I’m 25 and I literally saw an increase to heat waves year after year until 80°-90° was the norm in summer for the northern United States. I live in Pittsburgh now and the weather has shifted from raining 70% of the time, we use to have the gulf stream and mild climates. Now we get droughts after droughts, where’s my goddamn lake effect from the Great Lakes. We are eliminating natural habitats at ungodly rates. My dad who was born in the 60s has MAGA blinders and doesn’t see the effects of climate change. We are now fighting LLMs for clean water in a perilous situation that teetering on ecological disaster in many communities with newly installed data centers. Morally bankrupt politicians rather have a dollar in their pocket and vote for the persuasions of the rich like a puppet on a string. I miss bird watching and seeing bugs splatter on the windshield as you drive across the country, now its a mostly dry and barren trip because of overuse of pesticides and lack of habitats to regrow local insect colonies. Also the world is overpopulated as fuck and nobody can get a job in an ethical manner. You literally have to lie and cheat just to get a job that pays you better than shit, you would think the homeless people were violent and in gangs but its actually the goons on the top of the pyramid that have organized cabals and hired hitmen. So if there’s a better world out there it starts with eating the rich and consuming less of the planet. Probably have to destroy the meat industry and the oil industry but if you say that out load people think you don’t want people to have jobs when you actually think sustainable farming techniques should be widely adopted instead. It just feels like common sense and not even socialist, but apparently I’m a commie stoner who worships the devil to Fox News, and to my parents. They literally raised me to not only to be kind to be people but actually want better support systems for homeless people. My entire childhood was spent in a good nature providing free furniture to newly housed people who had nothing and I’m just expected to think Trump is next Messiah what the actual fuck is wrong with Christianity now a days.

Tldr: Yes we should eat the rich before the eat us

When I was younger it seemed politics were more rational and cruelty never seemed to be the point of doing nothing.

The cruelty was outside our borders. The rational, reasonable debate was for domestic issues. Foreigners got the bullet.

As the empire collapses the cruelty turns inwards i.e. fascism.

It can be both. This is also very specific to the western world and america in general, as other parts of the world have very different experiences, both good and bad

The world is not the USA. The USA is getting worse. The USA is an unhinged shit hole. Things are getting better where I live in Mexico. We have a popular leader that is pushing popular social programs and as the US kills itself we’re taking the opportunity to get closer to the rest of the world, build new infrastructure and sort out the American created cartels and chaos. China is getting better, they lifted millions of people out of dire poverty. Much of the rest of the world is doing just fine. There are always problem parts and hope simultaneously.

Climate change alone makes it objectively worse. The widespread rise of fascism also I think makes objectively worse. So yeah it’s bad.

If you’re in the west then it’s worse now because capitalism is reaching the stages of systemic collapse. For people living in countries like China or Vietnam the picture is quite different. They see their lives improving each and every day. They have clean cities, great infrastructure, and a rate of technological progress we can only dream of. Those of us living in the west are living through a similar collapse to the one that happened in USSR in the 90s, but the west is only 13% of the world population.

Person born in the late 70’s here

Although birth of social media took a gigant shit on peoples general mindset and world feels more divided, right wing and missing “street level” empathy, world is still better.

For example in the 80’s autistic people were just mentally retarded, dyslexic people were just stupid, bullying in schools was normal behaviour and part of being young, violence among teenagers was more commonplace, attitude that animals were just biological machines with instinctual reactions and just appearance of some cognition was more commonplace. 80’s yuppie culture made it fashionable to be a wealthy asshole.

In the 90’s home computers became common. Recession had bankrupted many high rolling yuppies. Nerds were no longer beaten for knowing how tech works. Gamer culture was no longer niche phenomenon. Cold war was over and nuclear armageddon was distant thing. Youth culture still had this doom and gloom attitude. Everyone was a flannel wearing tortured skater boy/girl. 90’s was the “tomboy era”, where girls were allowed to dress and act like boys without being socially ostracised. More attention was focused on mental health and colorful spectrum of human mind.

Late 90s and early 00 internet really started rolling, smarphones started to appear, social media was born. World became very small and everyone who wanted was a content creator. Suddenly large portion of population communicated with people outside their country on a daily basis.

This was the best time in the Internet. Search engines started to actually work and new webpages were sometimes an actual joy. Algorithms weren’t corrupting things and polarizing everything. Autogenerated content was yet to come. Internet and social media was infused as essential part of our lives.

2010’s the enshittification started and commercialization was on full gear. 2020 has become the era of stupid. AI, autogenerated content, polarization and dead internet.

But even with all this, I still think it’s now better for the average person than the cold war paranoia world of the 70-80’s.

We are however on a downward spiral and I’m hoping for a counter reaction in coming decades. Hoping that ignorances of past world are just making noise and attracting attention before they vanish for good.

liberals and republicans

It is getting worse. Humanity is entering a deeper and deeper crisis. Alienation is growing with each passing year. The inner contradiction in every one of us is getting more intense, which manifests itself in more external conflicts: between people, between people and nature, between everything.

That being sad, this crisis just highlights the slow death of the previous, deeply troubled era and marks the transition to another way of living. The destructive aspect of things, that we all suffer from, is therefore not absolute. It is not going to destroy neither us nor the world around us. It is balanced off by the progress that we’re making.

Take 3d printing, for example. If you think of it, it is actually the (very) beginning of something fundamentally new: local automated production. Automation eliminates the routine part of producing goods, which makes the process creative again, while not compromising on efficiency. This leads to production becoming a means of self-actualisation rather than something that takes away all your freedom. And since the process of making new things gives you value instead of taking it, the need for charging others for using your creations vanishes, giving way to free exchange and collaboration. This, if applied globally, would solve the fundamental issue of our current society, where creating good takes away just as much, making any growth a form of self-destruction. And solving that would spare us of all different kinds of problems, ranging from pollution, wars to emotional abuse.

So I think by getting worse it’s also getting better and these difficult times we’ve happened to live in are still marvelous.

P.S. Apart from 3d printing, there’s, of course, free software movement as well, which in my opinion is also part of the global free production evolution

I’ve (36m) asked my mother and grandfather if I’m overreacting.

My grandfather (104 when he died. He was so “dust bowl” he mother died of the dust in the dust bowl. Dust pneumonia. Yeah can’t get more depression era than that without also being a shoe shine boy at a carnival ): I killed the nazis once. I can kill them again

My mother (80f I asked here again just now. Right now face to face): I’ve never seen this cult behavior before. Never in my life. People will bury their trump flags in the ground and deny they ever supported him. Like the nazis did.

Yes this bad. It’s historically significant how bad it is. People will read about this moment in history and think “I hope my grandfather wasn’t a trumpet” as the look up their ancestors. Grandfathers will lie to their families about what they were doing right now. They will even shame me because all I did was comment online.

It’s specifically bad right now.

In the 90s, as a kid in Quebec, I thought racism, sexism, homophobia were all things of the past. Boy was I naive.

I think the answer is “yes” and “it depends on what you mean.” What is better or worse? For whom is it better or worse? Are we talking about the causes or the results?

If we are talking about results and how they affect the majority of people, yes, it is worse. Wealth concentration has increased. The environment has gotten worse. There is more war now than there was pre-2000, etc. All of these were problems in the past, but the course of history has naturally intensified them over time.

But a lot of what you’re talking about are causes: What politics leads to these things? Was it better back then and it getting worse now is why things are worse? And to that I say: Not really. America has been this cruel and greedy for a long time and that past greed and cruelty directly contributed to how things are today. Perhaps some of this feeling is you just becoming more aware of things, but part of it is that the politicians of that day cared more about keeping up the mask. They weren’t any less cruel, but they were better at hiding it behind a facade of respectability.

So what’s changed and what has stayed the same? The core feature running through all of this history is capitalism. Capitalists have immense power by virtue of their control over wealth and production and therefore the state primarily represents their interests. They might have different strategies for accomplishing that, different personalities, or different secondary priorities, but regardless of which politician is in office, support for capitalists is the primary concern.

This support for capital has to contend with various forces of history. Technology, labor power, geopolitics, etc all affect capitalism and the government must respond accordingly.

The period between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and 9/11 2001 was considered to be a period in which the US became the unrivaled power in the world. It may have appeared more peaceful, but that was due to a lack of meaningful geopolitical rivals to fight against. But it’s not like it stopped developing the military industrial complex during that time. It was still prepared to exert it’s power over the world, violently if necessary. This changed post 2001 because they finally got push back for their imperialism and had someone to openly fight. And with a new foreign enemy, the US once again had something to direct people’s fear and anger away from capitalism.

Some combination of globalization and advances in automation broke what little power workers had managed to earn during the mid-20th century. This meant that the government and capitalists didn’t have to give as many concessions to workers as they used to and the resulting economic losses created an angry and desperate population. This anger COULD have been directed towards the root of the problem if there were better class consciousness in the US, but instead racists were able to capitalize on it to direct people to their causes.

The last major development to talk about here is the rise of the internet. On one had, this enabled people to see things and communicate with people they never would have been able to in the past. The potential for this to open people’s minds and connect people was tremendous and obviously a potential threat to capitalism as it wasn’t as easy to control the flow of information anymore. Unfortunately the dark side is that algorithmic social media has managed to bring out the worst in people. Some of that is due to deliberate manipulations by platform owners, but some of it is just the unfortunate consequences of how mass human psychology interacts with an algorithm designed to optimize the amount of time people spend looking at ads and getting others to spend time looking at ads. Certain kinds of content, usually ones that elicit strong emotions, are more likely to get people’s attention than others. So in the absence of that class consciousness, it’s pretty easy for hatemongers to get their messages to spread.

I suppose my point is, when you get these kinds of feelings, it helps to try to learn some more and take an analytical approach to understand better and hopefully find a way forward. Just feeling like things are generically worse is an oversimplification that misses the underlying forces responsible for that feeling. We wouldn’t be where we are now if things were different in the past, so just thinking of the past as being better misses the role it plays in the present.

Wages are not keeping up with inflation. The middle class is disappearing.

Fascism is on the rise everywhere.

Basic Education has declined and higher education is less accessible.

Climate change. Worse storms. Lots of animals are extinct or nearing extinct.

Big Companies own everything.

No one can afford a house.

Subscriptions for everything.

Life saving maintenance drugs are insanely expensive. A subscription to live.

Women’s rights being removed.

Natural resources all owned by companies with no oversight.

it’s getting bad.

However. It’s worth noting that the cause of all of these things isnt new.

This is the inevitable outcome of policies from as much as 100 years ago. (200 years ago? Capitalism)

Also. For some groups of people, things used to be much worse in many ways.

So some things are better. But the quality of life over all is probably declining.

Late stage capitalism and the dead internet.

Yes. The contradictions of capitalism are only getting worse. Workers, care givers, nature, social institutions, racialized people and countries, all can only be exploited and expropriated so much. But capitalism demands more and more. So it will continue getting worse until successful revolutions. But you don’t have to feel detached about it. You can try to understand it, tell others about it, look around for awesome people struggling against it, maybe even find ways to help them. I started reading Nancy Fraser’s new book “Cannibal Capitalism” it’s short, tries to be accessible and it explains how all those areas of struggle I mentioned above are connected.

Yes, but now you get all the bad news streamed straight to you 24/7.

Previously you would have to pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV at the right time to hear about it.