I’m really worried about the state of the US despite being a white male who was I’ll coast right through it. I’ll also accept “I don’t” and “very poorly” as answers
I realize that it is materially better than it has ever been and it continues to improve, despite very obvious issues and inequalities.
It does, but it’s accomplished that over the past century by prioritizing short term growth, long term consequences be damned.
As those debts are starting to come due to collect, while it is still accurate to say that there’s been an unprecedented good run, that doesn’t mean the fast approaching wall ahead that has everyone else worried is a mirage either.
Both can be true.
Overshoots a bitch. Soon the land will be unable to feed the people and our artificial fertilizer will no longer work. It was fun while it lasted!
We’ve had market corrections. We’re coming up on some global population correction for sure in the next century or so. I guess we’ll all find out if that’s the Great Filter, or if it’s something else we haven’t found yet.
The “Great Filter” premise assumes that there are no other “advanced” civilizations in the galaxy. Seems like that might not be the case, if the UAP news is not some massive psy-op lol
Aliens probably exist somewhere, but space is unfathomably large. They have never been here. UAPs generally fall into two categories: faked or oddities not understood at their time of capture.
Listen to Cmdr. Fravor and the three other pilots that witnessed the Nimitz UAP in the early 2000s. A tic tac shaped object, darting back and forth like a ping pong ball, that travelled from ~80,000 ft to ~20,000 ft in seconds on radar, and went to their cap point, “60 miles away in one minute”. If it isn’t NHI it is almost certainly some zero gravity tech completely unknown to the average person and is very unlikely to have not leaked at some point.
Or, much more likely, something was going on that they didn’t understand, such as this: https://youtu.be/jHDlfIaBEqw?si=_wPWoNuzIRa2CrGw&t=548
You might think that if you listen to Steven Pinker, The World’s Most Annoying Man.
Yeah, I liked that book but I’m not sure I should believe anything that comes out of his mouth.
A friend of mine had an interesting basis for dismissing Pinker.
They saw a discussion panel which included Pinker and noticed that in all the discussion and Q&A he didn’t express a single thought that wasn’t already in his book or speech.
The basis is that any person intelligent and thoughtful enough to be an academic let alone a public intellectual has myriad thoughts and ideas that don’t make it into publication and should spill over in conversation. They reasoned that Pinker is just a clever nerd that got lucky in academia, and I’ve always figured that they’re right (having never thought of that way of thinking about it myself).
Incidentally I’ve seen Penn (of Penn and Teller) reason similarly about how dumb Trump is.
I also rejoice that the largest generation of terrible people will all be dying off in the next 20 years, and the millennials will be taking over control.
Every generation has its psychopaths and psychopaths tend to pursue power. I wouldn’t put my hopes in millennials any more than in boomers. I’m happy to be wrong on this though.
Yeah, this is exactly what’s wrong with constantly demonizing boomers and attributing every shitty thing they’ve ever done to leaded gas and paint chips. Populations tend more conservative as they get older and they have for centuries. Even if a minority of individuals actually change their minds, people who were politically apathetic when they were younger tend to be more conservative when they do start voting when they’re older, skewing the whole generation more conservative. There’s already plenty of conservative millennials out there, and even more of them among the ranks of the non-voters.
Remember, boomers are the generation of hippies. Actual, literal hippies who, despite whatever imperfect motives you may ascribe to their movement, achieved greater social revolution in their time than any attitude shifts that have occurred during millennials’ peak social years. And that was only with ~30% of boomers participating in the movement. The rest of them went on to vote for Reagan and kick off helicopter parenting and satanic panic and music censorship and the whole bit.
Anyone who thinks millennials will be somehow immune to this pattern is in for a rough next few decades.
Populations tend more conservative as they get older and they have for centuries.
That is just not true. They do get more protective of their possessions and the status quo as they get richer and hold positions with more influence in society. Currently millennials and younger generations do not get richer in the same way that boomers did though.
Fewer millennials ate lead paint chips as kids, I know that much.
I just don’t expose myself to the 24h news cycle very much. My life is good, the life of the people around me is good, and nobody is helped by worrying about things I can’t change.
This.
News are the reason your mental health sucks ass. The world is doing okay actually if you just look around instead.
Or if you ACTUALLY care about real news:
CRIME is at an ALL TIME LOW in all western world
China and many other countries have taken a billion people out of extreme poverty
Communist dictators are loosing ground in south america
Inflation is back to normal levels
Solar panels and infrastructure IS becoming CHEAP
Etc
I don’t think inflation is normal here. It’s still about 8%.
I wonder whether these positive comments come from those that are well off.
It’s not. It’s around 3%
I live in Ecuador and crime overtook us here… There’s some hope tho with new young president taking some action.
But in general the world is MUCH better as it was in the 80s for MOST PEOPLE.
unfortunately for those that were privileged before, it may seem untrue. But ask the average rice farmers grandkids if they’re better off as their grandpa was…
I just checked, it’s about 3 here.
So I’m wrong, doesn’t seem like prices have changed much, but hey ho.
The economys still fucked though. People are still underpaid.
The economy’s always been fucked though. People have always been underpaid though.
90% of the world would be happy with those salaries…
Sorry, what salaries?
The underpaid ones
…
We just shouldn’t be in this position.
Absolutely the way to go. Everyone in my circle is doing better than they were 5-10 years ago. My outlook could be better if my country decided to nope out, uproot itself and settle somewhere sub-tropical, far away from the Russian border we now share, but since I am considering emigrating after finishing training anyway, I don’t worry about that too much.
By realizing that it IS getting better. We live in a world now where information has exploded out of control. What this means is that we now know exactly what’s going on everywhere, and it turns out that’s a lot of shit.
That shit was still happening, but until fairly recently it was just out of the picture. The average person didn’t know about any of it , couldn’t do anything about it anyway, and thus it didn’t really impact them.
Fast forward to today you hear of tragedies ALL THE TIME. Bad shit happening to good people for seemingly no reason. The difference here is that you just happen to know about it. The objective truth is that bad shit happens less today than it did at any other time in history. We just see every instance of it, not just our local community instances.
When all the bad information from the news begins to bombard me, I think back to March 2020, when the pandemic hit full swing. That might seem odd to some because many would argue that was the spark that set of the series of events that got us here. However what I see now, years later, with a bit of perspective, it was an amazing time. For the first time in human civilization almost our entire species focused in on one task and overall succeed. An existential threat to our entire way of life emerged, most people got on board and we avoided the absolute worst.
We’re not meant to process all the bad things that happen in the world every day. Our primate brains are meant for small communities, not international events. Perhaps the pandemic isn’t OPs thing or yours to think about, but I’ll bet that almost everyone has some memory that gives them hope. Think about it, hold into it. A hopeful thing happened once, it’ll happen again.
This is definitely true. A lot of people fucked around during COVID and made aspects of it worse, but they would have probably done that anyway. Overall, we did a very impressive job worldwide in managing the crisis.
If you ever think the world is shit, disconnect. Turn off the news, get off social media, spend a week interacting with your local community only. You’ll see people can be pretty awesome, and you can make a very real impact in the world by helping your local community.
I use to think like that in my 20s. But the truth is right now, it’s definitely not getting better. I teach in college/univ and the amount of ignorance and entitlement I’ve seen in the past couple of years is alarming. Elon Musk and Andrew Tates are the role models for many young men now, there is a masculinity crisis and it’s affecting everyone.
Maybe it’s just because of the people I’m around, but it feels like society’s concepts of both masculinity and femininity have continued improving. There are of course the Tate acolytes, but they seem as much like the gasp of a dying ideology as anything. Not sure about Musk, that particular brand of personality cult prosperity gospel never seems to really go out of style.
If you consider serious, global issues with empirical data, such as disease, poverty, hunger, the world is indeed improving, and has been for a while, see e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-living-in-extreme-poverty-cost-of-basic-needs
I"m aware of that and I do agree some things are getting better. That was exactly my mindset in my 20s. But I believe you could use other data, like wealth repartition, environnement, consumption, media concentration, etc. to demonstate the opposite. The simple fact that we did more damage to the planet in 200 years that we did over 40k years is making me really worry. But yeah, I guess it depends on how you perceive certain things.
Your statement reads like “we haven’t made all the progress, so we haven’t made any.” We have learned, if nothing else. We’ve learned that our carbon emissions, for example, have an impact on the environment, and many people are moving towards bettering that. It’s not DONE, but to put on blinders and act like it’s the same as it has always been is at best ignorant.
It’s not what I said. You can call me ignorant all you want, but the truth is the F150 is the most sold car in north America, and the sales are going up each year. The vast majority of people who claim to be concerned about the environment are not about to change anything in their behavior. Flash news, Taylor Swift is worried about climate change. Unfortunatly, you and I riding our bikes and using paper straws won’t be reversing the trend.
Yeah, too many people buy trucks, but the counterpoint is
And someone could probably find more recent data that os even better.
That was already around. You had the toxic masculine movie stars of the 70s-2000s. Soldiers and fighters have been glorified since the times we’ve had soldiers and fighters. The only difference there is a wider audience. You also have an increasing number of reasonable voices out there reaching a broader and broader audience too. Violent crimes are consistently down, we just see all that there is.
From my perspective, toxic masculinity has been more assertive than ever in recent years. As mentioned in another reply, I had to intervene to protect female students from male behavior for the first time in my career this year. One of my colleagues was harassed by a student in full view several times this session. This is new for us. We have both extremely open, sensitive and respectful students, and the opposite, but the main difference is that the second group is now uninhibited and not shy about putting himself in the spotlight.
You’re using anecdotal evidence, from one perspective. You’re a university professor, surely you can see why this isn’t exactly a compelling argument compared to hard evidence, right?
Well as the saying goes, ignorance is bliss. Honestly, I think its healthy to takes breaks from the news and social media if world news is getting you down, just focus on the things that you can control in your life.
Try this: Don’t Believe The Hype
(DarkMatter2525 - Is Society Collapsing)
TLDW: No, things are getting better, some things aren’t, but it’s not an easy answer because there are 8 billion perspectives to consider. We are living longer and enjoy more technology, so there’s that.
Bookmarked for later watching
The pandemic is an interesting case because the world stopped because millions of people died. In the past that was normal. Spanish Flu sucked just as hard but people were like “oh well, try not to die”.
Every family literally lost one or two children each in normal times. Look at any history of your family and 100 years ago you will see lots of relatives that died at young ages of diseases that are preventable now.
We live in an age of unprecedented health and death is an outlier. It used to be a part of everyday life.
I play videogames
Same tbh
Be the change you want to see. I switched things up and took a job where I work to feed hungry people. It’s pretty great and I feel good about myself and what I do. I’m not gonna fix the whole world, but I am making a difference for those who I reach.
Fascists took over my country, and now they use a devestating attack as an excuse to start a total war that might evolve to world war, while the rest of the world sees our country as a “faschist genocide machine” our own citizens oppose it, and suffer from it, but still being fooled by propaganda.
I’m teriified. That’s the truth.
It is getting better though. We are all just facing the issues of our era’s.
Tech keeps going up, we are slowly making progress on climate change, the space race is back on, and superpowers don’t directly fight eachother anymore. Hell, we’ve proven to beat once in a century pandemics in a few years with relatively speaking barely any deaths. Life’s good
Yes, we have squabbles in the middle east and Africa, but that’s par for the course and not an indicator for human development. The only thing that has really gone backwards is that war has been brought back to europe
superpowers don’t directly fight each other
Yeah, this one shouldn’t be underestimated. The world powers, not just superpowers, just don’t have much of an appetite for head-to-head war anymore. Most wars are civil wars with the occasional proxy war thrown in. World War I killed 17 million, World War II killed 80 million. We just don’t have wars at that size anymore. For that matter, there’s a generous smattering of multi-million death wars through the 19th and 20th centuries, both civil and between nations. But as you get to the 21st century, that just doesn’t really happen anymore.
Even my much maligned city, with its poop piles, tents and opiate zombies, is so much better-off than it was when I was a kid.
We just bumped into the 1.5 degree mark, how are we “making progress” on climate change?
Sorry. Just so hard to be optimistic. 2023 has been BANANAS for global temperatures.
Is it getting worse? How do we measure the goodness or badness?
One measure of economic indicators suggests we are relatively stable.
I’m sure there are a variety of measures that are up and down.
I would argue that most measures are generally trending upward, and have been for a long while. The big difference is that now people spend their lives looking at negative ragebait articles.
Focus on the things you can control. My emotional state has significantly improved when I decided to do this.
Depends on perspective. Ask my grandma who lives through the second world war whether it is better or worse. Our modern problem seem trivial to her comparing having no non-bombed house, very little food and very little way of taking care of her family.
Yeah take the long view and realize 100 years ago TB would be a major cause of death, prohibition would be in full force and the Mob would be powerful, we’d be 5 years post-WWI, 6 years from the Great Depression, and 16 years from WWII.
Reminds me of that Doctor Who christmas special with the soldier. “Now let’s get you back to your first World War” - “What do you mean, FIRST World War?!?!!” - “Oh. Sorry. Spoilers.”
I’m doing good. I’m doing things that I enjoy, and I strive to improve. I believe we’ll sort most of our shit out, it will never be even close to perfect, because we’re dumb, materialistic, belligerent apes by nature, but it will be enough.
I chose to leave after Trump got in office—& it took like two years of planning/saving. It’s had real ups & downs but overall the best major life decision I’ve made.
Where did you go? I would like to live elsewhere, but I worry about ending up in an economy where I could no longer afford to travel or retire.
SEA will probably stay affordable for a while
There are a lot of good news all the time. For example: I’m pro veganism and always heard that vegans make up about 2% of the population. Recently I heard that specifically in my city about 8% are vegans. That’s amazing!
I really hope veganism becomes more widely adopted, or at the very least less derided than it is today. Animal agriculture is one of if not the biggest contributor to so many global issues.
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