Is the world broken? or are we entering a new era?

(I think you're missing the "Ask HN:" prefix, right now this is getting buried in new)

The chickens are coming home to roost...

My impression is that a lot of developments that were already going wrong for quite a long time, but could be ignored relatively easily, are now reaching a breaking point.

I think there is also a sort of "cascade failure" going on, on which some events are changing the conditions for more rvents to occur: E.g.: The general political turmoil inside the US led to the Trump election, which led to a weakened image of the US in the world, which may have emboldened other powers like Russia, which may have contributed to the outbreak of the Ukraine war, which has led to record inflation, etc etc.

Likewise, climate change has reached a level in which the consequences are beginning to be felt even by rich nations, and the predicted tensions and upheavals are starting to materialize.

Those are not the single "causes" of any of those events, but it might be one of many causal chains that connect all those world events and led to mutual escalation.

Where all of this is leading? I have no idea, but definitely to a different era. The question is what kind of era.

WW3 baby, lets fucking goooo! Is boring AF out here and I am depressed as fuck, maybe some bombs next to my house would force me into some survival state where I feel alive and forget about how I wasted my life.

I hear this stories of people who came from war zones and lived in constant fear but when they got out they actually MISSED IT! That shit is real.

I am so black pilled, humanity learns nothing and repeats the same shit over and over and over again. The lifespan of people can be directly linked to when it all goes to shit again. People who could directly warn us what not to do are dead, so its time to repeat.

It was a lot messier during the Cold War and even more scary before that.

This is just the end if a golden era. The next generations are going to envy us.

The world is not a right place. It never has been and never will be. We won't "science" or vote our way out of human nature. There are cycles of bad times and somewhat better times.

Are things really broken, or has our perception changed? Some of both, I think.

> Why are so many people jobless?

Perception -- Unemployment is lower today than in 82 of the last 94 years.

> Why are so many companies going bankrupt?

Perception -- Bankruptcies, currently around 50k companies per year, are also at historic lows. Before about 2015, 100k to 150k was the norm.

> Why so many people are homeless?

Perception -- Homelessness appears to be on the decline, having fallen from 210 per 100k population to 170 per 100k in the span of 10 years.

> Why there are so many people under mental health issues?

I have a several hypotheses on this one.

Broken -- Lifestyles in the developed world have evolved faster than our biology. Men have few paths to fulfill their drive to build and conquer. Women have few (if any) children to nurture. And children have little unsupervised play and exploration, and practically zero responsibility. These stresses push some people (e.g., the man who would build a home on the frontier but can't bear an office job) over the brink and into mental illness.

Broken -- In the past, people with severe mental illness were less likely to reproduce. Many were institutionalized, killed, or left to their own devices. This limited the proliferation of genes that code for mental illness. Now that we've spent several generations trying to keep everyone comfortably afloat, it's only natural that we see more people carrying (and expressing) genes that code for mental illness. Same principle explains the increase in other conditions that are no longer likely to be fatal: Asthma, poor eyesight, premature birth, etc.

Perception -- We diagnose more often (and for less severe cases) and the taboo against having a mental illness is lower than it used to be.

Regression to the mean, IMHO. For geopolitics specifically, many believe in the imminent end of Pax Americana.

> Why there are so many people under mental health issues?

Prevalence is probably similar or lower, but information is so much easier to come by, and societal stigma about talking about it (rather than just going to a bar, or suffering in silence) is lower with the internet. Still everyone understands so much more about mental health now, and toxic relationships and many things that were once normalized deeply are breaking down

However everyone also is competing with everyone. You don’t get to be “one of the smartest person in town” anymore because the town includes everyone on the internet. We’re still dealing with the initial wave of everyone being connected.

Every time this comes up, I want to remind you that the world today is much better overall compared to decades ago. It is a much safer world in general and people are usually better off (overall). So it is not all doom and gloom as you think it is. Just different times with different challenges. I would rather live now than say 100 years ago. or even 50 years ago.

If you grew up after the Cold War ended, the whole world has looked like it was generally moving in one direction for most of your life and if you were in the West, a lot of that time might have even looked very sunny.

But that was sort of a blip. We are entering a new era, but not because the world is broken, but because the dust is settling on that era and we’re kinda going back to normal.

That said, there’s some reason to worry that the return might be a little cataclysmic in the way that a long-stuck fault line can produce a bigger earthquake than one that slips more frequently.

I think you're seeing the inevitable result of ideology taking precedence over reality. In other words, reality only has so much "stretch" to give when being warped under an inaccurate model. At some point, reality re-asserts itself and your ideological model of the world crumbles into pieces.