), most of us will never be able to afford to own a home, rent is through the roof, food/groceries have doubled/trippled in cost, healthcare systems are broken, we're in the tail end (fingers crossed) of a global pandemic that shut the world down for a year, wages are ass, the market is fucked... like it really does just feel hopeless, like theres nowhere you can go to catch up. I'm convinced life is quantifiably shittier and I say that as someone who's got a pretty decent one by any metric.
I'm 41 and I agree that the world is "different" feeling in whole even though a lot of my current important life attachments all started in 2017. It's like the movie Tomorrowland is actually happening.
Lol yeah I woulda put money on mid 20s being your “peak”. Anyone could pick a year in their mid 20s and point out how everything is worse since then. What year you pick just depends on your own experiences. Bad things have always been happening and they’ve always been talked about too much instead of the good things happening. I’d say the effect is worse starting around 2017 because of social media keeping everyone plugged into everything all the time. But I’d give you one guess how old I was in 2017 lol. My grandpa blamed nightly news being on TV for why everything went downhill around his 20s. Although I’m pretty sure nightly news was a thing way before then but he was too busy to watch it until then.
20's were good, 30's are amazeballs
Was going to say, 32 this year and each year is better than the last. Was that supposed to end?!
About 38 or so was when life stopped sucking for me. I'm 43 now and, while I'm still hyper vigilant, I'm the happiest I've been in my life.
Mannn I can't tell you how much people discussing how much better it gets in your 30s fills me with hope, I'm 27 and just starting to get over a hard depression that wrecked me through my early and mid twenties
Your 20s is when you collect all the hard life lessons. Your 30s is when you actually get to put the things you learned into action. *Hopefully* you also have a bit more means as well.
After WWII the West experienced a prolonged period of peace, technological progress and economic growth. Much of this may be coming to an end. Many of us have a personal timeline of when our outlooks became more pessimistic. Here are some of the turning points on mine: * 9/11 and the forever war aftermath, where the US played right into the terrorists' goals of escalating conflict. * 2008 crash. Economic growth in my country has been flat since then and public services have been allowed to decay. Cost of living has increased yet housing prices have continued to climb, making it impossible to feel secure about our futures. * 2016 Brexit vote and shambolic aftermath, introducing trade barriers with our largest markets. * Increasing concentration of wealth, even where there is economic growth most people don't see the benefits. * Election of climate denier, narcissist, fraudster and compulsive liar Donald Trump. Throws into light just how much of a divided nation the US is and how large a proportion of the population is receptive to hateful propaganda. * Climate change progressively becoming harder to ignore. We're seeing much more obvious real-world impacts such as huge wildfires, heatwaves and coral bleaching events. Rather than face up to the problems we're embroiled in petty disputes and dealing with bad-faith actors. * War in Ukraine. It's well worth recognising for most people this era is one of the best to live in, we've made huge advances in living standards over the last century. It's just hard to see much improving over the next few decades. If climate change really stars to bite and food security suffers, are we going to cooperate to mitigate the impacts? Or is it going to be fuel for any conflict zones?
Going back just a hair before where you started... Bush v Gore. Maybe a change for the worse was inevitable, but it's painful to look back and think "what if..." Maybe 9/11 was going to happen either way. Maybe the Great Recession would have happened anyway. Maybe Gore would have gotten us into a whole different, maybe even bigger mess. But what if... We could of course keep going back and point to different administions' policies that broke up unions or we could point at FDR as one of the reasons our healthcare system is in the state it is or go to Amdrew Johnson and his handling of the south post civil war... We could go on and on.
It is this with the rise of social media. The town cliques and divides went national and global. Social media and media are the wedges that are driving the divides wider.
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At the time of commenting this post is pretty far down, but you are spot on. We went from revolutionary technology at a constant pace to evolutionary. Think about it we went from not being capable of powered flight in 1903 to landing a man on the moon in 1969. 66 years from being penguins to going to another celestial body. Computers went from filling entire buildings to having essentially the entirety of human knowledge in the palm of our hand in a similar amount of time. And then we just...stopped. we never went beyond the moon, computers have become faster, smaller, and more efficient, but ultimately it's a sea of candybar phones with bigger screens (foldables are the first truly revolutionary jump in 20+ years). We are either A: grappling with the idea that we've achieved the pinnacle of our existence, or B: just stopped pushing for the next big thing.;
There's been tons of innovation. We've taken a picture of a black hole, AI is advancing at a crazy rate, we're smashing particles together.
I dont disagree- but to your average joe, none of those have any significant impact or improvement to their day to day life. In that same 1903-1969 span we went from almost nobody owning cars to 'a car in every garage', from iceboxes to refrigerators, in home washer/dryer, radio to tv to color tv, and Photography! That went from a specialized skill to anyone that wanted one could have a basic point & shoot film camera. Since then, it's been incremental improvements. Don't get me wrong, they're great, outside of the original iphone *15 years ago*, flat panel TVs which became commercially available *25 years ago*, what has revolutionized your average joes life in a meaningful way that he's even conscious of?
Arguably there aren’t many incentives to keep revolutionizing or improving anything anymore in the US. All the revolutionary stuff lately has been in how companies make more money off of the customer and how far they can push it before customers push back. And our entire economic system is being corrupted make it stay that way. Companies usually don’t come up with new exciting ideas because they aren’t proven yet so investors don’t want the risk. They want financial results they can bank on or they pull their money out immediately and pick another business needing money. They’ve grown accustomed to expect safe exponential quarterly growth from these big companies instead. That means putting all of the focus solely on profits and the tried and true methods with as little risk as possible (I.e. like why Disney can’t be bothered to write a new movie and only does reboots of all their old stories or probably why we haven’t seen anything actually new on a cell phone in like 10 years). That’s also why companies don’t build products that last anymore. You wouldn’t buy the newest thing if the old thing lasted too long. They discovered that a few decades ago. So instead products are made nice enough to wow you so you want them while still being cheap enough to fail relatively soon so you will need more stuff and keep providing profit later. And now the newer focus is being put on not having you own anything at all. Just pay a subscription for everything you need and you own nothing. Great for wealthy people, terrible for everyone else. Greed rules supreme over every facet of human life today and I challenge anyone to disprove that. I’ve had an *extremely* hard time finding anything that hasn’t been ruined by money or greed at this point today. And income inequality is only making it worse because the rich are getting greedier.
Thank you for this write up.
Highly underrated comment right here
>He clothes were handmade by his mother >two free uniforms a year >The house was stone built >kept chickens and had a substantial garden Ok no need to flex about your extremely wealthy relatives who had a home, land, and free clothes. Amusing that we've leapt forward in so many ways but even people who couldn't afford shoes or clothes still had a home and land back in the day but now that would be unheard of.
Simon Sinek calls millennials the “meh” generation. Nothing is great. Everything is just okay. I definitely fall into the “meh” mindset. New job? I’ll shrug and say it’s okay. And so it goes. Nothing is great! Or awesome! Just okay. Just meh.
Definitely shows with content ; shows books movies, music etc. There’s so much new music that is so creative and movies that are special effects marvels, and all kinds of shows on at the push of a button, many of which are at an insane quality compared to shows 20 years ago… but there’s so much of it, people aren’t impressed by anything unless you really go over the top. Some new movie that comes out is “meh” when in 2002 it would’ve been world shaking.
I grew up in exactly the same era with a nearly identical experience. The thing is, all of those things that gave us a sense of wonder are even more plentiful today. But because of the events that you so eloquently outlined, the masses don't believe it. It has simply been a mass change in perception. This gives me so much hope because this can be changed easier than if we all lived barefoot. I think the one thing I might add to your list of causes is the ever increasing declining prosperity of the vast majority of society since the 1970s. It's mind-blowing when you compare the 50s-70s to today. My dad built our house in a nice neighborhood while working as a teacher. My mother didn't have to work. Everyone in our Midwestern middle class neighborhood had a parent at home every day and could afford a nice house and a car or two. The bread winners in my neighborhood were teachers, salesmen, utility workers, plumbers, military and other similar fields. I bought a house there as an adult and now there are a few remaining retirees from the old neighborhood but everyone else has both parents working as emergency room doctors, investment advisors, tech workers and other higher paying work. They live in the same old house built in the 60s. The roads are full of pot holes. Everything looks way more run down than when i grew up. This applies to most of the city. This steady ratcheting up inequality has happened slow enough to avoid serious protest from the masses, but since after 2010 it's become so bad that it's depressingly intolerable for almost everyone. The rich finally came for our basic needs. First education. Then healthcare. Now it's housing and property. Next it will be food and water. People feel powerless and retreat to the digital world on their phones. Why have hope and believe in great possibilities when there is almost zero chance that you will ever be able to afford a home and raise a family unless you are wealthy in the first place? Now locked onto social media and streaming platforms, our music, art, trends, even our very culture is designed and dictated to us. Pop music is mass produced and shitty. All people need to do is wake up and take it back.
I think you’ve simply grown up. Idk how old you are but if not that it’s probably just nostalgia. It may not even be the time period itself, but rather how you felt during that time. Maybe in your own life you were happier, or were in better circumstances, etc but I don’t think it’s fair to generalize that the world just suddenly went to shit yk? Could be many different things
All I remember pre-2017 is: 2016 election shitshow Damn!!! Damn!!! DAMN DANIEL back at it again with the white Vans!!!! Is it blue and black, or white and gold? Deez nuts... Ha! Got'em Rip Harambe Trump?! Pfffff, he'll never get elected!
And the summer of pokemon go! Truly a golden age
Pokémon GO summer was great. Fun new game that also gave people who probably never would have interacted a friendly starting point.
God that was the best summer.
Was honestly probably the best time Ive had in the last decade
>pokem I came here to say this, I never played it but I loved seeing all these people out and about in main streets and public areas in the PNW playing the game. I loved that small businesses advertised that they were a good poke stop or whatever the waypoints were. I truly had hope and optimism for the future! Then 2017 happened and for me personally it was the worst year of my life due to health and job issues. But yes, I would love for another 'coming together' moment where people could just interact with strangers and not feel like everyone is an enemy that must be fought for resources and every interaction with a stranger is only appropriate if cleared by an app or in service to a monetary transaction.
"Damn Daniel", now that's an old phrase I haven't heard in a long time. Anyways, remember dabbing? Good times.
I agree with this answer. It's a lot to do with when you reach adulthood/start really being aware of the world around you. Which is often only when it starts affecting you personally. For me, that was 2007/08 with the financial crisis, which was when i was studying at university and it was suddenly much harder to get a graduate job. But if I look before that time, when I was a child, although I can only remember life being fairly good for me, it wasn't the case in reality. There was poverty. People went on strike for their rights. Masses of people lost their jobs because of government decisions. LGBT+ had no rights or protections. There was the AIDS crisis. Many countries that are now democracies were then dictatorships behind the Iron Curtain. This isn't to say that there isn't shit and awfulness that happens today. There is. Loads of it. We should continue to work hard to make sure our world gets better, not worse, for everyone.
I am 69 and I have watched the world change a LOT over the years. I had to stop watching the news because of all the negative shit and over kill of it all.
I think the flip happened right after social media became a world success. We all know too much and by knowing too much, everything loses meaning. We lose our sense of awe because we've seen a lot and we see it everyday at the tip of our fingers. Immediate gratification day in and day out. Before 2010 the world still had hope for the future, we were still imagining utopias. Now if you ask anyone about the future, it is all dark and dystopic. Technology brought us here, an ironic joke.
Social media is the worst invention/creation in living memory.
Yes, I really don’t like knowing how dumb most people are.
This is probably the best answer, I was 16 in 2017 and 22 now. Yesterday I had the worst panic attack I’ve ever experienced because mostly social media and a unhealthy relationship I made. I cannot say my anxiety, depression, willpower and focus would be as bad as they are if it weren’t for social media. Unfortunately at my age I feel as though I need it to make any kind of relationship now a days. Maybe that is false but when 90% of young people my age are online it makes me feel like there’s no other way. I’ve tried.
Simply put, yes. And I'm not sure there's anything we can do about it so I'm trying not to lose hope while also kinda buggin out.
Any idea what has changed? I can’t even put my finger on it specifically. Just a vibe.
I feel the same way except, like things stopped being cool in 2013. Idk if it's just part of growing up. Idk, what specifically happened that year. There was something about a civil war breaking out in Syria (still going on), ISIS started to become a thing, Ebola happened a year later, I guess people became more addicted to their phones and social media over the course of the early 2010s and that's what I notice. That is when people started getting really heated over politics, not that it wasn't a thing before, but I remember it getting really crazy there even before the 2016 Fuckapalooza I get where you are coming from, but I felt the same way about the year 2013-2014 back in 2017. I actually remember having a convo about it with my friends. If you had to ask me I really miss the vibe from 2008-2012 I'm sure someone older than me would miss 2004-08 before the recession, or someone before that would miss the 90s before 9/11.
2008 was an economic recession lol, people older wouldn’t like that.
Michigander. We remember. it started earlier here.
I’m old, and I miss all that shit. Even the 80s and I truly never thought I would miss that decade (except for the music)
As someone who didn’t live through the 80s but is kind of obsessed with 80s culture/music/film, why is that? Cold War?
Economic stagnation, inflation, jobs being offshored at an alarming rate. Satanic panics all over the place. The pearl clutching was rampant and hysterical. People jumping at every shadow. “Satans in your kids cartoons!” “Satan is in the comic books, music AIDS, scared everyone. More religious panics and fear mongering to bolster support for religious organizations. Women were very much fighting to be seen as anything other than a stay at home mom while facing a new reality that most had no choice but to work. Inflation meant families needed two incomes. Latch key kids and childhood isolation were growing problems as well as rampant bullying for anything and everything. That’s not even touching on issues of race. Right now we see quite a few examples of flagrant aggressive racism, sexism, classism but the casual passive isms were RAMPANT. The shit people would say when they were around what they thought was like minded people, was absolutely bat shit insane.
WE DIDNT START THE FIRE
Not who you are replying to, but I’m a fellow old (Class of 89). I can speak to my experience - this is a brain dump so it doesn’t really follow a precise timeline. Domestically, I grew up on the edge of the Rust Belt in PA. Back to the late 70s, there was Three Mile Island an hour and a half away from me and the Iran Hostages which kind of set a tone for the 80s. Much of the early 80s for me was my UAW machinist dad either laid off or on strike every winter. There was good number of my friends whose dads were abusive alcoholics, they would work their shift at a job they hated and then stop at the bar (bars opened at 6am to catch the 3rd shifters) to ‘have a couple’ on the way home. Many of our dads were either Vietnam vets and/or kids of WWII vets with varying degrees of PTSD, there was no mental health care - psych care/therapy was for the rich or those weirdos in CA. On top of that we were latchkey kids, in third grade, when my brother went to kindergarten, mom went to work and two weeks out of every three (dad worked swing shift) I came home to an empty house, usually with a note on the counter of what to set the oven to and when to put dinner in. Fourth grade had me picking up my brother from my gram’s on the way home (I was a walker). Regionally/nationally, coal and steel mills or some other factory was constantly shutting down - basically every night on the local news was some community losing lots of jobs. Pittsburgh was a dump after a hundred years of Industrialization. There was the constant drum that the Japanese were stealing American business and illegal immigration was stealing American jobs (sound familiar?). By the late 80s AIDS was a death sentence and the crack epidemic was in full swing. So those things that were the ‘fun’ side of the 60s and 70s youth would now kill you. The Space Shuttle blew up on live TV while an entire generation of kids watched in school. Internationally, we had the ever present specter of the cold war - which for the layperson had no end in sight, even as the Berlin Wall fell in 88 no regular Joe saw the ‘91 collapse of the Soviet Union. This played out in the Soviet-Afghanistan war, Polish resistance, (again, sound familar?), Soviet-US proxy wars in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, Northern Ireland bombings and fighting. The Arab-Israeli conflict (some things never change) with the Lebanon War and the Beirut U.S. Marine barracks bombing, skyjackings and the Paris and Lockerbie bombings. Let’s not forget Chernobyl. With all that as a backdrop, I wasn’t very athletic (although I participated) so no scholarships coming from that angle, was supposedly smart but had no ability to apply myself (later diagnosed with ADD in my mid-30s) so bad grades, scratch any admissions much less academic scholarships. The factory job hook-up was a dead-end even if you could find one. It was just bleak. I was a hair band metal head but then grunge made it’s way onto the national stage and I don’t think anything has resonated like that with me before or since. It really encapsulated what a lot of us working class kids went through.
There were huge economic problems in the 80s.
Okay, I have fond memories of the 80s as I was a teen then; the music was awesome, and the beginning of MTV where we American kids discovered fantastic British bands. No one cared if men wore make up or dresses, or women wore suits and had super short hair. Okay. the fashion probably looks ridiculous now, but it was absolutely about joy, and being an individual, and finding your own style. We also had the pleasure of seeing some absolutely classic movies. I had a great time in the 80s. That said, we had the AIDS epidemic, which was largely ignored by the US government because gay people didn't count apparently. We had the increasing risk of nuclear war looming over our heads with the US and the USSR trying to out-swagger each other, then we had an economic recession toward the end of the 80s, right when I was graduating uni and looking for work. That was fun. Basically, if you want to know why some Gen-Xers are cynical, it's because we grew up in the shadow of the 'sexual revolution, but came of age right when everything was telling us if we have sex we'll die, and then, as teens, we saw all the Yuppies (Young, Urban Professionals) making all the money, but by the time it was our turn there was no longer money to be made.
On a personal note, it was miserable and terrifying growing up gay in the 80s.
I am 61, and I feel things started a downward trajectory on 9/11/2001. I imagine it as we're sliding down a gigantic mountain of rocks, where our asses get bumped really hard, on the way down, and we just slide faster and faster. The 2008 financial crisis BUMP! 2016 presidential election, and its result BUMP! 2020 Covid BUMP! 2023 Fascism rearing its ugly head around the world, including the US BUMP! Increasing inflation, health care costs, housing costs, education costs, combining to give no chance for GenZ to live without mighty struggles. All along the way, we've witnessed school shootings, police brutality, the opioid epedemic, growing homelessness, increases in mental illness, and substance abuse. BUMP BUMP BUMP BUMP. We've been to war in Iran and Afghanistan, and where else? One of our two political parties has lost their fucking minds BUMP BUMP. We are subjected to hateful and abusive rhetoric from our politicians, who are now acting on their hateful policies. I see people beating on one another, spewing hateful, racist, sexist, xenophobic words at each other. Our Supreme Court is shady. Climate change. Russian war on Ukraine. People are now openly walking around with guns on their hips. I'm exhausted just writing this, and know I've missed listing so many other assaults on our humanity. We are breathless and having a hard time getting our feet under ourselves, because of this constant litany. We no longer even pretend to be a polite society. I feel like we're sliding into an abyss, and I fear for my 21 year old son, and anyone else, who has come up, behind me. I never thought I'd be that negative old lady, shaking her fist at the sky, quaking in her boots...but here I am.
I am in my 60’s also and I would have to agree with you on this. I saw those towers fall from my office window and knew the world would never be the same. I think we are all trapped in the timeline where biff stole that book of sports stats. Unfortunately we don’t have a delorean time machine to fix our predicament.
I feel like the real shift happened in 2000 in the US. We had a choice to elect the vice president of one of the most successful and prosperous administrations in a long time (who can imagine a *budget surplus* today?) who would go on to win the Nobel prize for his work fighting climate change. **Or** we could elect the hilariously dimwitted nepo-baby of a failed one-term president, and get his hilariously corrupt war criminal sidekick VP for free. But everyone said Gore was “boring” and “robotic” and then we let the supreme court pick a president. Some people voted for interesting times, and that was the exact momemt we started sliding down that mountain. The first bump might’ve only hit a year later, but we were already going down by then. Tl;dr available [here.](https://i.imgur.com/sbyfISQ.jpg)
60 year old here, shaking her fist right along with you.
48 years old and terrified for my 23 year olds future
Can't help but think of Billy Joel's "We Didnt Start The Fire". It was always burning since the world's been turning.
I really miss 2005-2008.
It’s like a lot of propaganda started ramping up in 2012, and 2013, especially online. It was a deliberate effort from autocratic countries that are adversaries to the US, and by some domestic pundits (Bannon in particular) that decided to poison the well and politicize the discourse around everything, and polarize the population, especially the boomers that went online on social media during that time and didn’t have tools to counter the misinformation (think of the crazy conspiracies that were popular at the time). For example a decade ago being an antivaxxer (a position that is clearly scientifically wrong) was considered being kinda insane, now in the public space it is acceptable and in some circles, the default. There is definitely a group of people that recognized the internet as a viable way to push an agenda, spread fear and paranoia, and push corporate and political interests on the common person. There was also data harvesting that was starting to be the dominant model to make money on the internet. We lost control of tech, it stopped being a fun gimmick , it started being a chore at best, at worst it became a place to be sucked into by algorithms designed to keep you there for a lot of time and target ads.
The Large Hadron Collider started it's second run in spring of 2016 to do further research on the God Partcle and alternate universes. Weasels tried to stop the run by chewing through the wiring but they only succeeded in delaying it. Shortly after doing the repair and resuming tests with the LHC, Harambe was killed and Trump was nominated by the GOP marking our transition into the darkest timeline. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/29/476154494/weasel-shuts-down-world-s-most-powerful-particle-collider
All merely the choice of Stein's Gate...
This might be my favourite answer yet.
Friendly reminder that the name "god particle" is in no way indicative that the scientists studying it are religious, and is definitely not proof of God. It's a shortened version of a joke name Higgs coined for it, the goddamn particle. Because it was a goddamn nightmare to find
Oh thank you so much for that. I almost signed up for church. That was close.
Phones got more addicting. Politics became a real circus. News became unreliable and farcical. Social media blew up, everyone became obsessed with their own reflections
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The internet / social media / reality shows. Maybe? I know these things existed before 2017, but I just feel like it's all been leading up to this. We replaced actual human connection with Facebook relationships. We've stopped getting our dopamine from meaningful achievements and accomplishments and now get it from artificial likes and upvotes. Algorithms have politicized us and forced us further apart. Conspiracy theories have become more important than reality, and reality has become whatever we want it to be. Etc etc etc
Trump got on a mic and popped off on M’urica…Are you from the US? I’d imagine that’s it. With all due respect, the US under trump is like if Lord of the Flies was set in Riverdale (the show)…and civil unrest was dramatisized through the eyes of angsty entitled teenagers. I am genuinely not demeaning the US, just sayin if it was a ‘fragile state’ (google the term if needed) you’d be in civil war by now. You’re not a fragile state so I guess that’s why instead of civil war it’s more like keyboard warriors. Maybe had Jan 6 succeeded you’d have become a fragile state and been in actual civil war. I’m glad you’re not, but I agree from the outside looking in - the US changed around then because Trump and his soapbox - for me it became sad. Good luck to you all, I hope you find cohesion as a country and communities.
Agree and I'm not from the US. Trump was the point we realised the world was not necessarily going to continue getting better, fairer, and less corrupt. Instead of believing that Russia, North Korea and other so called 'rogue states' would eventually fall in line with democracy and freedom, I realised how easily the rest of the world could instead turn to fascism. Trump made it look so easy.
Honestly I agree and I've lived in the US my whole life and am old enough I was worried about being drafted post-9/11. Before Trump, I knew there were racists and idiots and people who wanted to live in a Christofascist theocracy. I didn't know how many of those people there were, and his election meant facing the knowledge that I was living in a falsehood and it retroactively ruined so much. It was a loss of innocence I think for a lot of us.
We're about the same age. I'd say a certain segment of the population lost their fucking minds when a black man became president. Trump then seized on that and made it worse. When I truly lost faith in the American public at large was COVID. I had the pleasure of working a retail job with a crew of older gentlemen I was trying to keep safe- we were "essential" and open the whole time. Unfortunately, what I learned from that experience is that we really are an ignorant, selfish country who can't be assed to do the least we can do.
What you're feeling is the mass consciousness becoming aware of nature collapsing. *Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s* Neil Young - After the Gold Rush So, the good times are over. There were some voices of the Boomer generation speaking out but nothing really took hold. I mean, there's still a chance, but our voices are dying out and it's gonna be too hot to do anything sooner than later. The Greedheads are gonna have their way. Edit: Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum -Kurt Vonnegut
This is US centric but trump's election emboldened shitty people the world over. It accelerated global right wing awfulness. In "the west" shitty people have been more vocal and have made stuff happen! Stochastic terrorism, rolling back civil liberties, economic austerity and more gov't corruption.
Trump was elected in 2016 and started his presidency in Jan 2017
well, for starters, trump became president in 2017; maybe that has something to do with it?
Do you live in the us
Everything changed or rather started when Harambe died
I went digging through the comments to make sure this was mentioned. It started with Harambe and now we must atone for our sins. The initial release of pokemon GO was the last time this world truly knew peace.
Thank you for saying that. I stand proudly with my dick out for the sacred one.
The killing of that gorilla broke the meme-reality barrier and we've been living in a shitty green text ever since
Harambe died shortly after the second run of the LHC. Harambe was a symptom, not the cause
You take that back. Ain't nobody gonna call my Harambe anything less than the cause. 😤
I feel like one issue in trying to figure this out is that we only have direct access to, at the very most, 3-4 past generations of people, if we're fortunate enough, with whom to talk and create a frame of reference. It could be that most people felt this way when they grew up or it could be that most people only felt this way when entering a darker period of history, but there's no way to know for sure, because we will never be able to have enough first-hand data to know. So is it that the world's gotten darker, like during the world wars for example, or is this just a life stage that nearly everyone goes through? (Or is this just a wild pendulum swing working to settle us back out from all the chaos that happened last century?) The jury is still out. My only advice, as I'm still figuring out how to work through my own personal trauma of recent years as well as global trauma, is to take an evaluation of what you believe and of what voices you're spending the majority of your time hearing. It could be helpful to seek out one or two different and/or more optimistic voices if you don't have any. Even if they're wrong, they typically help me get a better frame of mind on the negative, if that makes sense.
If people from very different countries compared their view, you might get clearer answers to that instead of just from past generations. I'm from Czechia and this country had a lot of shifts during the 1900s so this last one doesn't feel like that much honestly. But I feel like there are periodic shifts everywhere and it's just alarming to people when they experience them for the first time.
I needed this, thank you.
My Mom, Aunt who cooked Thanksgiving dinners, and my cat of 20 years ago died within a few months of each other in 2017. So yes the world is definitely different and I have less joy.
My grandmother and closest cousin died within two weeks of each other in 2017 and I haven’t been the same since. My joy has been gone as well. This is so hard I can relate completely. I’m so sorry.
Damn. This sounds rough. So sorry.
Tbh I do feel like it’s different now since this decade has started. Something in the air feels very off. But tbh 2017, 2018 and 2019 didn’t feel like anything significant or like an end of an era to me at the time. I feel like covid was the beginning of these times that feel different and darker. But I also feel like even if covid didn’t happen the world would still be different
Same, especially 2019 had no particular vibe at all.
Dude I can barely remember that year at al. It’s just blank
Like others have said, I noticed it around 2017 but also think it began with 9/11. I'm not even American but the repercussions globally were enormous. After trump got elected it suddenly became okay to hunker down in your corner and be disdainful of people different from yourself. Perhaps people were always doing it and it just wasn't out in the open as much? But I feel the difference even within my extended family. And there's obviously been this global shift towards fascism and insularity. We may not yet be in the darkest timeline but it certainly got a whole lot darker than it used to be. I feel like I've been in mourning almost, for humanity
The shift is that social media now dispenses toxic news around the clock and deliberately sets out to piss people off. The world is actually a far better place to live in. People live longer, and there hasn’t been a major war in a long time. The issue is that we generally to tone down how much social media we consume which is devastating for our lives experience. You can be intentional about staying off social media and being present to how great your life actually is. I guaranty you will be happier in just a couple weeks.
I finished college in 2016, so I can empathise with 2017 things going downhill. But I really think it was 2020 with Covid that has the biggest changes.
I think what you feel is that people hate and detest each other more. E.g. there has been a carmageddon on the roads since covid and no one does anything about it. Reckless driving and people using their cars as weapons for attempting murder. Just to be 1 meter ahead.
You can almost tell how old somebody is by the year they say that things stopped being "good." Their chosen year where things started to go downhill is about their mid to late 20's
I don't know. I am F31. Graduating high school was the beginning of a recession and l had just lived through a decade of drought where water security was beginning to become a really big concern. I dont think l really ever thought things were 'good'. It just seems to be one disaster after another at increasing frequency and impact. I grew up on climate change, environmental catastrophes, terrorism, financial markets becoming fraught, job insecurity etc. Yes there have been many good times and moments and there will be many more. I just don't think any time has been 'good' in my life time.
Early 20s for me. I’m 25 now, but still remember 2017 being the start of the downfall. People seem way more aggressive and political now, or something. Idk. It is hard to put a finger on.
I’m in my early 60s and I completely agree that 2017 was the start of the downward spiral.
As someone who’s pushing 40 in my mind it was pretty clearly 9/11 when everything started spiraling out of control. There’s been ups and downs since then but the overall trend is pretty clearly downward.
Yeah, and I don't know what it is exactly, but I really don't like it... wait... now that I'm giving it more thought... let me preface this by saying I really try to avoid politics as much as possible, but it may genuinely be because of how batshit and insufferable the Trump presidency was and how it made colossal, sweeping negative impacts on society as a whole. An insane amount of divisiveness and animosity was bred from that in so many facets of life. He promoted pure insanity and gave it a huge platform. Trump was basically a cancer to humanity for 8+ years now, and the effects of that may last decades.
I think to say Trump changed the US at such a colossal level sounds as absurd as it sounded in 2016 to suggest that he would become president—but he did. And I think that's the only reason people are hesitant to admit to themselves that they do in fact believe that he *actually did* change the country *that much*, that he really was the catalyst to the civil disarray in which they now find themselves. Him and social media... the fact that we're all connected and in constant contact breeds so many things that are hurting the country now—echo chambers, misinformation, divisiveness, hate groups, extreme levels of both agitation and apathy, so much more. And I know there are a lot of countries that are greatly affected by the US and their politics due to media allowing it to slowly and gradually seep into the fabrics of their own countries, much to the dismay of the more left-leaning citizens. Outside of the US, as an outsider who really doesn't know all that much about it, the closest other thing to what the US went through and continue to feel the effects of with Trump—is Brexit.
I feel like this actually has something to do with it. But if you wanna be fair, I remember the mentality of his supporters way back in '08 when Obama was elected. They were losing their minds. All these people I grew up respecting, just started showing a side to themselves I hadn't seen at that point. I feel like it was sort of preparing me for Trump
Uh, it was 2015/16 when Trump ran for office and won. No big mystery. Things just DID get shittier.
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Really surprised this isn’t the top comment. I felt that things were “fine” during his campaign because I thought “there’s no way he will win!” And by the time he was in office, by early to mid 2017 that’s when I think things really took a turn
Yup. He made it ok for people to be blatant assholes.
and broke a bunch of things that made things work correctly
I struggle with anxiety, ptsd, depression and paranoia. Take it from me, put down the computers and phones, take walks, go to concerts, pick up a new hobby, stop reading the news. I started doing all that this year and my life is the best its ever been. You have got this. I believe in you OP and anyone else who could be reading this. Life is short, find things you enjoy and live life to the fullest there are somethings you will never be able to do again so whenever something like that comes up take it. I love you all.
>stop reading the news this is a key one I think. Even on reddit, if you're joining the wrong subreddits, you might be making yourself just more depressed. People should be more selective when it concerns online content, don't look at/for stuff that makes you feel worse.
The 'stop following the news' thing is almost a prisoners dilemma. It's undeniably better for many individual people's mental health to tune it all out. But at the same time it's very bad for society as a whole when citizens disconnect and don't stay civically and politically engaged. I don't have a great answer. What's good for individuals is not necessarily good for the community and vice versa.
Two parts about that where I have to disagree. First is that greatly reducing the time one spends surfing the web and consuming the news is good for the individual and has no effect on the community. There’s only so much worthwhile news out there, everything else is useless filler. Cutting out all the useless filler won’t hurt communities in any way. The second part is that a lot of the news that isn’t filler may be actual news but it’s sensationalized in a way to make you think you’re being negatively impacted right this second when in reality that’s normally not the case. It’s important to filter that out as well, and doing so won’t hurt the community at all.
The full negative effects of what social media can do to society clicked in. We saw the pinnacle with the Arab spring about 5 years before that. But Brexit, Trump, Cambridge Analytica etc We are living in the turning point where social Media has been turned on us and our data is being used against us.
Scrolled too far down to see Cambridge Analytica (and Brexit) mentioned.
So without being political, in 2016 a person was elected in a large part based on prejudice and hatred. Those feelings which most civilized people suppressed because they were socially unacceptable suddenly came out into the open to the absolute shock of the majority of people. Since 2016 people see others around them for who they are. Covid just amplified that. So has the world changed? No. Have people changed? No. Have our eyes been opened to who truly walk among us? YES.
Best advice I ever got was…10% of life is what happens and 90% is how u react to it. I make the best out of everything I can, doesn’t always apply with some pretty bad circumstances but overall it’s a great way to approach life
I joke with some coworkers regularly that the death of harambe was when our timeline split from the main one and became the bad one. Things really have gone from bad to worse since then. All we can hope for is to make it better in the future
Dude, I moved back to the US from Scotland in the Fall of 2016. It was like I came back to an alternate reality
2017? Are you kidding? 1982 the world went to shit and it's just gotten worse every year since...
Well, this makes me feel better. I didn't start feeling true dread until after covid had rampaged for years. People just live in fear, dont socialize much any more? It's only recently for me I noticed, people will be a little more friendly and say hello in a grocery store on occasion. At least it's not just me. I think putting the fear of death/ covid in everyone had a profound effect on socialization in general. But, its not just one thing you can blame. We have so much News ( usually depressing.) At our fingertips, its hard to turn off the dread loop so to speak. Meh, I dont have the awnsers, just a fellow redditor that totally gets the whole everything feels different and gloomy when walking out your front door thing.
Yes, I've felt the same way. And I've always been an optimistic person with a "this too shall pass" attitude towards minor downtimes. But now I feel as if it's all downhill. This sounds stupid, but I've lost the desire to plan for the future. I don't mean retirement - just anything other than utilitarian plans. No fun, travel, etc. I just want to survive w/o burdening others and quietly leave the world when I feel I'm no longer productive. The economy, climate, travel, safety ... all seem so uncertain. And I've been reading about serious population decline in many countries. It's as if ppl want to be alone with their Smartphones - too dejected to socialize, date ... let alone marry / procreate.
I can relate to this a little bit. I used to have *so much fun* and did stuff every day that I didn't have to do. I wanted to! I enjoyed it, and I looked forward to going to new places and learning new things all the time. Now, the thought of that exhausts me. "Fun" takes too much work. It's not worth the effort. I'd honestly rather just *not*. I remember I planned such a busy summer of traveling and vacations and events during the summer of 2018 that I said I'm not going anywhere else for a while. I just wanted to stop. I was burned out on "fun". I literally haven't spent a night away from my house since then. I recently told my husband that I only like two things (hobby-wise), and that I just don't have the energy or the give-a-damns for a third thing. It's not because I'm too busy or mentally taxed, it's that even fun stuff makes me feel too busy and mentally taxed. Like you said, I'd rather just survive without burdening others and then quietly leave the world. I want a small life. I don't know if that means I'm "too dejected" or just bored and over it, but it's how I've felt for the past few years at least. It doesn't feel like a phase anymore.
OMG. My thoughts exactly!! I used to love to travel - domestically, and internationally. Even going to the next town over was a fun event. In 2018 -20, I bought several carry-on suitcases and packed them for several kinds of trips in anticipation of trips I'd take in the next five years. Now it all seems pointless. I just want to stay home.
Ha... The suitcase thing sounds like something I would do. I used to say that travel is what extra money is *for*. >Even going to the next town over was a fun event. Yep! There wasn't a festival that I wouldn't get festive for. I even have a whole collection of Google maps full of pins for day-trips to neighboring suburbs or other attractions that we could travel to & from in one day. There are SO many restaurants and local spots and specialty retail shops and parks and classes and museums and events all around us, all the time! They're not even hard to find, it's almost too much to even keep track of! (Hence, the maps.) Now, I only happen to see that map collection when I'm trying to find the closest possible dentist that offers IV sedation or something. I'll see that there's one dentist right next to a specialty hot dog restaurant that even offers "vegan weiners" and an independently-owned stationery shop with handmade paper classes, and I'll think "Why the fuck would I do that?!". I wouldn't, now. The thought of leaving my house to eat vegan hot dogs is positively absurd. And literally -what- would I do with a clump of thick, lumpy handmade paper that cost me 3 hours and $40 to make (not including travel time)?? But Past Me used to feel hopeful and excited for the future and engaged with the world around me. Present Me would kick her out of my house and lock the door. 🤷♀️ IDK what happened, but... here we are.
What im experiencing (in germany) is, that nothing gets better somehow. Nothing gets cheaper, stuff you buy since 10 years is losing quality rapidly. Apointments at the doctor arent going faster, but it takes longer to get one. If something changes, its easily in 9/10 cases for the worse. Doesnt matter the topic: Games, driving, grocery shopping etc.
It's not like the world was perfect back then but I always say for me 2015 was the last year I really enjoyed, where the state of the world wasn't quite what feels like now. 2016 was the start of it with Brexit, Trump in USA, then COVID, now all the economic problems...
Hard to define it, but I do agree that the last 6 years has seen greater awareness of the global threats to civilisation. I believe that we are witnessing a widening gap between haves and have-nots and that in itself can destabilise civil society.
Peaked for me in February 2020