Ask Lemmy

Well, as an American, I can only speak for my lifetime...

Late 60s/Early 70s - Vietnam/Nixon - Pretty fucked up.

Late 70s - Iran hostage crisis - Fucked up.

80s - Reagan/Bush - Iran/Contra - Recession - Iraq War I - Fucked up.

90s - Clinton era was pretty good. Big scandal was a blowjob. People actively talking about blowjobs all the time.

2000s - Bush II, 9/11, Iraq War II, Abu Ghraib, 2008 financial crash - VERY fucked up.

Late 2000s - Obama - Not awful. He should have ended Bush's drone program, but not awful.

2017-2020 - Trump. Covid. 1,000,000 dead Americans. INCREDIBLY fucked up.

Early 2020s - Biden - Fucked up inflation. Covid weirdness.

Now? (gestures)

Yes

Generally, things were always fucked up. However, two major changes between this generation and previous ones:

1. Leaders were generally portrayed as being more competent than now. Even leaders who were considered dumb at the time kept themselves to a far higher standard than now.

2. The media landscape is more fractured now than before. It was common for television shows to be seen by a third of the country. It made things more uniform culturally. A lot of that is gone

Yeah, thought it was fucked up, but assumed the vast majority of people still wanted it to be better for everyone. Recent US elections, though, indicate otherwise, which is extremely depressing.

It really depends on how you define it. There have always been locations and groups where things were terrible and there have been locations and groups where things were good. Often the locations were the same but the groups were different.

In the US, there was a general sense that things were gradually improving that may have gone back as far as World War II and lasted through the 70's. Not that there weren't a lot of problems, just that society seemed to be recognizing and working on them. The conservative resurgence in 1980, lead by Ronald Reagan and Newt Gringrich, pretty much ended that positive trend. Since then we've seen active efforts to divide people, to encourage prejudices, and, especially, to destroy the education system. That last is critical, because it makes propaganda and other forms of social manipulation far more effective.

The US is now living with the result of allowing those changes. There are vast disparities in education, wealth, and power across the population. Many people on the low end of those distributions have been convinced to blame other groups that are also on the low end. That has allowed those at the high end to corrupt our political and economic systems to their advantage.

The current situation is not sustainable, but it will do incalculable damage to hundreds of millions of people while it exists. And we don't know what will follow it.

There is strong evidence that humans became successful as a species because of their ability to put interests of the group before their own. Those instincts have been subverted, but they are not dead. That is what gives me hope for the future.

My take is that everything was worse back in the day, except for two things: climate change due to an unprecedented rate of global warming, and the ability to bomb ourselves out of existence with nuclear weapons, which simply did not exist before 1945. I worry about the first more than the second.

Always has been, the big difference is it wasn't streamed straight into your eyes in real time

No, no it was not.

Example: when they found out what caused the hole in the ozone layer, they fixed it.

If we found out now, people would say that you can't trust Big Academia or Big Science and nothing would be done. And don't get me started on vaccinations.

We're sliding rapidly backwards.

People who say it isn't are just too lazy to do anything.

It was different, there was more of what at least looked like cause->effect. People were irrational, but not directly belligerent about their irrationality. Round table talk formats didn't seem so useless, there being people who were more learned than you giving useful explanations about what was happening in the world (that made sense). Watching them now seems like the blind leading the blind. The world was more coherent and the incoherent parts of it seemed largely marginalized and sidelined. This marginalization seemed fairly permanent, like you could count on society making progress in science and technology without regard to your stupid uncle's sexist bullshit or your crazy aunt's vitamin therapy and aversion to aluminum cookware. Now all of them are wrapped up in one Super Saiyan called "Secretary of Health and Human Services."

Almost everything now is better than ever before. The problem is that the news is telling you all is bad. Stop watching it. This includes your social media feeds. Just don't read it. Do something else with your time. Go outside.

The creation of the universe was a mistake. It's been downhill since the big bang.

This is actually one of the best times in human history.

We didn't start the fire was written for this exact reason. Billy Joel was talking to someone 20 years younger than him who said that when he was 20 more stuff had happened than when Billy Joel was 20, so he just started listing all the stuff that had happened before he was 20 and then expanded it into the song.

It used to be a lot worse for the vast majority

As a little preface here, I teach philosophy and world religions at community colleges for a living, and so I spend a good bit of time reading texts from ancient cultures.

The relevant thing here being that it’s pretty common to find writings from just about every point in human history that talk about their own time as one of terrible injustice, iniquity, etc. often in ways that sound like they could have written today.

So, I’d wager it’s always been this way, and not just in the last century.

Not an old person. But so to put into perspective:

My maternal grandmother was born in war-torn China after the japanese imperilists wrecked our country. Food was not even a guarantee... farming sucked...

My parents were born during the cultural revolution... the way they described stuff... all they had to eat was 番薯 (sweet potatoes?)... they say my generation had it better off...

I remember rations were said to be a common thing...

By my era, I had stable access to food. I remember being so picky and they scold me for me... "back in my day... all we had to eat was..."

I wanted more things to play with... its responded with... "back in my day... all we had to play with is..." (don't remember the answer but they played with like rocks or sticks or strings or stuff like that)

Literally... all the food would've been a luxury in their era...

So like... in a way... westerners having access to food is already not bad...

I mean y'all are not being invaded by imperial japanese...

y'all not being bombed by russians in Ukraine....

y'all not being bombed by israel in Gaza

so...

(I'm not saying you should accept status quo, just trying to think positively by looking into how bad it could get...)

-From an American Citizen originally born in China in 2002

Edit: I also wanna mention the problem with people who grow up under these conditions... they had to deal with so much "real issues" that the whole topic of mental health is never a thing to them... "just get over it" as my parents say...

UGH WTF...

So yea... the west have mental health acceptance... so consider yourselves lucky...

OP keep this in mind.

During and 18 month period in the early 1970s there was an average of five domestic terrorist bombings in the US every day. Think about that.. five a day was the average.