Why Is Everything Declining?

I think you're way off base. It's called rosy retrospection, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection. As you already mentioned in your comments, you're judging the past disproportionately more positive that the present.

If you really want to know if everything is declining, try measure it everyday for the next five years. For example, every day, rate your personal well being, track how (un)happy you are with the current software, how much you pay to your landlords and subscriptions, how many mistakes the police makes, the weather, everything, ... After 5 years you'll have a good idea if things actually got worse than they are now. Sure, some things will get worse, but definitely not everything, and some things will even be better than they are now.

I don't know your age but I'm going to guess 30+. This is just happens when you get old. When you were younger you probably noticed that all the older people you knew pined for some earlier time (say the 1970s or 1950s). And you probably thought they were being silly. Well, now you've become one of those people.

The fact is the world always seems better when you are younger, not because the world necessarily better, but because it's just more pleasant to be young. The future is full of promise, you haven't made any huge mistakes yet, and your body hasn't started the inexorable march towards decay and death.

Most of your points are subjective, reflecting people's mentality or thoughts. I can't really argue against this because it's your own perception. But I would say you should be a bit skeptical that people's behavior can really change that much over such a short period. It's much more likely that you interpret it differently than you use to. Scams have been prevalent throughout human history. Perhaps you are just paying more attention to the news lately?

Some of the things you bring up are valid objective things. For example it's true that many more things are subscription based now. But on the other hands, those are things that weren't even available before. You can still buy and play all the same non-subscription games that used to exist (I still play HOMM3 for example). If you prefer cable TV that still exists as well. So I find it misleading to argue that because we have more choice that it's somehow worse when the previous options haven't been taken away.

> People are noisy as fuck and dont seem to give a shit. Seems like every night there's someone with loud as exhaust on "sportish" car ripping around the neihborhood. For months this guy would start up his loud car at 7am and no one care when I complained.

> Police seem to not give a shit anymore. I've noticed what seems to be total lawlessness going on in my world. Folks stealing shit. People driving absurdly dangerously in cars that are not designed to travel like that. (tailgating, lane switch, accelerating at the fastest I've ever seen a beat up Sentra do...) . I never see cops hit lights and sirens at them.

Both of these resonate with me. I perceive it as a general decline in the willingness to enforce any sort of standards of behavior by any means (social shaming or formal enforcement by law). Antisocial behavior like drag racing, speeding through neighborhoods, arguing and even fighting on airplanes, being a grown-ass adult in pajamas out in public, etc. You're likelier to get resistance for trying to enforce any sort of basic decency than to flout old (but not that old...) standards.

The economy is just increasingly fake or rewarding foolish scummy behaviour instead of honest cooperative work. People coasted for 10+ years now on "passive income" from printed money along with almost no enforcement action against scams. That gave rise to a chain reaction of people trying to scam each other in a general revenge.

Take for example a big slice of the economy - real estate. Honest real estate agents who try to match real needs to real properties were totally displaced (or outcompeted) by agents who spam fake ads in order to secure an exclusive contract with unfair terms and sell you the biggest property you can afford with no regard of your actual needs. The Fed in turn backstops any losses and buys toxic mortgages perpetuating the scheme.

Further, imagine an economy entirely comprised of real estate agents (or even NFT traders). In such economy, there is only so much real need for agents, at some point there will be more agents than the market really needs. At that point the only way to survive in the market is to become adversarial, it is in your best interest to outspend everybody on deceptive marketing, then mismatch buyers and sellers so that they will have to come back to you looking for new deals once they realise they were mismatched. And again the only reason people can keep this mismatched economy going is because the Fed/congress flood the system with money and their mistakes are rewarded (in asset price inflation at least).

This is the economy we have now more or less in the different sectors. And policy makers can't touch anything because they prioritise stability and growth.

A lot of this is related to inequality, value of labour detaching from wealth, and the increasing unaffordability of life.

The material conditions of regular people are continuously getting worse as more and more of their income is stripped away by rent seeking oligopolies, mainly increasing housing costs but depending on your jurisdiction all sorts of other costs (eg. cable and mobile phone costs an issue in some places, healthcare in other places).

In the worst extremes people are simply running out of money and the amount of people at risk of homelessness and in homelessness is spiking, and people in such dire conditions are dying at a remarkable rate given the toxic drug crisis.

For the political class, not a problem here, as they are part of the rent seeking class, and they can expect a nice directorship gig at some oligopoly corporation after their term.

The big fix for much of this is fundamentally to put more money in the wallets of regular people. This means increasing rental vacancy, limiting rent increases, and bringing rents down to 30% of people's income (or less!). It means livable incomes and government stepping in to create a social safety net to ensure that those incomes aren't flowing away immediately to pay for the basics of staying healthy.

It means breaking up corporations and reigning them in and stopping rent seeking.

All of this harms the very wealthy and even the upper middle class, who themselves are often small time landlords that benefit from low rents and renter misery, so these politically active groups block all change.

> Anyone else have other examples?

Elected president who is so crass and generally offensive he wouldn't have gotten close to being elected 50 years ago.

Elected president who is showing clear signs of age related cognitive decline (so they say) but continues to occupy the office.

Elected presidents with criminal behaviour that is far worse than what previous presidents were impeached or resigned for.

Mental illness, drug abuse, homelessness appears to be worsening in many cities while we're seeing record setting net worth individuals and corporations.

Environmental catastrophe lurking just around the corner, scientists pleading for action to the point of civil disobedience, same international apathy from governments.

Increased government surveillance and control, military equipment flowing into police forces, laws passed to allow government kidnapping of citizens without formal charges.

I'll preface this by saying this is all anecdotal evidence based on my personal observations, so it may not apply to everyone.

I often feel the same way, especially with tech. For those of us that remember before the internet was ubiquitous, the optimism and promise of the "information super highway" seems in stark contrast with what we see today. I try to keep in mind a few things:

First, we are living in a time that will be regarded as one of the most consequential in history. We're only ~20 years of nearly every person in the planet having access to all human information, instantly. Think of what people will say about this time period in 200 years. We are currently feeling the effects of growing pains.

Second, everything that embodies that early optimism is still there, its just harder to find. Which is related to my next point:

We are seeing diminishing returns in the benefits of constant consumption of media, energy, food, etc. There is so much choice out there, and the margins are so thin, that you need to consume more to be "satisfied". I often reflect on how many more full TV series we have all seen compared to a few generations ago. Or how much text we all read daily in the form of news, tweets, and forums, compared to the daily paper. Are we better for it? I think a lot of people don't feel better.

So that leads to the optimistic conclusions of this post. Generally speaking, we have more choice than ever before in history, across the board. But we have the burden of the responsibility of moderation and curation.

I find that when I feel this way, I try to shift my "consumption" mental state to "construction". We live in an amazing time to make things and distribute them. And because there's so much noise to compete with, you have to do it friend to friend, neighbor to neighbor. Its a glimpse of how the best parts of the "new world" can provide the best parts of the "old world".

What interests me most about the current zeitgeist is that there is an generalized, or at least spreading, feeling of emptiness.

What replaces religion to fill this gap for a new generation who is not religious? (including myself)

Something very clear, a philosophy of life of some kind that people can adopt to feel like they are part of something bigger, without that something being a fictional being. And without devolving into a cult either.

And obviously I'm generalizing for my north american well-off white man point of view but I feel like living a balanced life, working out, having a good job, having good friends and family etc is all great but it feels like all of that is focused around ourselves.

There is no common thread and it just feels like we see obvious greed every day, perpetuated by massive corporations and protected by corrupt politicians, and there is seemingly no change.

Some other comments about the world becoming more adversial ring true to me.

It feels like we are approaching an unknown cultural revolution of some kind, with a general unease growing and no one being able to put the finger on it exactly and communicate it effectively.

Obviously my own perception comes into play here and on days where I'm happier I don't think much about it.

But generally there is a feeling that we are hurtling towards catastrophe and everyone is trying to profit before it's too late.

There is a mental barrier of irreversible climate change where I cannot imagine the year 2100 being anything other than dystopian.

I really believe that this is what happens when you go so long without a substantial recession coupled with an easy money regime.

There's apathy because no one has been scared in a long time. Landlords haven't been scared of not finding renters and not being able to pay their mortgages. Workers haven't been really scared of not finding jobs. Businesses have not really been scared of not being able to raise money.

Awful behavior in general comes from an absence of fear. Recessions were the natural force that brought fear and its ensuing product, sanity, to markets. Remove that and you get our current state of things.

> I’m aware of pinker’s general argument that many numbers are getting better.

I reject the entire premise on the grounds that a list of supposedly bad things without any attempt to compare it to something proves absolutely nothing, no matter how large the list is. If you’re aware of Pinker’s argument, why are you ignoring it? Why not explore it, follow up on the stats and see if he’s right?

It does seem like a lot of people are wallowing in bad news and convincing themselves to be hopeless, several threads have gone by HN recently along those lines, and I can think of friends and family members that are stuck on this too. I have no idea if it’s gotten worse, but seems plausible the pandemic and lower rates of in-person social activity combined with some bumpy politics recently combined with social media and news cycles that successfully engage people in outrage 24-7, seems like all those things may very well increase the perception that things are worse, regardless of the reality.

> Anyone else have other example?

This is explicitly seeking confirmation bias. Why not instead solicit counter-examples? Good news is occurring all the time, and for whatever reason it gets lets attention online and in the media. I highly recommend consciously seeking out good news in your life, it may answer your question.

30-50 years ago, with a single salary you could support a house with a yard, a non-working spouse, multiple kids, and a car. Our society knew how to make that happen once, and we've forgotten.

We've had incredible advances in technology and productivity since then, so why can't we have that kind of economic environment now? What's gumming up the works?

Everything isn’t declining. Things were never great, by any modern definition. We just have an expectation that things are supposed to be easy breezy nowadays, and it turns out people are still people.

Like, are you telling me that NYC landlords in the 90s weren’t trying to scam their tenants? That Philly police in the 80s were clean, efficient, trustworthy public servants? That there was less fraud in the .com boom, or before the Great Recession, then now with AI-SaaSchain nonsense?

I used to go to a burger place where the cashier would just tell me to fuck off if I ordered too slow. I can’t imagine trying to tell that dude he forgot _napkins_ in my bag.

I totally get the urge to rant too. People suck. But don’t lose hope! Because people always sucked, and it’s nothing new.

The energy gradient which powers civilization is decaying.

Civilization must conifgure itself around a new, steeper gradient. Only catch: it must use the old gradient to power this transformation.

https://gist.github.com/clumma/214831723c7d567cc343cc0767273...

As for the declining quality of products and services, we are leaving a decade where start-ups were burning VC money to provide a service that was both superior and cheaper, in order to starve their competitors. Now that the competitors are dead, prices/monetization will increase and quality will drop in many areas.

This will hit twice as hard if you were an early adopter, because you also stop being the target audience for most of these products.

And on a smaller scale (restaurants, corner shops, small businesses), the default state of being for most companies has always been to slowly decay over long periods of time. The brand new business that earned your loyalty a decade ago may be worse today, but there's certainly another new business today that you can be impressed with. You just need to find it.

Little things I've noticed decay in my 40 plus years.

I noticed credit card machines fail a lot more. Like 5 or 10 years ago credit card machines very rarely failed. Like you didn't even think about it. Now it's like a 25% chance the credit card machine I'm using will not work properly. This is not a new technology.

No one lets you in in traffic anymore. you used to be able to put your blinker on and people would wave you in. Now people are actively hostile and try to stop you from getting over.

There's a lot more scammy activity. Things like if you forget your tracking number or if you don't get documentation then that transaction will be gone.

Customer service has gotten terrible. You used to be able to call up and relatively quickly speak with someone knowledgeable and competent in many support phone lines but now it's a mostly hopeless endeavor that you wait online for an extremely long time to speak with the super friendly but clueless incompetent person.

I think we're on the verge/in the middle of a stagnating/shrinking pie. When we're not growing in population and wealth things get dark as people chase zero-sum short term gains at the expense of others.

Distrust runs rampant, people turn to the extraction of their peers vs expansion with their new friends.

It will get better.

Edit:

Think bigger than the extractors!

This is pretty much just the inevitable consequence of a market-based, individualist society that is obsessed with removing any standards or expectations on behavior, cultural output, language use, dress, or anything else. Unfortunately, I don't expect things to improve until people start caring about their local communities (i.e. the other people around them) and "Society" in general in a concrete, actionable way, and not just an ideological, tribalist, abstract way.

People notice and express this pattern every year for all of recorded history. People also express the opposite, seemingly as often and seemingly as perpetually.

It might just be subjective. There are countless things to see in the world and you can make a list of examples affirming whatever you want to (or dread to) believe.

54 years old so here is the mixed bag I have seen in my area (South)

  1. Absolutely there is a decline in quality/cleanliness and low to mid restaurants in my area. I don't even bother checking my order and assume it will be wrong. Many places we go into look like a disaster so my family has just quit eating out. I was at a Red Lobster and two employees got in a scream fight because all the cooks just walked off the job. The manager eventually walked out and shooed everyone that did not have food out the door. I don't know the root cause but the degradation happened post Covid.

  2. People do seem less considerate of others. I have decided to not coach youth soccer anymore due to crazy parents. We had a street fight in my middle class neighborhood. Many other examples - maybe it's my local area but I have lived here most of my life.

  3. I am a middle aged white guy and even I am scared of the police. Scared mainly because they seem so scared and on edge.

  4. The "business" people have taken over IT. I do feel bad for the next generation. We are wealth generators for people that hate to be dependent on us.  

  5. On the plus side, society seems much more tolerant of minorities (race/sexual orientation/religion/etc)

I'm not saying that I agree with all of your points (the air and water were far worse in the mid-20th century in many areas, for example), but let's take it as given and advance an hypothesis: decreasing time horizon. The ever-increasing (because self-feeding) pace of technological change, means that there is less and less predictability about the situation in the future, so timescales over which people plan are shortened. This is most obvious in the example of software being made for a very short time horizon, with the idea that it will be regardless obsolete in a short time, and anyway faster and faster hardware will overcome software bloat. Whether correct or not, a shorter and shorter timescale in planning is probably inevitable if things change faster and faster, which they are.

Just an hypothesis.

The quality of some products is getting worse for sure because companies are enlarging their margins by saving as much as they can to reduce their costs with obvious repercussions on the quality. It is also part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

Refrigerators used to last forever. I still have a 1993 refrigerator that is still working well. In the meanwhile with all brands except maybe for Subzero and other $10k refrigerators you are lucky today if the refrigerator lasts 6 years.

>Landlords seem extremely greedy

>People are noisy as fuck

>General worker apathy is endemic

>Seems like everything is subscription model

>Police seem to not give a shit anymore

In my personal opinion all of these are related and it is like this because an average person has nothing left to strive for.

Example: a property I've bought 2 years ago went up by 20%. There's very few people who can keep up with such crazy price increases. Who can keep up with something like this? Certainly not a McDonalds employee, nor a regular policeman. Even if they do get a raise it won't make a much of an impact because it will be instantly devoured by a rent increase or by some subscription service raising prices. The numbers will go up but the standard of living decreases.

So why would they care? No one seems to care about the problems of these people, so what incentive they have to care about others?

Let's hope we're not headed towards Singapore or 14th century Venice, https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/46499129502/the-rise...

> Venice had prospered under a relatively open political system in which a wide swath of the people had a voice in the selection of the republic’s ruler, the doge, and successful outsiders could join the ruling class. But in 1315, the establishment, which had been gradually tightening its control over the government, put a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro D'Oro, or Book of Gold, which was an official registry of Venetian nobility. If you weren’t in it, you couldn’t join the ruling oligarchy.

> Software seems to be overrun by a mentality that any future cost is worth it to save even 1 minute of development time…

From the instant the idea to do something pops into management’s heads, or is explained to them by sales (who heard it from a customer), the clock is ticking. Actually developing the software necessary is just an irritating overhead. Something to be reduced to near zero. A one-dimensional “scalar”. This isn’t about building. It’s a sort of conditioned response, like a chicken pecking at a lamp to get a grain of corn. Quality, maintainability, simplicity, doesn’t come into it and all management hear from you is technobabble, like Scotty explaining why the dilithium crystals need time to cycle.

>the water is poison

Putting aside the tons of pollution in lakes and oceans, what strikes me the most now is the abject failure and neglect in cities like Jackson, Mississippi and Flint, Michigan. How are people so powerless, governments so weakened, and politicians so detestable that something as basic as clean drinking water in cities is no longer functioning?

People, humane beings, have grown and prospered in the past because they were able to form and act as communities. We are good, really good at that. If you want a modern example of how effective functional communities can be, you can look at the Ukraine. Or at revolutionary war era Americans. Or hunting mastodons to extinction. As communities we do exceedingly well. If you take away our ability to form and act as communities then we lose this. The internet, which was supposed to be a way to be more effective instead has destroyed our ability to act as communities. Our way of building a common understanding has been destroyed by letting people track us and target us with lies.

Who can trust the internet? No sane person would trust the internet. We have fanaticism on all sides. And yes it I do mean all -your side too. No matter which side you are on, your ability to see what you have in common with others is impaired.

Have you listened to political ads on the internet, tv and radio. They are all of a kind "X is betraying you and has sold his/her/its soul to the devil" So vote for Y. There is nothing in those to build consensus or common understanding. There is everything to outrage us, embitter us, and divide us.

This is the problem.

Tracking ads are a social disease that can destroy our society by preventing us from having a society. And yes it is much more complex, but it is also just that simple.

This is spot on. I agree with all these points.

Personally, as a software dev, I feel like my career started to stall about 5 years ago in spite of being extremely driven and consistently producing high quality results. I've also observed unqualified people being promoted. I had to quit some jobs because the person who was promoted above me was not competent. Projects started declining within a year after I left.

It's obvious now that I'm not alone in having this experience.

In a twisted way, I feel somewhat avenged by the current situation. There is something oddly satisfying about being forced to leave a once thriving organisation due to bad change of direction and then later watching it all collapse. It's rewarding to know that it was people like me who were holding the system together.

Unfortunately it's the closest thing I got to feeling successful. My suppression and subsequent absence contributed to failure of the organisation in a very clear and obvious way. That's my version of success.

I think the core problems are wealth inequality combined with cronyism... People are promoted for being friends (or more than just friends) with rich people. They're not promoted based on competence.

Beyond the OP's points, some of which can be seen across history and aren't just a "now" problem, I feel that aesthetics have declined massively just these past 15 years. I remember the early web, and then the era of blogs and personal websites, the y2k and Frutiger Aero design styles I could see in ads on TV, on many websites, in many of the arts, etc. Nowadays, you can't find this except in individuals' work (e.g. those scattered across the web)

Every company's site is the same: a header image or a carousel, big sans serif text saying absolutely nothing of substance, no form nor function in their presentation. Both native software, web apps and smartphone's apps are converging to a braindead flat/material design design (and if you complain, UX people throw out arguments of accesibility (which are completely irrelevant to what UI style you choose to use), and many say that skeuomorphism is ugly (???), when in reality their UI choices are atrocious, reducing functionality by taking away options and even going as far as removing borders around most things, making it harder to know what is clickable. I've seen my parents and grandparents, neighbors and even people my age struggle with these "easy" interfaces)

I genuinely believe the effects of these design choices around everything in our lives are detrimental to our mental wellbeing, and thus I try to surround myself with 19th century furniture, and I use Windows XP for any non-internet related task. I prefer forums and personal sites in my browsing, and regularly use wiby.me and marginalia.nu's search functionality. I only play old games and indie games too. I know it's just a futile attempt to resist the passage of time, but I can't help it. I try to make things in this vein and I know that it's just a small drop in the ocean but I still do it.

There's this article from the Guardian in a similar vein https://theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jun/19/grey

To paraphrase, if everyone seems mean, we are the mean ones. We may be heading down a dark hole of pessimism here, at the end of which there is no light. Or we are just getting old.

We should reexamine our views of history. If we write the history books we would be inclined to paint ourselves and situations in a good light saying everything was great and everyone treated each other great.

From the perspective of someone who is not in the ruling class, we should try graphing our collective freedom and prosperity on a 2000 year scale. Things were pretty good over the last 50-300 years and are still not too bad.

We have short memories and tend to block out the bad stuff over time.

We may also just be spending too much time on the Internet and consuming news media.

Or maybe we legitimately live in crappy neighborhoods and cities where everyone treats each other poorly. We then have a tendency of moving somewhere else and bringing that negative, cynical and stressed out mentality with us, thus benefiting from other people's remaining goodwill and social cohesion while simultaneously destroying it.

It's more constructive to engage in our interests and build than to criticize and tear down others, we should concentrate on that.

The economy, social behavior, investing and most aspects of human society are “reflexive”.

People modulate their behavior and outlook based on what they think other people think.

Going even deeper, people absorb way more from other people than they first let on or realize. Over time, their own thoughts adapt to whatever’s in their RAM and they believe they truly believe what their brain produced. This leads them to have a greater conviction in their beliefs which leads to actions that further propagate that belief.

There have been several events in the last few years that have altered people’s internal sense of security and hope. With social media, people are far more exposed to the sentiment of other peers as opposed to a leader (or book) who would otherwise be responsible for reframing traumatic events.

The decision makers aren’t immune to these influences. So on multiple levels, society is regressing towards the mean.

Furthermore, the mean is also decreasing due to real reflexive effects in the economy and people’s sense of well being.

So a greater mass of people are content with not being as good as they were before.

Society will have to get fairly deep into the abyss before it realizes it hates being there and an exceptional leader will have to show everyone a path out of it.

People won’t realize that they caused the situation in the first place but only be focused on first order effects such as how bad they feel or how much money they have.

The sentiment that things are futile seems to have already captured you. The only thing you can do now is to realize the first thing you need to do is insulate yourself from being bludgeoned into mediocrity by all the noise around you if you want to effect any material change.

I think that the human mind is not evolved for, and does not cope well in societies at the scale we now live in. I think there's a certain tipping point where social cohesion begins to break down, and people's psychology begins to shift from participation in a society of their peers, to guarding themselves from a society of potentially dangerous strangers. I think this phenomena has been extrapolated to a large scale. I also think that the society consisting of people who are largely genetically different from yourself has an impact as well on social cohesion, and by extension, on how people behave in society.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, it's time for the Secret News.

Shhhhh. Here is the Secret News:

All people are afraid.

No one knows what they're doing.

Everything is getting worse.

Some people deserve to die.

Your money is worthless.

No one is properly dressed.

At least one of your children will disappoint you.

The system is rigged.

Your house will never be completely clean.

All teachers are incompetent.

There are people who really dislike you.

Nothing is as good as it seems.

Things don't last.

No one is paying attention.

The country is dying.

God doesn't care.

Shhhhh.

- George Carlin

The behavioral degradation of the US is very easy to see from the outside.

It's when you reduce all human existence to economy. But turns out money chasing is a bad substitute for morals, principles and social connection (the true version and not the shallow caricature that is sold online these days).

Companies have to continually increase their revenue or profits out of fear of their competitors becoming larger and taking over the market. The internet has allowed almost everything in physical space to become commoditized. You also have a society that does not appreciate quality. Combining all this together I don't see how things don't keep getting worse.

Yeah, the world goes through cycles of sucking. It's not all one problem. It's just a bunch of problems piling on at the same time over the last few years. Most of it boils down to economics.

You can still be yourself and make the world a better place for others. Just because some people have problems doesn't mean you have to emulate their bad behavior. The golden rule still applies and lots of people are still looking out for each other. If you run into problems, get involved with your community to try to solve them.

Instead of focusing on all of the external problems around you, focus on how you're processing them. It's okay to get therapy if it seems like overload. It's also okay to just not do anything for a weekend so you can de-stress and relax.

Try tuning out from all of the noise for a little bit. There's probably some internet/news withdrawal at first but after you stop worrying about everything, it's easier to see what's directly affecting you.

Prioritize fun stuff like finding a good book and making some tea. Go hang out with friends and have an adventure. Be unproductive for a while. Do weird things. Take an art class or find a community group. Life is happier when you're in a positive community and having fun. Most people are still good.

Scale, mostly. Knock-on effects of greed and power, I suppose.

Individuals and companies operating at some level of scale and focused primarily on revenue discover that "giving a shit" is both costly and unnecessary, as the mass market doesn't care and will buy anyway. Artists care, which is why they're a pain in the ass and get kicked to the curb as soon as money grabs the power.

It's "difficult" to deliver a quality service/support experience if you have 2 billion daily users of your product. I'm not excusing Facebook, but that scale makes everything a hell of a lot harder than "you" think it is, and therefore they'll either mess it up, because that's unavoidable, or they'll just optimize for revenue, and they were never artists anyway. Applies to Google and Microsoft, too. Steve Jobs was an anomaly.

Nearly nonexistent barrier to entry in most respects in most areas. The noise, however that may manifest, vastly (vastly, vastly, vastly) outstrips the signal. If you assume 90% of everything is crap (a generous and optimistic assessment), and there is 10,000 times more stuff than there used to be, well, that's a whole lot more crap.

When your company can basically not fail, and has its fingers in everything due to acquisitions and consolidations and whatever, again, unless you're an artist, and you aren't, caring increases costs unnecessarily because the market doesn't care, and neither do you, so you don't bother.

If you are a probably underfunded law enforcement agency (or school) who basically has to accept the recruits you can find because nobody wants to do the job, because the scale and scope of what you're dealing with (ie: too many people, too many problems) is hellish, and there's no clear guidance on what or how to manage it, much less improve it, well, it can't end well.

Obligatory Kali Yuga here.

"Hard problems that no one is bothering to understand clearly, without getting folks on the same page regarding why it's a problem, what solutions should be sought, and why." may be another was of looking at it.

Based on your post, it seems as though things in _your_ particular area are declining. If you live in San Francisco or New York, well, those places are the stinky rotten armpits of the United States (assuming you live here, of course). Police officers by and large aren't a problem. Hundreds of thousands of police interactions occur on a daily basis that go just fine. Police stories are almost always the case of an individual shithead that would've been horrible regardless of their job, and more uncommonly local systemic problems, such as the police department and/or the justice system. The media loves its drama, too.

Optimist view: it’s not. There has never been a golden age. There were anarchists blowing up things in the early 1920s, WWI followed by II, institutional racism, etc. Things have always been hard, just takes different forms.

Pessimist view: strong generations bring good times, good times breed weak generations, weak generations bring hard times, hard times breed strong generations. You happen to be born right after some good times.

Like tipping, subscriptions are out of control. Everything needs a subscription now. And a common trend is a company releasing a feature or service and then later degrading it, to encourage people to buy a subscription to restore original functionality.

My anecdotal hypothesis (at least from a North American perspective) is that we've slowly adopted a culture that favors individualism and growth over community and sustainability.

We had a period of extreme wealth and growth after WWII, and chose to re-make society in ways that were fundamentally unsustainable. Then in order to keep that dream alive, we continuously borrowed from our future, and ignored those who were cut out of this dream, all to prop up an increasingly individualistic eutopia that was doomed to fail.

Now the bill is coming due for all of us. But we've gone too long isolated from our neighbors, ignoring the cries of those for whom the system was failing, and losing our sense of community that we've forgotten how to work with one another to solve our real societal problems.

The world we built ourselves is slowly deteriorating due to the natural progression of time, and we've forgotten how to fix it.

I think it's hard to pick an overall narrative, because the world is complicated, memory is unreliable, and what's actually visible to regular people changes with the times.

In many ways, I think the trend for the individual person's most likely experience has been sharply positive over the past century. I share your frustration with the level of unpunished grift and abuse of power in our society, but I suspect that it's always been at least this bad.

However, there are some macro trends that are extremely ominous. As the years pass, human are evolving technologies that give small groups of people massive leverage over the shared physical and social environment. To name a few:

- Nuclear weapons

- Genetic engineering

- Chemical production / pollution

- AI

- Social media

- Nanotechnology

And we completely lack the governance at all levels to manage this. I think we're set up for all sorts of potential catastrophes and the collapse of the global economic complexity we currently take for granted.

I've noticed similar things as well. Especially in contexts where no observability is available as CCTVs or other people. People will behave badly if they can get away unpunished.

I disagree with most of the other comments that its a question of wealth. I know religion arguments are unpopular in this crowd. But in my opinion, lack of similar values derived from religion is starting to cause these issues. Because atheism is de-facto dominant in most of the west today, people don't have the same values anymore. The things you mentioned are simply not regarded as immoral for those people. Everyone will say they can do whatever they want, they don't want to adhere to your values, they have their own unique ones. But at the same time, we cannot deny the fact that how others act around us does impact our mental state as well.

Read Bowling Alone. It was written by a Harvard sociologist in the 80's. The American community is steadily breaking down and he quantifies it over the decades.

I considered myself a liberal most of my life, and still do to an extent, but it needs to be recognized as a double edged sword. Values like "tolerance" must have boundaries if you want to avoid the normalization of negative social behaviors that degrade the fabric of society.

Read “Denial of Death”. Ideas here are based on that book.

The plain reality of existence is that there is no inherent meaning and we will all die. That is too much for anyone to bear.

We can live “normal” lives only so far as we can distract and deceive ourselves from the base reality with our own constructed meanings.

Truth, science, knowledge, are inevitable and unstoppable. They eventually expose the deceptions and distractions we create.

We don’t have a good next collective deception.

Sounds like you live in a bad neighborhood. My rust belt neighborhood doesn't have those issues, and it's very affordable on a tech salary. Vote with your feet.

underlying all these problems is the quite simple kernel: we lost our religion. you see, religion long served as the reference point for morality. you had to be a good person in this life lest you spend eternity in punishment and torture. many weak nations throughout history have endured terrible rulers (and often converted them) by their staunch adherence to their religion. the roman empire becoming christian is one such example.

unfortunately, religion reached beyond its domain (of the metaphysical) and attempted to explain all human knowledge in terms of revelation and the so-called holy books. thus, when a new method of discovering new knowledge via observation began its triumphant march towards explaining and predicting natural phenomena, religion was found wanting. it suffered the double blow of losing authority in the physical realm as well as the metaphysical. and since then, imo, we have struggled to stand morality, and more importantly, your responsibility to be a good person, on any firm grounds. biology (and evolution), which likens us to animals, seems to throw a wrench in any effort: we’re animals anyways, we’re within our nature to be animalistic.

at present, we live without universal morality. we have substituted what it means to enjoy your life with another measure that renders it a given that the person living in the future most definitely lived better than who lived a millennia or two away. below, that’s the sort of counter-arguments/counter-observations you see. it’s unfortunate. we’re living in a mess. adults are twerking on innocent kids again (after an intermission than banned child sex, child marriage, betrothals, polygamy, &c). the reversal to banality is markedly celebrated as freedom and progress. but is it really?

so someone will point you to the article that demonstrates scientific progress. don’t let them dissuade you. what you’re concerned about is moral depravity. essentially how onlyfans isn’t despicable but celebrated. from here, at our current velocity and acceleration, it only gets worse. brace yourself.

We are going to make it. Our trials today are the same magnitude of trials faced by those of the 20th century.

Try optimism for a change https://effectiveaccelerationism.substack.com/p/what-the-f-i...

The big one for me is the death of publicly funded education here in the UK. Before Thatcher's cuts in the mid 80s grants covered the total cost unless you had wealthy parents. Around the same time the Fair Rent Act was abolished. I date THE GREAT DECLINE from this point in history.

We are seeing decline in some areas where there are monopolies. Companies used to be afraid of competition. Not being able to produce enough product or raising prices too much meant someone else was going to come along and take over your market. But, once a monopoly or oligopoly has been achieved, companies have far more pricing power. It takes about four major players before you get price competition, from an EU study. The US is down to 2 or 3 in many areas, from drugstores to cell phone services.

Its all peaks and valleys, crests and troughs.

It will get better, it always does. Just takes a while. Make strategic moves and maybe it works out for you.

I really think a lot of these problems can be traced back to the introduction of the iPhone.

Physical reality has taken a backseat to the digital world, so physical reality has been neglected. Living in a world of physical neglect has hurt our health, and affects our ability to build the digital one.

Yes, I agree. Some of the particulars look a bit different here, but the spirit of it is the same.

One thing it fits well with is progression through the Demoralization, and possibly Destabilization, phase(s) of ideological subversion as described by KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov.

Decent legibility charts e.g. here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220412064205/https://wyomingtr...

(EDIT: The organization hosting those charts is rather opinionated about the interpretation and context. Even so, I'm leaving this reference in as the legibility of the charts themselves is higher than for many other copies/scans on the web. Originals can also be found e.g. in the linked https://ia800301.us.archive.org/25/items/BezmenovLoveLetterT... )

Some prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30470856

A sizable share of the recorded media materials: https://archive.org/details/yuri_bezmenov_all_interviews_lec...

It's hard to prove something like that as a cause, for obvious reasons, but I think the relevance for the features of what we're seeing is hard to deny.

I live in a different place in world, but objectively everything is getting better by the day.

- There is visibly less crime, statistically at an all time low record every year.

- Drug politics are getting way better, leading to way less drug criminality

- People drive smaller, more economical cars. Less noise, less polition

- You can find polished software for a small monthly fee for nearly any use case that works on your Phone, Linux, Mac or Windows. Only few years ago most good software was expensive and platform exclusive. Also mostly big coorperate where some software companies today are one person or a small team.

- We finally started talking about our environment in a serious future thinking matter. We don't yet act like it so often, but we are getting there.

- Crypto made 'normal' people rich, crypto changed to live of so many people. Not all about crypto was bad, not all is a Ponzi or Scam. Plus we finally have a low fee world wide money transaction method, which means so much freedom for a lot of people that are used to heavy restrictions.

- I think it never was easier to do your own thing and life from that. Whatever you do, if you are passionate enough it could be your job.

- The subscription and microtransaction trend is a huge pain in the ass and hopefully will die one way or another.

My point is, or should be it's all about the perspective and a lot about choice.

If you don't like loud cars, criminal & busy neighbours why don't you move somewhere that better fits your lifestyle? What makes you living a life you don't fully enjoy?

The social contract has broken. I think we’re about to experience even more disturbances until we reach a new one.

The neighborhood I moved into isn't exactly pretty nor clean, but overall liveable. Then, I am continuously annoyed at littering, finding puke on the pavement in front of the appartment building I live in, people can be loud, etc.

Thing is, I remember the area from visiting when I was a kid (like 30 years ago) and it was in a worse state back then.

Recently in the just-for-fun soccer practice team I met a guy probably in his mid-60ies who - after practice when we hang around - told a story from his childhood growing up next to the red light district. I asked where that was, and he grew up 200m away from the place where I live, same street.

The town I grew up in was just generally gray. Now its painted, has pedestrian zones, etc. When looking for an appartment a landlord showed me the storage area of an apartment in the basement, this storage area, he told me, had been in the past rented out to labourers, as in bunk-beds for 6 men. I asked him when it was and it turned out that this was during my lifetime (not turn of the 18th to 19th century or something, more like "the 80ies").

Ok I’ll bite. Problems exist on several levels of detail and it won’t do justice to address these concerns with broad generalities. However there are a few root causes which have outsized impact on society - namely, business, government, and world leaders who are detached from reality. People who fly in private jets preaching about the perils of climate change DO NOT DESERVE TO BE HEARD!

Yeah, things have gotten markedly worse, objectively worse. Which is not to say things have not been bad before, or even worse before. I definitely think we’re in a local decline and I expect the decline to continue.

It’s harder to escape crime and noise. It’s harder buy decent food. It’s harder to earn a decent wage. People are increasingly narcissistic. I think lobbyists have gotten better at their jobs at corrupting politics.

But there used to be razor gangs roaming the cities, Charles Babbage was hounded to an early grave by street musicians. Rancid food would be laced with dangerous chemicals to cover up the smell. People used to be proud of having the Disease of Kings (gout), and is hard to imagine a greater corruption of politics than the South East India company, or the Robber Barons.

I think it’s a reversion to the mean; It is post WWII America that is the aberration and we’re now living in the afterglow of that. We seem to be trending towards some kind of feudalism and that is really going to suck for the vast majority of people.

Your post is on the worldwide web. Saying that you notice things getting worse where you are and not saying where "where" is and equating that to everywhere is what the problem is.

If you live in USA or western europe, real living standards have been decreasing for decades now. But thats probably not something youd particularly notice over 5 years.

Will Durant once expressed his conviction that the world only seems to get worse because as we develop morally and intellectually, we're less tolerant of evil but simultaneously more able to perceive it. In empirical terms things have been getting better for a long time, and probably still are.

How do you expect a society that thrives on the exploitation and murder of other life forms to have peace and joy? There's a spiritual crisis happening right now and if you don't change the way you treat other life, yours will continue to get worse.

When I see posts like this I think “How would I measure this over time?”

Software projects were notoriously late and brittle in prior eras. (Ask anyone supporting a mainframe that they’re afraid to reboot)

Fraud and monopolies are as old as money. (Look up the history of Wall Street and railroads)

It’s very hard to come up with good time series data so here is my wish list to test the “we are going to crap” hypothesis:

- Air Quality Index over time.

- % of the World Population with sub-0 net worth over time.

- % of World Net Worth in discovered financial crime.

- % of technology projects overbudget and overdue weighted by dollar value over time.

- % of population literate.

Some these are hard to measure. I’m open to other measures. Absent that it’s about as accurate as asking someone “Are you busier than you were 20 years ago?”

Read Karl Marx, what we're seeing is basically what he described as the end state of capitalism. Everything gets shittier and shittier as costs go up and profits shrink. People and businesses are getting more desperate to prop up profit or make a buck. Everything suffers--worse products as costs are cut, worse service as wages stagnate to cut costs, people are more angry and stressed as their standard of living declines from frozen and falling wages. It doesn't end well... (for capitalists at least). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_theory

YMMV of course, but literally none of these apply to me, partially because of luck maybe, partially because I steered clear of bullshit.

Funnily enough, IMHO Pinker is a fool : in the West we have been living above our means since at last the 80s and the bill started to come due since at least 2008 : I expect things to get worse, and not start to get better for decades, maybe more, depending on our choices and sheer luck (and some places will be better off than others).

Speaking of frauds, I wouldn't trade my life with any of theirs, they are going to pay dearly for them, and already started to.

(Paragraph numbers would be nice in such a varied dump.)

1) We just went through a globally historically unique event, the likes of hopefully won't be seen for another 100 years.

2) If you log off social media, your life will improve remarkably. That said, I love TikTok because I find it so inspirational, at least my feed is.

3) Depending on where you live, your sentiments can definitely be true. I feel California has gone downhill a lot in terms of safety, affordability, etc. But if you turn off social media you probably will feel this a lot less.

4) If you go outside, travel, etc, you'll find that it's not so bad. Unplug and travel is probably the best thing to do.

While the "things are actually better" argument is certainly true when you look at the data, from a first person perspective people have definitely become very very self absorbed in American society. Not only in the US kind you, but in the west generally there is absolutely a massive cultural malaise in play right now.

Even speaking just about culture, look at how stagnant things are. Fashion, film, music, books. They are all stuck on repeat, making the same old things new again with no actual innovation happening on noticeable scales.

I would like to point out that prior to the EPA rivers and lakes catching on fire was a yearly thing in some sections of this country. Yes pollution is still a thing but it's NOTHING like it used to be.

Regarding subscription services, most people don't know how to use them. I use subscription services, but I only pay for the time I use. For example, if I need an app today, I will pay the subscription and cancel it next week when I need to do something else. I subscribe Netflix to watch one or two series, and cancel after it is done. Most people think it makes sense to keep paying a subscription for months on end, just for the sake of keeping it alive. These are the ones who are getting poor and filling the coffers of subscription services.

One thing I noticed are buildings: many old buildings are very good-looking, with a lot of details and passion put into them and using the best materials available, most of the new ones are just usable, with the cheapest materials that do the job.

In many measures of health, education, lifespan, and income my state ranks in the bottom half. Yet the state had a record budget surplus. What did they do with it? Fund things like education or roads? Cut the state gas tax that is one of the highest in the country? Nope. They gave people a $140 check. Sure, that is nice but it would be better to invest in long term improvements. Yet, in my state, one political party has a supermajority in state politics with no sign of that changing any time soon.

I thought it was me getting old (in my 40s now, with little kids, life feels like shit). My thoughts:

1) Globalization caused massive changes to this world that have not been properly acknowledged. Sort of like none of the politicians cared about redistribution. In aggregate, the average person is better off, but there are significant structural impacts. A lot of people in the west, got hit badly (e.g. manufacturing). Conversely, a lot of people in Asia (specifically, China and India) have had spectacular improvements in standard of living.

2) Mobile & Internet: info travels at the speed of light. Along with general computing advances, this makes everyone more efficient, but simultaneously more starved for human contact and with little to no downtime.

3) We are still paying the price for the 2008 fiasco. Interest rates were down too long and inflation measures not accurate. House prices (and other asset prices) went up dramatically. This simultaneously increased wealth inequality (those with assets gained, those without got left behind), and made the so-called American dream harder to attain.

I was very romantic about democracy growing up in countries without it. Now that I am older, I can see how messed up the system is (even in the West). I remain optimistic that the Internet and computing will somehow improve things, though I don't exactly see how.

I think you're somewhat off base. It's hard, because some of your examples are correct, others are not, but in general most of them (in my estimation) have different causes, and should be treated as individual cases rather than as part of a general statement. As you note, some things are getting better. A good theory would have to fit both the positives and the negatives.

One reason I don't agree is that I try not to say "good" or "bad" when thinking about big, systemic things like that. It's more useful to describe the way things have changed. I'm not talking about moral relativism, I'm talking about inputs and outputs: by looking at what has changed, you can sometimes trace it back to a cause, and then try to figure out how to change it again. But just saying things have gotten worse seems a capitulation to inevitable forces outside anyone's control. Like an apple, rotting, rather than a boat with a hole in it: You can fix the boat if you find the hole.

Anyway, I think it's an extremely complicated question. I'm probably a bit more conservative than a lot of HN. My kneejerk reaction to many things is that, yeah, people suck more now. But, that's a dangerously convenient intuition which should be examined very carefully — like almost everything else in life.

I believe that social media is contributing to these feelings. It seems that social media, being an amplifier for "shocking" stories, tends to exacerbate the negativity of the world around us. Only the most controversial, sad or frustrating stories get eyeballs.

It's been this way with traditional TV and radio newscasts, of course. But TV now has to compete with social media and is moving towards the same hysteria. Podcasts for sure and some radio programming are also playing the doomsday soundtrack as well.

I don't actually think the world is in a much worse place. I do believe that America (and probably the world) is changing culturally, how we treat others, human rights, respect. There seems to be a new awakening towards minority rights, gay rights, race, and police abuse. Negative things have always existed, but it's becoming harder to hide them with the ever present social media lens looking at us. We're changing our societal perspectives and discourse as a direct result of the extra focus.

So maybe it's a good thing. Maybe all these negative feelings and observations are a technology/media driven renaissance of sort. We're possibly just at the dawn of a new age of awareness and respect for others and the world around us.

Everything was normal until it wasn't, and if it wasn't back then, nobody else paid that much attention because that wasn't normal, so they hoped it went away.

That is, our bias tends to be towards supporting and reproducing the norms we're familiar with. Acknowledging a problem with the norms is much harder than ignoring and dismissing an actual problem that contradicts them, because it's often a challenge to faith to resolve conflicts between closely-held values.

It's the disruption to norms, not specific events, that leaves a pit in one's stomach.

Here's what I suggest you do instead of looking for specific evidence of decline. Go read "Joe vs Elan School"[0]. Get angry and upset at the story, and then note that this is really a story that, while covering mostly the last few decades, has threads from as early as the 1950's, a decade where things were "normal" relative to now. Except, if the story is to believed, they weren't. They couldn't have been!

And then...focus on virtue ethics rather than norms. Norms are exhausting, a perpetual "babies vs parents" game of shifting around boundaries and responsibilities such that some people(e.g. billionaires) can behave like children, while other groups must attend to and explain the child's actions - and that's how a place like Elan can exist. We can curse that darkness, but nobody has time to work out all the ways in which they could properly live better instead of succumbing to a norm; you have to lead with strength and hope others follow.

[0] https://elan.school

Focus on the good.

Reject the bad, evil, dark.

Focus on the good, true, love, kindness, compassion, right, lovely, righteous.

For one I strongly agree with your premise.

Imo, the reason things have gotten worse is finanicialization brought on by an extended period of low interest rates which causes societal surplus to flow to capital intsinve activities at the expense of everything else. To understand the reasons behind thisid recommend to look up Triffin's dilemma.

Basically it says, that any country that has a reserve currency, by nature of being forced into a structural trade deficit, will be forced to prioritize Financial activities over productive activities and that this force will increase the longer you hold the reserve currency.

Basically we used throwing the working class unfer rhe bus as a strategic lever at the end of ww2, but that didn't really start playing out until the 80s and has gotten much worse since then.

Now everyone is a nihilist because no one believes the game is fair anymore because we have structurally set things up so everyone in capital intensive activities gets obscene gains and everyone else fights for the scraps.

This has permeated beyond its first order effects where people embrace this system and actively encourage it without really understanding its causes.

Don't forget that lifetime expectancy has declined in the US for the 2nd year in a row and that real income has shrunk in the face of inflation.

> It's like no body seems to give a shit about anyone except themselves anymore. Whats the cause of this? What's the solution?

Be the change you want to see. If you want your police be tougher on crime, then get informed and involved in local politics. Participation in anything but national politics is completely abysmal, and practically non-existent if you don't include the seniors. Most people don't even know the names of their DA or city councilors, let alone their positions or how competent they are.

> And then they use RealPage to collude to make prices higher[1]

Along the lines of being more informed, this almost certainly is untrue. Realpage is a service that landlords use to find the optimal pricing for their units. Unless RealPage controls the entirety the market, which they don't, the optimal market price for each individual landlord would be different from the colluded price, and they would be offering a substandard product for landlords. The price that landlords pay to use their service is based on square footage, so they have no incentive to facilitate collusion anyways.

Its difficult to have an objective view about this. For starters we must at least define what timescales we are talking about and which region or social-economic system.

Talking about the so-called western world and a generational experience in my mind there is no doubt there is a huge mismatch of people's expectations versus their creaking and failing reality that is what creates this sense of falling apart.

What is falling apart is a tower of falsehoods. Very fundamental ones: About where the energy and the food is coming from. About where cheap stuff is manufactured. The inability of consumption and money to fill in destroyed social bonds. About the fitness of corporate structures and regulation. Political corruption and skyrocketing hypocricy and deceit.

So its in reality a mental / moral decline and it is entirely self-inflicted. Objectively none of that should be happening.

What is fascinating is that the mechanisms to reverse that dynamic are not readily available. Religions and political revolutions are discredited so we are left seething with nowhere to go.

I don’t get why people keep complaining about streaming subscriptions. The whole appeal of something like Netflix is the unbundling of cable packages and getting rid of annual contracts. I don’t need to subscribe to things I don’t want to watch (unlike a cable bundle where you pay for channels you don’t care about because they’re part of the bundle).

Even more importantly, there’s no annual contract. Subscribe to Netflix for a month or two, watch the 4 shows you care about and unsubscribe for the rest of the year. Switch to a different service for the next couple of months. This is amazing - I basically get to watch the best shows available on any service for under $20/mo (this was never possible with cable). No one asked you to keep all of your subscriptions active all of the time. I always subscribe to these services via iOS and so canceling takes exactly 5 seconds (you don’t ever have to call anyone or go hunt down the unsubscribe button hidden deep inside some website ever).

Implosion and looting of the old empire, evicerated middle class now cannibalizing itself. Welcome to the fourth industrial revolution.

I think there's a very good point to be made about general anti-social behavior and a handful of downwardly mobile elites that defend it (see: defense of shoplifting, turnstile jumping etc) but I see the opposite from the American perspective for the last two years alone.

- The unemployment rate is the lowest it's been in 50 years, while inflation is ticking lower

- The Dow is at 34k and this is considered "bad" because we hit Dow 36k last year.

- Real GDP per capita is the highest it's ever been

- We're meaningfully pushing the needle forward on Fusion, and abundant energy deployments like wind turbines and solar power installations are accelerating

- Battery and semiconductor manufacturing is rapidly coming back onshore just within the last year

- Machine Learning hit at inflection point with diffusion models and large transformers

- We are involved in no wars and drew down our involvement in one

- Cars are getting better and EV adoption is at an inflection point

- The MRNA revolution is just beginning

- Crime is ticking down from the highs of 2020 but is still lower than even the early 90's.

Well sure, civilization may be in decline, climate change is going to get worse, etc.

But not everything is getting worse: there are still some things to be thankful for! Look at phones and laptops from 10, or even 5 years ago. Many of them are so bad by today’s standards I wonder how we ever put up with them. I bet in 5 years time these things will be even better still!

Assuming you live in the US like I do, definitely watch this video and read Dalio's book (I bought 2 copies)

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio (2022)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8

Basically we're on the downward part of the cycle of wealth. That has NOT happened in our lifetimes, but it's happened many times before to other countries (Netherlands, Britain, China).

Some things go in 150 or 250 year cycles and they're hard to see.

Basically the idea is that in the long term, countries need to actually produce wealth in accordance to how much money they print.

HOWEVER, the problem is that you can actually get away with NOT doing so for 50+ years -- the span of more than one generation. Particularly if you have the reserve currency of the world, as the US currently does.

Dalio links a lot of our ills to Nixon's untethering of the dollar in the early 1970's.

That reminds me of a good tweet -- What if your entire personality depends on low interest rates ?

The idea there is that the habits and culture we've grown up with have been enforced by this distortion of wealth.

---

To create wealth as a country, you need education, rule of law, cooperation, trust, etc. There has to be real output, and people have to push in the same direction.

But if you can just print money instead of doing the work of those things, then why bother getting educated? Why not just rip people off?

Why not rip off the government? They're just printing it anyway. So the social order is hugely affected by monetary policy.

TBH I didn't come around to this until ~2020 ... In 2016, everyone I knew thought the sky was falling ... But I was living in wealthy area with a good job. Now that I'm a bit removed from that, I see that the rest of the country is having big problems

I think Jeff Bezos has said -- "I don't worry about next quarter -- it was already determined 5 or 10 years ago". Unfortunately the social trends for the US were determined 40 or 50 years ago. But that doesn't mean everyone should give up and do nothing! Don't be a nihilist

Honestly software is one of the places where you can create real wealth (not fake, extractive riches) with a few people. People in other industries aren't so lucky

(Related to a previous comment about gambling and crypto: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33910537 -- if huge portions of society engage in NEGATIVE SUM games, then that has consequences. I conjecture that gambling is commonly banned because societies that banned it are the ones that survived. Others went down in flames.)

maybe it's the tendency of the rate of profit to fall over time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_prof...

anyone who can manage to get some blood out of the system, even if it's just smoke and mirrors, shoots to prominence. i won't name names.

for everyone else there's less and less. landlords squeeze harder, workers are stretched further because there're fewer of them, and because there're are fewer of them everthing slips. and so on. basically, as the rate of profit falls over time, everyone squeezes harder and is squeezed harder, everything gets worse. what's kept a lid on it since the great depression is the government dumping money on it, in various ways. perhaps that mechanism is running out of juice.

hopefully we don't start a war with russia or china to create demand.

> Is anyone else noticing that for several 5 year blocks (pentad) the world just seems to get markedly worse? It's like no body seems to give a shit about anyone except themselves anymore. Whats the cause of this? What's the solution?

I used to think that random people on the internet could be trusted, now my attitude is (essentially) "if I don't know you, then fuck off and fuck your opinion too"

I'm not saying this directed at you OP, I've felt the same thing you've felt about the world becoming worse off

In 2018-19 I'd think about making a blog connected to my IRL credentials. Now, this isn't really something I'd consider doing. I used to want to write an autobiography, now I'd rather not say anything

And with respect to this:

> And at the same time, we get these cases where a dude like Tyre,

That whole thing makes me feel physically ill. If people are capable of that kind of cruelty, what does that say about our society?

If you live in the U.S., there is a substantial chance your demographic has been affected by lead poisoning. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2118631119

I think many of the problems you talk about can be traced to things like this.

What I see is that after some inflection point in industrial development, a race between stupid decisions and smart solutions began, on a massive scale. Antibiotics is a good example of this sort of thing, but it's not just technology that gets rushed but laws and ways of living. For example the GI bill created a standard of suburban living that we still expect to this day. And for what? We're not in a war.

Ultimately I think we live in highly experimental times. You could have cutting edge benefits or cutting edge annoyances and combination thereof.

>have abandoned decades of experience showing how to create reliable, robust, reusable code that is both great the customer, fast to iterate on, and only a tiny tiny bit slower to write.

This era you think existed… didn’t. All of the trash code from 10-20-30 years ago is long gone. The only stuff that remains is the <1% that was simultaneously written with quality in mind while also remaining useful.

The quality of software is absolutely irrelevant if you build the wrong thing, so you need to iterate quickly unless you’re lucky enough to know exactly what needs to be built. And even in that case, you need to weigh the engineering cost against a cost of a failure and the cost of expensive maintenance.

Many times, 100 lines of very use-case specific python that can’t be re-used is absolutely the correct engineering call. It might not be what you like as a programmer, but you’re not paid to navel-gaze.

I think most people in this thread might benefit from the book called Factfulness. I'm a bit sad it's called that because it sounds like I'm calling people 'unfactful' / fake news, which is not at all what I mean. It just happens to be called that. Instead, I think people here are basing their worldviews off of the news' and social media's presentation, which is inherently more "omg you must see this"-type negative than realistic.

Book: https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/

The short quiz with which the book opens: https://factfulnessquiz.com

If you live near-ish to Aachen, I would also be happy to lend you my copy.

I think availability bias and confirmation bias may play a role in things seeming worse. Incidences of violence, unrest that in the past would have gone unreported, unnoticed is made obvious and immediate on social media. Social media makes it easier to compare one's social status to someone else.

Things are bad, but... things were always bad:

- Things in the past seemed better just because you didn't care enough and now you are becoming aware of it. - There were always wars, famine, diseases, poverty. You (or humanity) in general didn't care enough or couldn't care (information took longer to reach people). - Software were always bloated, but now we have machines that run faster, they had bugs but they were simple programs before. There were injustices in the area, they were not as common because there were a lot of less software engineer and methods for them to share their discontentment. - Things were always poisoned, because of the substance of the moment: Mercury, Lead, Asbestos, Plastics. - We already opened hole in the ozone layer, it's recovering, now we are heating up the planet.

Having moved from the US to Sydney in the last year, Sydney feels like the US mid-2000's, where generally things still felt more stable, prices weren't terribly crazy (except for buying a house), and the streets are extremely safe. Kids still wander around and take public transit by themselves like I did as a kid in the 90's in Europe.

In terms of "rosy retrospection" there's probably a bias on the other side — things can get better or worse; they shouldn't always be improving. The last five years seem markedly worse than the five years before that, in terms of stability and safety etc.

However- I think this period of instability is might lead to the next positive shift in how we live our lives and our relationship with technology. (e.g. collectively we'll be moving away from social media)

It sure seems like it, but I think things are getting progressively better.

Look back at any time in history and unless you were pretty darn lucky, you had a short and miserable life compared to today’s standards.

I think the perception of the decline on civilization is just being amplified like never before.

Scary things grab our attention and we now have a major portion of the world’s economy built on capturing and keeping people’s attention.

Vying for consumer attention is not new, it’s just technology has allowed us to scale it up to crippling proportions.

I think people are generally better to each other today, in most places and in most ways. I think we’ll save our environment well before it’s too late. I think humans will be just fine.

Though, I also think, as today and as 100 years ago, 100 years from now will sometimes feel like the worst time ever to be a human.

I agree with other commenters that rosy retrospection may be at play, and that in many regards the world today is better than ever before.

That said, you might enjoy Scott Alexander's essay "Meditations on Moloch", describing how many aspects of our society are multipolar traps / races to the bottom: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

A sample:

  Imagine a capitalist in a cutthroat industry. He employs workers in a sweatshop to sew garments, which he sells at minimal profit. Maybe he would like to pay his workers more, or give them nicer working conditions. But he can’t, because that would raise the price of his products and he would be outcompeted by his cheaper rivals and go bankrupt. Maybe many of his rivals are nice people who would like to pay their workers more, but unless they have some kind of ironclad guarantee that none of them are going to defect by undercutting their prices they can’t do it.

  Like the rats, who gradually lose all values except sheer competition, so companies in an economic environment of sufficiently intense competition are forced to abandon all values except optimizing-for-profit or else be outcompeted by companies that optimized for profit better and so can sell the same service at a lower price.

I understand the strong temptation to think like this. One very specific thing that I am sure has declined is journalism. The ad-supported model that was basically a patronage to writer-artist-philosophers is dead. As a result, I think we have very low quality information about what our world is like today, and much of what’s written is paid content or panicked clickbait. That means a whole lot of people get told every day that the world is burning.

But if you shut off the screens, I think you will find we live in a world that’s safer, richer, and more just than at any other point in history.

Personally, my main concerns are geopolitical and environmental. Either could knock us off this relatively great pedestal we sit on. To respond to that belief, I have aimed my career at contributing solutions.

You're not off base regarding the cars and the crime. It is well documented. There has been an increase in traffic accidents the last three years and I have been following it because I wondered myself if I noticed it. NHTSA gives an update biannually I think. Road traffic deaths per mile driven increased in 2020, 2021, and 2022. I think it's still unknown if this is starting to revert to the pre pandemic mean but I haven't checked in about six months. It's related to the increase in crime although I have heard people suggest that there was simply a madness that occurred caused by empty streets during the covid lockdowns. Perhaps people got used to a lack of enforcement and being able to drive at much higher speeds on roads and they are set in their ways now. Police are somewhat unwilling to start enforcing this aggressively in my area because they have to take officers off of patrols and because it leads to an increase in violent officer encounters when they pull people over. The reality is they have bigger problems and not enough staff.

The cars you are talking about with modded exhausts could be just the area you are living in but there is a car culture involving loud, fast, sporty cars and the people who drive these cars are pretty apathetic about whether it annoys anyone. It's unclear to me if this is growing but I think it is anecdotally. Maybe it's worth looking into this further. It wouldn't be hard to track car sales and the growth of modded Japanese cars. I remember this always being a thing since Fast and Furious but I thought it died out for a while. not sure =\

Regarding the subscription revenue thing I think this comes from business schools and public companies wanting to secure revenue streams for investors. I think it is definitely overdone. In the cloud business it kind of works but I think this model of business is being applied to other businesses due to its success. You see almost everyone trying to convert their business (ink for printers!) into some kind of a subscription model. It's probably just a dumb trend that's being propagated by 'experts'. This is also me speculating.

My gut feeling is that we're entering into capitalism's end game phase. The endless growth is unsustainable and is eating away the only planet we have. Once it becomes apparent that business as usual isn't going to work any longer and that cost of living will eat away any reserves one might have, I expect things to get very bad for a lot of people. I feel this outlook might influence a lot of that: Get as much as possible now, so you might make it longer. So start collecting bottle caps now :-)

OP, At the risk of sounding like self promotion, I have 2 products that I am working on and really want to be as "just" as possible. ( One of them being https://mergeclouds.com/ , it is still work in progress ) .

1) Non-recurring , fixed price .

2) The software will not stop working even after privacy / terms update ( you are not forced to agree to use keep them ). They will just work based on last configuration of privacy policy when you bought them .

Basically treating software like a physical product, you pay for them once and regardless of how manufacturing changes does not change how product you already own functions. At-least from my side as a developer I completely agree and am trying to stay true.

>General worker apathy is endemic everywhere I go people seem aggravated I would dare to check my order and point out they didn't put in the ketchup i asked for, or the napkins, or whatever. Or when I dine in the tables are dirty. Or the gym is filthy, the cleaner just drags the mop around looking busy but accomplishing nothing. But in many instances they keep asking for more tips.

I don't think I'm off base in asserting that _this_ attitude is a major contributing factor to why the world feels "in decline" to you.

Perhaps if you went through life with a little more empathy for people who are almost certainly living in or around poverty, you'd feel a little more of a sense of community and less hostility toward strangers.

Somewhat offtopic but I've found reading Gwendolyn Leick's comprehensive history of Mesopotamia (~4000BC->1000AD) and it's really helped me understand how civilizations --- successful ones, at least --- consent to ebb and flow.

There have been, in history, periods of hundreds of years where the tide went out on civ. Because their civilizations were more-or-less designed for this, it was ok. Whole cities were abandoned when rivers changed their courses over hundreds (or in some cases, dozens) of years. And this was painful, but it was also ok.

Our civ is not nearly as well-engineered as all that, however. We got so obsessed with planet-scale development we forgot century-scale development. Fast and brittle, like driving a Ferrari offroad.

I attribute it primarily to lack of appreciation for the foundation of civilization: Private property.

Violations of private property are primarily done through the state, which socializes costs and thereby both reduces incentives for responsible behaviour and increases incentives to be dependent and irresponsible. Less wealth is created, more wealth is squandered.

Many who raise democracy to an practically religious status also contribute to this decline, as it overshadows much more important cultural values, such as free and open public discourse, decentralized / local governance and of course private property. It's almost as if, as long as you're in the majority, anything goes, perverse incentives be damned.

Some counterpoint though I don’t totally disagree.

- had a guy playing loud music outside our building in the middle of the night, called police regularly and they would come and address it, mostly useless but at least they cared. - another guy did the same thing, I asked him to stop and he did, no trouble - my current landlord is about as good or slightly better than other landlords I’ve had over the last 15 years - other people on my block (Brooklyn NY) are mostly very friendly, neighbors help each other out, say hello, etc. - I have approximately 1 bad encounter with someone per year in transit, which is about what I had when I lived in another major metropolitan area in a “friendlier” country 15 years ago

It's part of a long-term decline that accelerated markedly in 2015 but started much earlier, with 9-11 being a major factor. The US had problems before that, of course, , but 9-11 engendered a siege mentality accompanied by a severe failure of confidence.

Must be American thing.

Where I live things either do not change much or improve because of tech advance.

Of course I don't know anything about US other than some websites. But I think that US issue roots with disrespect of police. You do remember how you forced policemen to kneel? That looked terrible for me. We don't do that. Now police don't want to work, so you get loud people, stealing, higher crime, etc. Solve that thing. Stop bullying police. Respect them. If they killed some criminal, applaud, not judge them. World is better without criminals with drugs in their blood. Don't treat criminals as heroes. Even if they're of black colour. That does not make them saint.

i'm nearly 70 years old. believe me, things have generally got better, except possibly for the quality of fish & chip shops.

https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/Lin...

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege

I was at a walgreens in SF yesterday for ~30 minutes and witnessed 3 separate incidents of homeless people stealing as much as they could carry without consequence. I don’t see how this microcosm depicts a sustainable society.

Hard to explain all the points you've mentioned with one single root cause, but if I were to pick one I would say: people don't care anymore because they're bored.

We've reached a level of comfort for most of the population that is probably akin to the wealthiest people at the worst point of decadence of the Roman Empire. There is nothing to do, nothing to thrive for. The nation is not even working towards anything as a collective. Leaders have no interest in solving the current challenges (poverty, homelessness, hunger, etc) because they help keep the population in check.

I believe you are right to sense a change in our zeitgeist (each era has one). In this case I think it is caused by a feeling of impending doom, perhaps mainly because the prospect of nuclear war has bubbled up (again) lately. This particular doomsday prospect has the curious property that we block it out from our minds as too horrible to even think possible, and anyway nothing we can do to prevent. In some this creates a general sense of gloom, in others it creates a hedonistic urgency, because "après moi, le déluge", in yet some a feeling of general and roaming anger.

My two cents

I believe the narrative that tells me everything is good and I shouldn't complain, and also that I should get really upset at things that the screen tells me to. I am an individual who expresses my individuality by conforming to all the trends and the world owes ME happiness! Your whole post seems negative and like you're denying all the progress we're making in allowing people to live their own truth within the confines of the neoliberal global order's approved options. Please report / ban for hate speech. Only positive vibes please!

Don't forget we just got out of a couple of terribly turbulent and damaging years of pandemic response, and before that we've been riding quite a high.

Things will get better, but they might get worse first.

You are not off-base. Your reflections on your society are sound, and you do right in raising them for discussion. The fact that you can (and should) is part of what democracy is about. If you think something ought to be better, then why not try to engage and influence your community with your ideas? Don't leave it to the politicians (and companies) to dictate what is valuable in your country.

Easier said than done, I know, but imagine if we all actually made an effort to shape our society, and took responsibility for it.

> Software seems to be overrun by a mentality that any future cost is worth it to save even 1 minute of development time today.

Because SWE's report to engineering managers, who report to other layers of management who report to the executive suite who report to a board who report to those who own a majority of shares in the corporation. The message coming down from on high is fast, fast, fast, features that will increase next quarter's profits, or even this quarter's profits. Everything flows from this.

Antisocial behavior has been on the rise since the pandemic. You aren't imagining that part. Fight on planes, petty theft, car accidents, murder all up.

Not so sure about the rest of your complaints.

It’s cultural rot. Those values that you cherish are not seen as important by a growing portion of people in society, and those values aren’t being transmitted to their children, etc.

And kids are listening to strange music and don't respect their elders and dress funny, and all these people demand their rights!

Sorry,smarky,but virtually everything you mentioned seems specific / personal / localized / variable. I'm fairly sure that loud motorcycles and evil landlords existed previously. It's even entirely possible your specific neighbourhood and/or workplace is in fact getting worse. But it's a big world out there!

The noise complaint is the one that resonated with me. My pet peeve is the phenomenon of libraries being converted into some kind of community center/day care centre. In my day, libraries were as quiet as tombs and the noise standard was enforced. Now library staff put out kids’ board games to play. Or tolerate grown adults having long cell phone conversations in the library. This is not Starbucks; get out. Even noise canceling headphones isn’t enough.

Lots of my friends have been discussing and thinking the same things. Sounds like you’ve been feeling it too. Something is off. Plus everything you said, I feel like my clothes never wear as well the next day from the past, my hair never falls in quite the same way, and even my coffee tastes...wrong. Our institutions are crumbling, nobody trusts their neighbor anymore, and we stay up at night wondering to ourselves...How can we go back?

Things are better now than they ever have been in some regards, but yes in others we are entering the "find out" era after the "fuck around" era.

Low fuel and house prices. Not worrying about the environmental impact of humanity's excesses. Pointless wars when we all thought we'd learnt better.

Forty or so years ago, quite a number of people seriously thought that we were months away from thermonuclear war. Thirty-five years ago, crack cocaine was a big deal, distribution of it was violently contested, and murder rates were high in a lot of cities. As for poisonous air, I don't know that it has recently been as bad as it was in Pittsburgh back when a temperature inversion killed some number of people.

Yes, some things are getting worse. But the truth is that some things are getting better in some contexts, some things are getting worse in other contexts. It seems you are focusing on "what is getting worse FOR YOU". This may be an example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

The mix of complaints points to two causes

(1) Noisy people, young people not caring about quality, etc - it's caused by a phenomenon called "aging", I'm struggling with that myself.

(2) Major metrics going downhill, etc - the problem here is that you are caught in the spreading epidemic of "watching the news" while at the same time, metrics keep moving up and down and good and bad things keep happening, as before.

I'd add to others' points here: if you can afford to, live somewhere that provides an atmosphere that makes you happy. The seven years I lived in Seattle made me deeply unhappy in many of the ways you describe. Moving somewhere where people are generally kinder and more conscientious of one another has had a considerable positive impact on my outlook on "global wellbeing."

Not 100% sure.

What I do notice is the frenzy with which certain people attack those small parts of the globe where these things are less of an issue (the usual tired assaults upon Singapore and Japan for their crime of being cleaner and safer).

So maybe the answer is - the people that matter don't think the juice is worth the squeeze when it comes to a more civilised society. And the rest of us just have to suffer.

We live in a loop.

Remember that we still have unlimited source of food and water, that should be enough to be happy and optimistic, but probably we need a world war (again) to value what we have now.

Remember when we were free to work in whatever we wanted, do whatever we wanted, go out or not, travel or not, spend hours on the internet doing things like discussing on hacker news with the fridge full?... good times...

I don't entirely disagree with you but I've experienced differently. In software, for example, I have seen precisely the opposite: there's been a lack of long term decision making. Instead of saving developer time overall there's a push to write it even if it is bad. Then it goes into production immediately and it becomes very difficult to get it fixed correctly

You too will get old, and when you do you'll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.

[https://www.songlyrics.com/baz-luhrmann/everybody-s-free-to-...]

Independently of amoral and shitty behavior in a lot of industries, which you could probably debate back and forth whether or not that has gotten better or worse, I think that the general health of the population is in decline. It is likely multifactorial as to causes, but I don't really it's even debatable, and this will make EVERYTHING worse.

Complete speculation, but this sounds like a decline of community, where interactions are more transactional rather than personal.

The digital world has advanced ; the physical world was left behind. We did not adapt. We placed hurdles regulation and rentseeking traps in anything but the digital.

The root of this is in demographics of course. Different generations focus on different kinds of wealth and will defend it till the end of their lives. In democracy, it becomes a numbers game

If there is one thing that always stays the same, it's every single generation coming of age and saying "Everything is headed towards ruin!"

Believe me when I say, everyone before you, going back thousands of years, have said the same thing.

"Kids these days don't listen to their elders and don't value work!" - carved into Greek walls

“Play long-term games with long-term people. All returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.”

Idk, maybe for whatever reason right now, as others mentioned, the macro environment or maybe your micro environment is incentivizing this behavior but it won’t work out in the long run.

Just gotta do you, and do good, OP.

> Software seems to be overrun by a mentality that any future cost is worth it to save even 1 minute of development time today. ... >it seems that people get promoted away from their problems so they're not the ones to solve

This has been going on forever and it's anything but software specific.

You're just getting old.

Things have always been like this.

I studied Econ in college because it was a particular interest of mine. I hated it. I also wanted to understand it, so that I could know why it rubbed me the wrong way and live intentionally to push against it.

There was this moment when I was in a grad course and the professor was talking about self-optimizing markets. That's when it hit me. I literally stood up in the class, interrupted everything and went like "wait, the math isn't optimizing for income inequality". It was kind of funny watching more than 100 little economists in training suddenly start tearing apart the equation at once. You could literally hear the sound of frantic spreadsheeting and charting.

In the end, the professor himself said that it was true, you could achieve a fully "optimized" economy with literally everything being owned by a handful of people. Made me think.

How is a system supposed to be beneficial for us all when the mathematics at its core don't actually consider societal benefit?

If an economy is fully "optimized" but everyone is sick, sad, and angry - is it actually optimal?

A mathematical model can make sense without being sensible. This is why I have an implicit distrust of algorithms and other systems of optimization.

So when were things better according to you? During the 2010s post-housing-bubble crash? The 2000s with the dotcom bubble and 9/11 and subsequent wars? 1990s AIDS epidemic? 1980s with Reagan's trickle-down economics and all the insanity of the cold war? 1970s and the Vietnam war?

Things are getting better, broadly over time, but you hear more and more about the wider badness. Stress reduces compassion to others and so you yourself may miss the good in others.

There's a never ending cycle of impending doom broadcast on all channels.

Things _feel_ worse. That doesn't mean they are.

Maybe you had good parents who shielded you from shit of the world and now you're getting older.

Wow, I’m sorry you feel this way. And I’m glad I don’t have to wake up as you. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but get a grip. Life has always been and always will be mixed with good and bad. No matter if you choose a “pentad” from Roman times, today, or 600 years from now.

Children; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room, they contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers. Children are now tyrants!

>the world just seems to get markedly worse

the world = US? Cause your irl examples (people are noisy, police, environment quality) are very very US specific. And even then I guess it's hyper local in the US too.

But tbh I'd not be really surprised if you really meant that the world = US

Just read the first two sentences, disagree with this in Europe. I feel family and friends caring. I feel there's quite a bit of good faith among strangers. I do feel a bit of that people seem emotionally too blocked, but I think that has always been there?

Might not be one of the most important things but some of thr best videogames I played have been released in the last 5 years, so things haven't necessarily gotten worse.

Keep in mind that covid has been here for the last 3,affecting everything (yes, 3 damn years!)

I will address only one of your complaints:

>General worker apathy is endemic ... the gym is filthy, the cleaner just drags the mop around looking busy but accomplishing nothing. But in many instances they keep asking for more tips. <

I have held many jobs in my life. I learned to clean the kitchen and cook as a child and later to sweep, mop, rake, etc. once I was big enough to do so effectively. I learned to take orders and to work with others on a task.

Every time I see "the cleaner just drag[s] the mop around looking busy but accomplishing nothing" I offer to show them how to mop. They always allow me to do so! [I can hear the Tom Sawyer jokes now!] The root problem is that they don't know how to mop!

I explain that I once did lots of sweeping, mopping(grocery stores et al), cleaning and that there is a method to all of it. I take them through the procedure:

- wetting/drying the mop,

- when to change the water/soap,

- drying(squeeze) the mop,

- patterns to use in mopping, etc.

In all of that I emphasize safety for themselves and warn of accidents I've seen/caused while mopping.

Employees really don't know this. I know it only b/c I was explicitly taught (in pieces over my earlier life) or experienced it.

The root problem is that some facilities have no one who knows how to do basic tasks such as cleaning. It is assumed that such knowledge is acquired by magical cognitive osmosis in the past. Often an employee is shown a mess, a mop bucket (complete with dirty water from the last use) and told to "clean it up!".

It helps to be humble: I'm not the boss, I'm not ordering them to follow a procedure and I'm not correcting them. I show and tell them what I once did and how I was taught and that I was once "in their shoes" and did the same task. I am no better a person than they are and it is always a worthwhile and good thing to work safely, to do a good job and that their work is valued.

FWIW mopping accidents are wildly varied from slippages and falls to mixing the wrong mopping ingredients [entire store cleared out due to HCL acid gas - don't mix cleaning fluids]:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mixing+wrong+cleaning+fluids&t=ope...

Inflation, easier access to negative information, sped up automation, fear of replacement by robots, military tensions, global warming. It's not every 5 years, more like long phases when superpowers become like supermassive blackholes and implode.

We’re sliding into that post capitalist world that is depicted in so many “scifi” books. It’s apparent but everyone just seems to accept it. Things are going to be very bleak in 50-100 years with most people living in poverty with a tiny rich elite.

I've often wondered if 2,000 years from now historians will place the height of our civilization maybe somewhere in the mid 1800s or something like that and call our time "the crisis of the 21st century".

It's kind of fanciful but who knows

Some of what you said resonates with me, but it seems like you're not looking objectively for evidence to the contrary. Some might be generally true, some generally false, and some might be locally true but not society-wide problems.

Try traveling around. You’ll see that the world outside of your immediate vicinity is actually pretty good. That’s the way I can view the world as positive even when I see the weaknesses/negative aspects of my immediate surroundings.

We didn't start the fire. The world's been always burning, since the world's been turnin'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g

You’re just more aware. It’s been like this for longer than five years - lol. For some of these issues - it’s been a while.

Our entire media system is built around attention. Your attention is more easily grabbed by bad things than good.

A more pertinent question would be what can one do about it realistically? And analysis of why things are declining is generally futile simply because involves societal/govt change that doesn't happen easily.

People are gonna people. My main priority is my own mental wellbeing and my sense of inner calm among all the chaos you see. Self care, and self love instead of selfishness.

'Hell is other people' as the saying goes.

Most of your points sound easily resolved by simply moving. Sounds like it can't be 'worse' in your view, and America is full of ~1 million pop cities that'll be a different experience.

If you're not allergic to reddit, the collapse sub might interest you.

Are you in California? Specifically soCal? I've noticed this too but it seems to me to be mainly here in SoCal. I go back home to Phx, AZ or other parts of the US and don't notice it as much.

You are too ingrained in the internet news. If you just turn off your news and actually look at things that directly affect you, you will find out that it is pretty great for Americans right now.

Maybe you are getting “grumpy old person” disease. We all get it at some point.

I agree with many of your complaints about landlords though, but it has been going on for much longer than 5 years.

Global poverty has decreased by more than half in the last 50 years.

> Police seem to not give a shit anymore. I've noticed what seems to be total lawlessness going on in my world. Folks stealing shit. People driving absurdly dangerously in cars that are not designed to travel like that. (tailgating, lane switch, accelerating at the fastest I've ever seen a beat up Sentra do...) . I never see cops hit lights and sirens at them

People say this like a truism. Go to a store, like Walmart or Target, fill up a basket with some goods, and then not pay for it. See how well it works. I do noy endorse this, but may as well put your words where your mouth is. People make these blanket statements because they sound convicting or popular.

I think this comment would be equally right in Victorian times.

The world is becoming every day more greedy.

The low interest rates environment increases wealth inequality and the rest is catching up to because wealthier as others.

You're not off base. Paul Ehrlich was right, the population bomb has exploded, the Earth's resources are stretched and breaking. That's the trouble at the root.

The Southpark episode calling noisy Harley riders fags aired in 2009 so its nothing new.

I've found the noise of vehicles was jarring after the long periods of quiet covid lockdowns.

I'm afraid this will happen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYD0qLY1orU

before things get better.

Hopefully not including "inclined not to talk' because of covid restrictions a form of 'declining'

Noisy people are all over the place and 24/7 noise is horrible for my health. The only way I know to escape noise is pay more for a better neighborhood.

...And no one can write anything without profanity. It's so ugly! Why make the world an uglier place?

Somewhat sarcastic, but I'm making a point too...

You might enjoy the Triggernometry podcast. Some of their guests discuss what society seems to be losing. Some are more optimistic than others.

I think it's just the current stage of capitalism. A lot of the products that meaningfully improve people's lives have been created so now it's more profitable for companies to just start rent seeking in every place they can.

It feels like so many of these complaints on your list are things that have existed for decades in western culture. I'd argue things are getting better.

Greed has always existed.

Anecdotally I find people less loud these days compared to when I grew up in the 80s and 90s. Remember boomboxes?

No one's really cared about quality when it comes to low skill labor. Western culture typically doesn't carry that kind of value or pride in work.

Police don't give a shit? Crime has been steadily falling over time.

Pollution: look at the industrial revolution.

You should read factfulness by Hans Rosling and realize the opposite. Both from a health perspective and economic and violence

I will just throw in some counter anecdata: in my little corner of the US, people are at least as nice as they were before.

I blame it all on Hollywood and media. If you watch the trend of media in the last decade it keeps getting darker.

https://ncase.me/trust/

you can find safeheaven in China/Russia if you commit crimes in the west and vice-versa.

Its become easy and shameless to commit crime. You have Britain gets $100 Billon dirty money every year and its a champion of free world.

My country spent a lot of money to bring back a human trafficker from Britain but failed. Its neo colonism.

Automation is playing a part here. "Software is eating the world", which means that many interactions are now based on software - that is buggy.

The level of customer service in any e-commerce website today would be innacceptable in even the shitiest of brick-and-mortar store.

Try buying shoes without getting the wrong size of the wrong model delivered to your neighboor's former address.

Try booking a plane with using your real first name if you daaaaare having a dash in it.

Try getting a refund for _anything_, canceling a subscription to _anything_, basically doing _anything_ that commits the now cardinal sin of "reducing someone's A.R.R.)

Try getting billed for just the amount of electricity / gas / water you consumed in the previous month, as opposed to some estimation based on what the prince of Nigeria would use if he was not in exile.

Try answering a phone and having it be someone you really want to receive phone calls from, as opposed to someone trying to sell you something else.

"Capitalism theory" has it that bad actors should get replaced by better competition - however we have (inevitably) stumbled into a "local extremum" where _everything_ is crappy, but people just get on with it. So there is really no incentive into making anything work, except maybe for some luxury items - though, I suspect those are getting shitty and full of buggy software, too.

On the other end, we still have relative peace for at least of couple months.

The world is getting objectively better in nearly every way. That’s my whole response to your post.

America is a recently dead empire and you are observing the corpse twitching and going into rigor.

I think it’s part of growing up that you become a lot more aware of all the problems in the world.

IDK. Things are going well for me.

Could be, but also you read bitter and jaded by life. May want to look deep into yourself.

Covid absurdity (vaccine policy, riots, too much money printing, rabid conspiracy theories, government incompetence, etc) ripped a hole in the social fabric

The thesis is hard to falsify and your methods of proving it seem less than rigorous.

For example this post being on the front page reminds me of how HN is declining.

I am convinced that this is the case. The reasons for it, I think, are actually quite simple.

* Software automation has destroyed the human role in society. No one knows anything anymore bor are they allowed to accomplish anything anymore. Just 15 years ago, I could call Amazon and get an American worker on the phone who could contact other departments directly and solve exceptional problems. I distinctly remember doing this in one instance where the person actually cared about getting me a single book. Now, I am lucky if I can even get the automated service to get me a person on chat, and even then the person is basically only allowed to do what the system allows them, but for exceptional cases they can maybe override it. This really destroys motivations of both customers and workers because we're just literally pawns in a massively connected and ubiquitous but wholly dysfunctional software system. I recently had a weird delivery issue where the customer service person didn't even have the capability or knowledge or want to just call the shipping warehouse. I had to just wait weeks until the system was able to handle it.

* The other thing is inequality is just off the rails. People realize that hard work and doing the right thing doesn't matter. This really beats people down when everything continually gets more expensive and more hidden behind obtuse systems. Companies do not care about individual customers anymore. A customer is merely a statistical model. All of this is because capitalism worships scale, which further drives inequality. Inequality creates this "every person for themselves" attitude.

We're in the age of "the computer says no". Technology and capitalism are destroying individual human value. This is literally the matrix. The architects are just the super rich.

Can you expand more on the five year (pentad) pattern and what you mean by that?

Loss of religious grounding.

Christianity was the north star for our societies, it organized people, align them to work together, put the future(love) before personal interest(excess pleasures, sins)

Without religion we are going to fail. There never was a working society without religion. Yes we are in a different time, we have to update our stories, but if we throw them out we are going to collapse.

Ex: does a doctor does what is good for him or for his patient? What about a regulator in the government or a scientific working at Pfizer, Twitter a bank or Google?

If people stop putting truth and love on top(christianity) and put personal gain higher not much of what we have will keep on working for long.

Personal side: we have never been more materialy comfortable yet we are more depressed, more anxious, more medicamented.

Family: We no longer have enough kids or manage to keep a couple long enough to bring kids into adulthood. Kids to single parent household do worse in almost every metric yet we don’t care or don’t look.

On the flip side a lot of people are looking for the missing pieces, are trying to reintegrate the wisdom that we had in an modern framework: Jordan Peterson, Verdake, Jonathan Pageau and others.

It’s very hard to reverse. If people no longer believe to higher power (truth and love) we default to a lower version of ourselves, our animals instincts and we don’t know how low we will go: should successful men have only one woman? Why not? People are free to do whatever they want. Could a billionaire have a huge harem of thousand of women ala Genghis Khan? If not, why not?

There is no rules anymore (beside obvious immediate harm). We have discarded our ancient wisdom as useless, so we create all the harms that are on a longer timescale: trust, family, society.

The police enforcement should be viewed as a pendulum swing: in the US at least you can see periods of heavy enforcement, political upheaval, periods of laxity, increased crime and misery, right-wing backlash, enforcement, backlash against that and progressive movements, periods of laxity... and that's where we are today in the pendulum swing.

The pluses are we're treating new and more diseases, exploring technologies that cure the previously incurable, and making progress in areas like energy efficiency.

There are all sorts of downsides and challenges, like alienation due to online personas and the diminishment of the value of in-person interaction; people who believe the online is reality and are forever seeing evil in everyone (the -cisms, the harassment, all those things the online connected world facilitates).

Those too will lead to some sort of correction.

It's a difficult time for sure but it's also a time for adaption. What other choice is there?

You caught the woke mind virus. Stop watching the news and it will fade.

Have you come across this meme?

Bad times create strong men, strong men create good times

etc.

Let me know your thoughts.

I'd tell you the reason for all that stuff with data, but I'd get my post flagged. If you want a whole bunch of bad answers and maybe one or two decent well thought out uncensored answers I'd try asking on an uncensored forum.

Meta commentary:

Does anyone else notice that the comments which appear to agree with OP seem to be lacking both data and historical and contemporary world knowledge?

Pure speculation: OP and supporters are living through their first economic cycle inflection as working adults.

you’re 5 years older.

you may have been young five years ago now you aren’t.

Everything is pretty much the same as it was. Fees and fraud have been a part of urban society since urban society was invented during babylonian times.

Some things that have changed:

You can walk into pretty much any standing structure, drink straight from the tap, and not die a horrible death from bacterial infection.

Fast food is historically the most nutrition per-weight per-dollar that's ever existed.

There's a cure/vaccine for most diseases and conditions. Yes some companies are witholding preventative treatments in favor of money. On the same hand, having categorized continuous treatment for most existing conditions is a marvel of science.

It your only complaint is "People are rude and why does stuff cost money?" then I recommend indentured servitude as an alternative.

Literally not one thing listed is a new. All of that had been going on for my entire life and I've been here about a half a century.

Seems like you are just finally noticing what's always been and are upset by it.

You’re way off base by almost every measure.

You are suffering from perception bias.

Well, I can tell you from my own experience… greater productivity means everyone is overworked. And better technology could benefit everyone if it was open source, but instead it helps only thoss who have amassed a lot of economic and political capital (large corporations and governments). When it comes to Web2 and Web3, it seems to have been completely captured by grift and profit motive, and has no good open source applications for communities! The public just has no tools to serve themselves. And because of this, the governments and corporations will soon force everyone to use digital ID and central coin to do anything. This isn’t hyperbole — check the links in the description of this video: https://youtu.be/uwRSzNTp2ko

People often hate Big Tech and Big Government overreach and surveillance capitalism and war and … but there is no viable alternative.

Since 2011 I have been writing, with my own dev team, at my own expense, an open source platform so communities worldwide can have an alternative to Big Tech. We reached 11 million users in over 100 countries and translated to 15 languages.

But most VCs and investors don’t understand it and say we are doing too much. You can use it here: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

Then in 2018 I launched a spinoff company to create Web3 smart contracts for communities to govern themselves, manage their own currencies and generally run software they don’t have to trust any central parties.

But here on HN many people knee-jerk hate and downvote it because it’s Web3 and blockchain based. You can grab them and use them for free: https://intercoin.org/applications

So I don’t know… to build these things for the good of the world takes a lot. It took me 10 years and $1 million dollars so far, and my team probably several man-decades put together. And we give it all away. But what I have noticed is that people don’t really get why something is important until they start to use it in their life.

Also we started two youtube channels where I interview people including regulators and sociopolitical thinkers and tech people. This Thursday I have Noam Chomsky and David Harvey on a panel, for instance:

https://youtube.com/IntercoinOrg

https://youtube.com/QbixPlatform

If I needed people’s appreciation or VC investment I would have given up long ago.

entropy of the object or the observer

Another good piece of "doom porn". "fraudulent crypto schemes" is an oxymoron. crypto itself is fraud.

Daily reminder, America is not the whole world. Conservatives, neo liberals and capitalists have pillaged your country. Other places are doing a lot better.

Seasonal Afective Disorder maybe

> the world just seems to get markedly worse?

The world is significantly better than the year before cause the world is not just USA. Imagine being gay even 20 years from now. Imagine being black during slavery. Imagine being a woman in the 50s. Imagine having your country colonized. Imagine dying of polio before the vaccines... This is endless. Things are still broken, but we human as a whole still improve.

Kids, get off my lawn!

1. We're in late-stage capitalism. Things are optimized for capital, not for people.

2. You are a victim of the fact that sensationalism drives views and clicks. Things aren't getting any worse, you're just exposed to the worst of it.

2. You're getting older.

What about WWIII?

You should read Factfulness by Hans Rosling.

29yo woman here. I passionately share the bitter sentiment that most things are declining. Some anecdotal evidence.

* The built quality of the average fridge, car, phone, piece of clothing, sofa feels lower. A few years lifespan at most. One has to pay big bucks to get great build. Also, we repair much less and replace much more. * Community and family bonds are extremely weak. People in my city used to go to church on Sundays and socialise. We used to have family meals weekly. Now each family is locked in their house I feel. People don't have kids and think they can get an equal level of fulfilment from work or hobbies or traveling. * Many transaction, not many interactions with people. Attention spans have become super short. People very self-centered. No ability to listen. Not even interest. Genuine conversations f2f in decline. During my childhood people used to sit out on their balconies and have conversations with people who passed by. Kids used to play outside. I feel kids were more smiley, vibrant and full of life. * Aura of laziness and entitlement. I feel in general people have less appetite to go out and do things. I also think we are way more fragile and mentally weak growing up in this societies whilist being protected from any adversity from our families. * We are more connected than every but feel the least truly connected. A result of digital communication I believe instead of real f2f touch and talk. * Nobody of my friends can afford a house. My parents had one at 25. We are 30 and most of them are still stuck at entry level jobs (various reasons). 30s are meant to be our career peak. * Brother coming fresh out of university and it is impossible to get a job. I had no trouble, parents, not even. * Every building looks the same. Not attention to detail put anymore. Furniture too. And ofcourse software. Every landing page every product feels kinda the same. Minimal they call it. Where is the soul? Where is the craft? Emotional design? * The people successful online are the ones who shout the loudest not the ones that have the highest quality or are most legit. This holds for 'creators' and for businesses that are trying to sell you something. It is all about sneaky loud marketing. * Woke culture. Don't even get me started. * We are more productive than ever but work just as much as we used to. It used to be that human progress was measured by the amount of labor one had to do to make a living. The less the better. This metric has barely moved. * Gentlemen are hard to find and not appreciated. Craftsmen. Good ethical businesses - everybody is looking to make a quick buck with little care and devotion it feels. What was once considered the peak of human flourishing is extremely hard to find.

Sure there are so many things that got better like access to knowledge, power to create our own opportunities, cheap travel, conveniences like UBER or online bookings, improved healthcare(?), generation that cares about doing the right thing(?) but do they balance out the negatives? I am not so sure. Again; I am talking about Western societies. And these are just observations and feelings of one person. I don't have data to back these.

I am really trying to check if I am objective or if I am being driven by emotion aka nostalgia for the good ol days, as many in the comments mention. But I still hold the position that the at least Western societies is getting worse.

By many measures of wellbeing personally I am better off now than in the past: salary/material wellbeing, fitness, number of friends, freedom, skill, self-awareness, wisdom, emotional maturity, peace, finding my mission in life, having an unbelievable partner, great bonds with family etc But still I truly, objectively think life is not as good as 90s - 2010s

Serious answer, the earth's magnetic field weakening is accelerating [1] [2].

It began declining in 1859 [3] but the changes have increased in recent times, with the magnetic pole shifting significantly such that even airport runways had to be renumbered [4].

The weakening geomagnetic field leaves earth more vulnerable [5] to inclement space weather [6].

It has been shown in mice, the negative behavioral effects of increased space radiation [7]:

"Studies in murine models have shown that exposure to high-energy 56Fe particles, which are the largest effective dose contributor in the space radiation environment, impairs cognitive function. These impairments include deficits in spatial learning and memory, object recognition, and operant conditioning, which parallel the cognitive decline observed in aged animals. [...] These behavioural studies, taken together with investigations into low dose HZE radiation effects on neurons and neural tissue, illustrate the risks that space radiation may pose to human health."

and [8]:

"Acute and chronic tissue alterations arise from the damaging effects of highly energetic charged particles that penetrate the spacecraft and traverse though the tissues of the body. These fully ionized nuclei are derived chiefly from solar ejection events (e.g. protons) or galactic cosmic rays (GCR) composed of light and heavy ions (Z from 1 to 26)

Past work with rodents has demonstrated that whole body and/or brain exposure to charged particles can elicit various behavioral decrements that can be linked to impairments in the hippocampus, amygdala, basal forebrain, medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and other brain domains."

If this model holds true, we can expect things to get worse and worse at an increasing rate in the coming years/decades until the field strengthens.

[1] (2014) Earth's Magnetic Field Is Weakening 10 Times Faster Now https://www.livescience.com/46694-magnetic-field-weakens.htm...

[2] (2020) Earth’s magnetic field anomaly: Scientists have no clue why it is weakening and if it will disappear https://www.timesnownews.com/technology-science/article/eart...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

[4] (2021) https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/airport-runway-names-shift-ma...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_field#Signi...

[6] Space Weather Prediction Center: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration https://www.swpc.noaa.gov

[7] Space-like 56Fe irradiation manifests mild, early sex-specific behavioral and neuropathological changes in wildtype and Alzheimer’s-like transgenic mice https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-48615-1

[8] Persistent nature of alterations in cognition and neuronal circuit excitability after exposure to simulated cosmic radiation in mice https://sci-hub.ru/10.1016/j.expneurol.2018.03.009

"everything is subscription model [...] pay N times to access something thats only worth 1-3x" For me, 10 bucks a month for music and ~15 for movies/series (~1.5 concurrent subscriptions on average) adds up to less than a percent of my net income. For that, I can watch basically any series, any movie I want, and listen to any music I like.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Money in politics.

It's called late stage capitalism

I know this might not be a popular opinion, but: late-stage capitalism. Not (necessarily) from the /r/latestagecapitalism everything-sucks capitalism-sucks stance, but more fundamental than that.

We're living in an era of human history where core growth has effectively halted; and most "growth" since the 80s-90s has been synthetic. Real growth overwhelmingly comes from one place: rising population rates. The net rate of growth of our population, in the economies that matter to our global perception of the world, has effectively hit zero since the 70s; the excess deaths caused by multiple back-to-back recessions and COVID-19 close the gap on any small lead the birth rate may have had over the death rate.

Some people say "efficiency gains from automation will help close the economic gap caused by a declining population". Barely, but keep hope alive. Automation is extremely expensive, requiring complex machinery, complex software, smart engineers to build it, and smart operators to keep it running. All of those components have dozens of steps in the supply chain to get from raw material or babies to an effective, non-brittle system. The jump from "farming by hand" to "a tractor" is FAR more capital efficient than the jump from "a tractor" to "a tractor that drives itself". Why are Ubers so much more expensive than Cabs? Because Uber has to fund a massive engineering and logistics effort to automate the delivery of its services; cabs don't.

The more pertinent point to try and answer is: Why is the birth rate declining? There's a ton of proximate answers to this question, but the root cause of all the problems is really: declining growth in raw resource deposits and virgin land. This decline in growth has caused material things, and thus services, to all become more expensive over time.

These are the four things that keep an economy running effectively: People, Resources, Land, and Automation. When they fall out of balance, too much or too little, things start falling apart in both obvious and insidious ways. Wars are fought over countries having too much land and resources. Too little of them, and people can't afford to reproduce. Automation can help close some of the gap, but too much of it leads to expensive, brittle systems and non-productive bureaucracy to support them. An imbalance stresses the system; it stresses the people in it, it forces them to do counter-productive things like resort to robbery, it causes hormone imbalance which can lead to aggression, which influence the polices' default response from friend to foe, its a forcing function on today-over-tomorrow in businesses meeting demands from customers, taking shortcuts like not fully researching the harms of deploying some new chemical in food processing or dumping waste into the ocean or not properly responding to carbon emissions. Macroeconomics influences everything; it can raise people out of poverty, but it can also destroy them.

There's a few good things on the horizon that may improve the situation, though we're talking timescales of decades.

* There are large parts of the population whose labor has been under-exploited by the capitalist system. As China declines, SE-Asia is picking up some of the slack; and there's an entire content of people in Africa. Continuing industrial-scale exploitation of these people will help sustain us a bit; we've got a good start with e.g. diamond and cobalt mines in sub-Saharan Africa, and I expect we'll see even more over the next decade. The birth rate in these countries is still a lot healthier than the West/East; but, naturally, it won't stay that way as industrialization and fighting for workers rights happens, leading to improved standard of living; they're just a few decades behind us, but they'll catch up.

* COVID-19 reduced the population pretty substantially. Global warming will continue that trend into the next thirty years, killing and displacing in the eight to ten figures of people. Contrary to some previous points; this will actually be good for the short-term economy, though quite bad for the long-term one. Reducing consumption will be good. Mass migrations of desperate people will be good to keep the labor supply going. More deadly natural disasters will give the government the credibility it needs to spend money without triggering concerns about inflation or insolvency (similar to COVID-19). Just watch out for natural impacts to raw resources in the supply chain, like flooding in the US bread basket or wars in eastern europe over natural resources (ope).

* Space, I guess. If we, as a species, can start sustainably living, producing, and reproducing in space, either independent of gravity wells or within other ones; that's basically the only out without a massive disruption to civilization. Of course, there's challenges with space; but the sheer amount of resources should pretty easily overwhelm most of those challenges. If you're paying attention to what is happening and will continue to happen in the world: building technologies that will push forward the colonization of space destinations proximate to resource rich areas is the single most important thing humanity should be working on right now. There's nothing else. EVs are cool and important; but not the most important. Ad technology isn't important. Stopping climate change is long-past being attainable; but we're not talking about "escaping to space and leaving earth behind", we're talking about finding more balance, being able to send resources back to earth, creating optionality.

Late-stage capitalism not from the sense that capitalism always terminates in a world where we're living today. But from the sense that no global economic system is sustainable without growth. We can find more growth, or we can live in isolated communes at a thousandth the population size and subsistence farm (though given global warming this probably isn't an option anymore).

You are not wrong, things are markedly worse, and they will continue to get worse because the people who have been put in charge have decided for you that when things fail, its because not enough resources were provided. Unlike engineers, they claim we need more resources, more power, more of everything, and it will always fall short as structural issues often do.

To understand how we got here you have to understand things which are no longer taught.

I would not expect a solid answer here or on any other social media. Given the complicity of social media platforms, most of what you see is fabricated and warped to increase engagement.

Most intelligent people rarely participate because of the ease at which censorship, amplification and deamplification occur.

To address some of your points, Landlords in most respects are the victims of the people who funded them to purchase property (the banks). There are cases where that is not true but they are a minority (i.e. Blackrock/Private Equity purchasing up 40-50% of the market in some areas). The cost is passed on.

Second, People are generally indoctrinated, and they have had that happen over such a vulnerable and long time that they become unthinking, and their ability to communicate with others that might reign them in has been interferred with intentionally.

They are not taught how to recognize harmful or manipulative content, and fall into a psychological state where some might argue they are no better than animals. This is one state.

Apathy is the other state where people can't react, its a direct attack against our way of life. If you can polarize large portions of the population into either of those two states, you can historically change governments. Tactics that cause disunity, and the inability to organize is what prevents us from responding.

Software has always been motivated and driven by the motives of people who develop it. There has been a long drive to push people to answer the 'can we do this', instead of the 'should we do this'. Hubris plays a large role here.

The idea of technology solving certain problems is laughable. The faith in science in that respect is a lie and completely ignores the brutal aspects of humanity which most are taught as sugarcoated versions. I've known people where they don't understand why most other countries hate or think Americans are stupid.

As for subscription models, this is what happens when you have a concerted and unopposed effort over 50 years to weaken property rights, and strengthen control in the hands of company's who have consolidated their marketshare to the point of monopoly. This isn't capitalism. The people you voted or didn't vote for chose this for you along with the other 200k+ people they represent. The most good for the most people... which isn't good at all.

The core driving force for why we have progressed so well was the division of labor, you can learn more about what was known by reading classic books like "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith (1778). Its a very fine balance which has been broken for quite some time.

The core of the issue, is money over time enables corruption. Money isn't bad, but a Ponzi inevitably leads to loss because its unsound, and relies on deception. What do you think our current (no longer fractional a/o 2020) banking system is? (A ponzi).

Based off what you've written, you appear to be vulnerable, and unable to critically identify truth from misinformation. This is a very dangerous state to be in. I would cut out social media and reeducate yourself on how propaganda works. You may find the book Influence by Cialdini useful in identifying the psychological blindspots that are often employed.

I think I disagree with all of these things.

* Real estate is expensive. Landlords take on a lot of risk. A small example is that my landlord noticed that their water bill is absurdly high. Now they have to give everyone notice that they need to look for the source of leaks in their apartment; while the legally-mandated waiting period is going on, they are just losing money on paying for water. Combined with things like rent stabilization, mandatory lease renewal, etc. they might be losing money on rent, even though you think it's "too damn high" or whatever.

* People being loud outside bothering you inside is under your control. Get an apartment on the back of a building. Use double-glazed windows that isolate noise.

* General worker apathy is a product of being paid very poorly. People that would do an excellent job serving you food have found higher-paying jobs; those employers can pick and choose who they employ because the higher salary attracts a steady applicant pool. Again, I think this is just a product of where you eat. Yeah, they are going to fuck up your 99 cent cheeseburger. Go to a restaurant that's $300 a head, and you will probably get exceptional service. You pick what's important to you; money or service. Fortunately, laws ensure that the food at any establishment won't poison you, so at least you don't have to "pay" for that.

* I really think getting something out today is more valuable than making something perfect tomorrow. I can see how this feels bad; software is your craft and mentally you can spare no expense to make something "the best". I feel this way for personal projects, but not for products where I'm being paid. Before I gild the lily, I have to see if anyone even wants the feature. If they do, then refactor and make it perfect. If they don't, delete the experiment. I'm not that upset about this. (As a team lead, I always encourage my team to plan projects to make the codebase cleaner than it was when they started. If we want feature X that depends on subsystem Y, and subsystem Y is falling apart, I always advertise feature X as depending on subsystem Y refactor. You know subsystem Y is getting used because it's already in there, and you know it's important for feature X. So now is the time to improve it! Clean up tech debt and deliver a new shiny for users in the same project. You feel like you're paying down tech debt. The business feels like it's increasing the value of the product. Win/win.)

* Everything is a subscription because everything is a subscription. Gone are games that you play by yourself alone. Now games are online; new content every month, player vs. player, etc. The servers and software engineering behind that cost money. "Pay $60 now to use something forever" is risky financial engineering; $5/month is the real cost.

* I don't know if police don't give a shit about theft, but it's rather a problem that is more difficult to solve than it looks. If you see someone stealing stuff, what do you do? Have a salaried and pensioned police officer on every corner? Should they use deadly force to save your insurance company $100? I don't see an easy answer here, other than to consider all property the problem of an insurance company.

* Many of the people you mention are in prison for their scams. Scams are as old as the human race. It's just something humans do. Not a new phenomenon.

* There is more we can do for the environment, but the US before the EPA and the US after the EPA are dramatically different places. For centuries, you could pour toxic waste into people's drinking water. A lot of people died of dysentery and cancer. There is always more work to do, but we're moving forward, not backwards. Lead isn't in gasoline anymore. Gasoline cars are on the way out. It only gets better from here.

TL;DR: The world isn't going to shit. And you have a lot of control over how noisy your apartment is.

I disagree everything is declining. A lot of things are working really well these days, but there are places worth improving. My thoughts here somewhat shaped by living abroad a few years and learning to better appreciate US along with reading favorite blogs like Noahpinion

It’s hard to forget a few factors involving news in the USA. It’s the 3rd largest country and has substantially more free press than the first 2 populated countries (one of which has no free press and the other is 150 out of 180 on the freedom scale). Also police generally acknowledging things happen. So the big picture stories here tend to blow up around the entire world but they almost never ever directly affect us. Other countries seem like Utopia or something just due to not appearing in the news as often due to their smaller populations. I believe this is a large part of what fuels “life in USA is on the decline!” topic.

Regarding the police: I reported my car stolen about 2 weeks back. The police found it and got it back to me in an hour after I called. Yeah, the tech helped them, but I wouldn’t call that not giving a shit. Their help in my time of need helped me appreciate their response times.

Economically, North America is still fairly abundant in resources. Canada and US jointly get to enjoy these due to free trade policies. And much of the confident has policies preventing resources from just being stripped off of or out of the earth as quickly as possible. We could be entirely fuel independent if we had more refineries. This is an economic advantage few parts of the world can enjoy.

Religiously, becoming a secular county has been positive for all kinds of equality. I say this as somebody raised in church!

Guns: the bipartisan gun safety policies coming out the past two years are exciting. I see news about red flag laws being applied (even in like Florida?). It required liberals to dial down the “take all the guns” and it required conservative to dial down the “guns at any cost”. I hope both parties can make more progress on these lines and 10-20 years down the road we can look back and say things have really improved

Sure, there are situations that need some work:

* water availability. Not looking so great in the west! But we can afford to build enough desalination to get California off the Colorado river if we wanted to. Everybody is so scared to build these plants we can’t really access economies of scale for them.

* street people - homelessness is a poor word for what’s going on in cities. People down on their luck who lose their homes can get back on their feet many times. The people who are occupying the streets of cities are the ones who have traditionally been housed in asylums, which closed to due public frustrations of care quality. Society should have worked on making those more ethical and improved patient care instead of removing them. Newsom’s forced care law might actually lead to asylums coming back?

* birth rates - maybe one day the GOP will wake up and realize their electorate is declining due to this and decide to make a 180 about government funded childcare support. Tax credits aren’t enough anymore.

* housing - it seems to me like a lot of people live alone which pushes up rents. Roommate tax credits seem worth exploring.

Anything bad that happens around the world is now spread instantly via social media and is messing with people’s heads. Good news never gets attention, only the worst. Over the past half decade or so smartphones have reached saturation. Hundreds of millions of people who never learned to filter what they see online are experiencing the same craziness many of us first saw in the 90s for the first time. It’s the eternal September to its final extreme.

This has infected society in a way that is similar to what happened when TV reached saturation in the 1960s. By the end of the 60s everyone was convinced the world was going to hell because every time they turned on the TV it was war and hysteria. That’s what gets ratings. But it was just a blip in retrospect. BTW, watching Easy Rider is hysterical - truly clueless Boomers in their late 20s bitching about the good old days. They basically sound exactly like this post.

Then a new generation grew up knowing how to filter what they saw on TV and things cooled down for a while. I’ve always assumed the term “YouTube” was chosen because of its similarity to “BoobTube”. By the time I was in my teens in the 80s, we all knew what we saw on TV was mostly crap. Remember your mother bitching about the “garbage” on TV?

I feel we’re experiencing another social shift of similar proportions. Constant negative news and inability to filter is messing with perceptions.

The facts are that the air is cleaner than it has been in generations and EVs now make up more than 5% of the market and growing, which will lead to even cleaner air for our children. Water out of the tap is still the best in the world for the vast majority of the country. Crime is the lowest it’s been in decades. Children are safer now than ever. When I grew up, parents beat their children as a matter of course (I was for sure), now that’s considered the abuse it is. Illiteracy is a thing of the past as literally every man woman and child has what were once considered super computers in their pockets which need basic levels of literacy to use. And each smartphone is able to access any piece of information and tutorial one can think of regardless of socioeconomic status. Bigotry like racism, sexism and homophobia is finally being noticed and called out as is abuse of law enforcement. All things which used to be hidden away is now being pulled out into the light of day. Not all of it is pretty, but just because we can finally see it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there before. It was and it was worse. Ever talk to your grandparents and were shocked by their casual prejudices?

So yeah, we’re in a trough of low public morale, but it will get better. I’m as shocked as most of us who helped create the internet as we know it, in how everything seems to have gone sideways instead of the universal education and enlightenment we were expecting. But it’ll happen. Generation Z is already almost immune from the bullshit they see on their phones and are taking advantage of all the opportunities it provides to educate themselves. It’s amazing to see.

I didn't read the whole thing because the answer is simple.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was not the end of the Cold War and the paranoia, distrust and apathy you sense now are the culminations of Russia's Eastern German techniques to the West.

We have been in an almost entirely psychological war since 1991. The decline of the West was primarily due to the fact we had a high trust society that foreigners from Europe took advantage of in order to utilize their Old World schemes.

Points 1, 2, and 6 are why every generation eventually figures out why suburbs exist.

Have you tried asking to speak to the manager?

You should strongly consider seeing a therapist, in all honesty. Read some books on mindfulness, consider putting the phone down and staying away from news headlines for a while.

You either ride wit' us or collide wit' us It's as simple as that for me and my n1.! War time, (war time) it's either yours or mine Outlawz be on the grind and a mission to shine - Tupac

Seems your not doing enough in your community to make it a better place. On the sidelines saying gee, everything is bad! Best cause of action. Become the community you want to be part of.. you either ride with us! Or collide with us.

> Police seem to not give a shit anymore.

If we listen to our less privileged friends and neighbors, we hear _very_ clearly that the police have never given a shit. Rape and sexual assault have been rampant throughout much of US history and rarely taken seriously. Organized crime has often been allowed to be an ally rather than a target of investigation. Lynchings have gone uninvestigated.

The concept of police is just silly from first principles. Expecting that this mechanism will give a boost in your quality of life is wishful at best, bigoted at worst.