It’s really hard to tell what was just younger kids not being exposed to the world vs. things actually getting worse. I was a kid during '08, and things didn’t really change for me at home cuz my family was always very frugal, especially my dad.

Climate change has empirically gotten worse tho. Inflation, enshitification, food quality, all of it SEEMS worse but it’s hard to quantify it you know?

OP, it’s also going to sound like a cliche, but touch grass. The cancer-like tech companies want to replace your sense of community so that they have more power over you. F them, join a local group, and find yourself feeling more powerful when you have a real community behind you.

Also middle aged and my only real issue is how stupid everyone is

They don’t read. They don’t research. They don’t question… not in a “conspiracy theory” way, but they don’t see a headline and go, “is that true?”

They’re morons that feed off negativity.

They’ll post an article about something terrible but then I’ll look it up, find out it’s bullshit, and then post the data that shows it’s bullshit and instead of everybody being like, “oh thank God, I was worried there for a second” they go, “Fuck you. Obviously everything is shitty and how dare you even try to point out that it’s not”

What the fuck is wrong with people these days?

yes, join your local communist party

Wealth divide is worse. We are also in a time of change geopolitically. Also in a time where powerful actors benefit from creating controversy including media, social medial, political, and geopolitical. We live in interesting times.

Life isn’t that bad yet but owning things is starting to become impossible. You used to buy and own things now you are more and more only allowed to rent them. Be it movies, video games or your house.

I think about it this way.

In 1995 I could leave the house with nothing in my pocket except $10.00 and have a great day. Ride the bus with cash, get food with cash, buy stuff with cash. If I needed a ride there were free phones to car services in most stores.

Today, if I go out the door I need cash, a credit card, and a phone.

I believe it’s a mix. Both ‘nostalgia goggles’ and straight up facts.

What I mean is that, when we were kids or teenagers we didn’t see things the same way our parents did. They were the ones struggling, and we were pretty much just playing around and complaining of mundane stuff. So it’s hard to tell how much ‘easier’ life was back then… we were just young.

But at the same time I do completely agree that the advancement of technology and growth of USA giant corporations really fucked a lot of things up badly. While back in the day we couldn’t find answers or information to everything so easily, we lived a more ‘natural’ life, where everyone actually expected things to take a while to happen: you had to wake up, literally read the news if you wanted, take the car or bus to the job, and just then you started working, and while working you had to do some research and so on.

Nowadays things either happen immediately or you’re tagged as lazy or something like it. You wake up with a lot of e-mails or message notifications on your smartphone, and people expect you to answer these demands ASAP. It’s not expected anymore that we do each thing in it’s own time anymore, and the volume of work is much bigger because you’re expected to solve problems much faster. This volume of demand and unrealistic expectations definitely generate stress and anxiety, which are huge health issues nowadays.

And the fact that we now realize, thanks to the amount and speed of information we have today, how the industry leads are fucking everyone up without consequences doesn’t help in the slightest, since it leads to a feeling of being powerless and exploited.

Bills went up, pay did not keep up.

There’s a whole lot of awful going on.

My dad used to rant about how government should be run like a business, no, no dad, it really, really should not. Businesses do not care about people, businesses don’t want anything but money, your money, and they will twist, turn, manipulate, lobby, and flat out steal or harm people to get it.

So the next time you call 311, the non emergency police line, or God forbid 911 remember, your call is very important to us, a representative will be with you shortly. If you’d like to take a brief survey after the call just stay on the line. If you’d like to talk to our chat bot Sally just say, hey Sally!

All of the things that were supposed to help us by making our lives easier really helped them and now our lives are harder. I don’t see an end to that.

im putting groceries on credit. i had a great credit score till this year, i havent even tried making payments on certain things including ER bills. only a matter of time before im bankrupt, and i am also disabled. i have given up on having a future and I’m only 32.

It’s both: it’s just you and it’s everyone else. In the modern age of relatively fast technological development, people tend to get overwhelmed by change in their later years. But also things are getting worse for almost everyone^[1] under late-stage capitalism.

I think this is due to increased alienation. We’ve become more isolated and distanced from one another and, more importantly, more distanced from our own creative self. This is what happens when production is largely automated but humans are still involved - we turn into small faceless gears in a big mechanism.

You’re correct OP. I think the difficulty of modern times is multifaceted. A lot of other comments here speak to various parts of it these days, but I want to add one I’ve noticed related to this issue.

Pre mid-2000’s, technology worked for us. If you look at the hayday of tech (1980 thru early 2000’s), it seemed like every tech innovation was aimed at the consumer. The tech got better and we did too. The tech worked for us.

Nowadays (and I think I can see all this turning course around the time of the 2008 collapse), tech is not for us. The consumer has become the product, and tech is built around working through us instead of for us. Manipulating us instead of helping us. It sucks.

I have no doubt that if the washing machine was invented today instead of like ~100 years ago, they would be the size of car, and only installed in corporate offices. You’d have to go to an office to get your clothes washed. Consumer-level washers wouldn’t be a thing. They’d tie it to work like healthcare. It seems like no one is interested in making quality consumer devices. The consumer devices we do have are designed to become obsolete quickly without any repairability, so you buy another fast (i.e. all modern cars).

So yea, I think when you add this on top of everything else, it help explains what is amiss with life today. My 2c