For those say in their 60s or 70s here. When you were in your 30's or 40's did you have the feeling that the world was a fucked up place? So much has been going on since I entered adulthood in the early 2000s and I feel like it's getting more and more intense. It's never ending.

Is it unique? Or has it always been this way?

The world is just as fucked up as it ever was. The only difference now is that every fucked-up thing that ever happens anywhere is getting pushed to your always-on doomscroll device in real time with people attaching their mostly ignorant opinions to it.

This is where the "touch grass" advice comes into play. In broad terms, the real world is not nearly the hellhole social media portrays it to be.

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

I'm not that old...

But you're confusing reality for perception.

The world's been fucked up, it's just people can see it from their phones when they used to not even hear about it

Being aware of issues doesn't make them worse, just means we have a shot of fixing them.

It was worse. The difference is that now companies are making money off of scaring you with headlines so that you will click, click, click ...

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.

According to legend, the problems all started when the landlord found out that Adam and Eve had a pet snake, and they got evicted.

I'm not your target demographic but it's not really a stretch to say that pretty much everything that's happening today has happened before and will keep happening. Like others say it's mostly because there is more coverage (and maybe some more nuance causing more opinions). Back in the 50s the US started fighting in Korea and pretty much the entire US could see why and supported it. Then when Vietnam happened, there was a bit more coverage which also caused more dissent. Since then I think petty much every 5 years or so the US has been fighting wars in the Middle East. The fight with Iran is nothing new (look up Iran-Contra for instance).

Environmental concern has been around for well over 60 years and yes, we are a lot further along but by now the smart money is on people will never be able to steer it in a positive direction so it's pretty much damage limitation where possible.

In the end it's not really about how fucked up global events are, it's more about finding the light in when they all seem a bit less fucked up than it used to be.

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...

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.

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.

My always-on doomscroll device's weather app today told me about an aviation accident that killed two people in another country

I just wanted to know if the snow was going to let up, why am I getting international news of death and dismemberment?

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

I'd get a new weather app that only shows the weather. If you're on Android, try BreezyWeather (F-Droid link).

The F-Droid ("freenet") one only mainly uses OpenMeteo as the source (which is pretty good) but the releases on Github offer additional sources. Not sure why there's a discrepancy, but I use the Github release and Accuweather as the source. YMMV which gives the best results for your area, but I often wasn't getting severe weather alerts with OpenMeteo.

People said the same we can't fix it about the ozone layer.

It never was, but there were always doom and gloomers saying it was.

You must realize terrible stuff was happening over that time period too. Yes, there is a ton of regression happening right now, but compared to any other time in history some things are better some are worse. One can probably select any two points in modern history and say the same. There are always great and terrible things happening.

But it was still done. Regulations were put in place and corporations were made to comply.

Tje only place that still happens is here in Europe, and I'm afraid that might begin to deminish soon.

Not anymore. Conflict around the world has statistically shot way up. There's also a significant increase in political polarisation around the world.

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.

You're right on both counts.

Like most things though it depends what metric you're using.

Access to medical care for example is better than its ever been.

Yep, you had to get out of bed, and walk a few miles, if you wanted to see public torture and humiliation of others.

But executions and all that were public events. Not behind closed doors like today.

I question that. In colonial times and in tribal times, there were huge amounts of conflicts. And conflicts is only a tiny part of how the world is running. Slavery, human rights, minority treatment, just laws, poverty, standard of living, etc. On average world wide, we are far better off. The majority of the people in the first world have luxuries that only kings and nobles used to have.

Stopping climate change is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE harder than protecting the ozone layer. Protecting ozone requires switching the chemicals we used in refrigerants and propellants to other, viable alternatives. That affected products worth, generously, maybe 1% of GDP?

Stopping climate changing the vast majority of the vehicles on the planet, along with the majority of our electrical power plants. It also necessitates stopping deforestation and overhauling a wide number of industrial processes, including for basic materials like steel and concrete. And that's not even getting into methane emissions from livestock.

All of these things add up to a massive chunk of the planets GDP. It's an extremely heavy lift, and it's not fair to say that the world has gotten worse because we're struggling more with climate change than the ozone hole.

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

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

The Middle East has definitely gotten worse.

This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

—Douglas Adams

At least in the US there are more trees now than when the settlers landed at Plymouth Rock.

Im a little younger than you asking but to me yes. Its not as much what people are experiencing atm as direction. Coming off the seventies it seemed that although we had a ways to go we generally were getting better with human rights, equality, quality of life. We seemed to backslide in the 80's but there is always kinda ups and downs so it just seemed part of the cycle. Backsliding a bit and we would pick ourselves back up. The nineties did well enough that it reinforced this but honestly it did not make the progess it should have. Like that is the point where the us should have finally got universal healthcare and it did not happen. Then like 911 and the aughts was big time backsliding with the patriot act and other things. I think technology made it less obvious how we wer falling. Also laws around globalization that were easy not to notice dovetailed nicely with peeling back rights. Then like the tens the progress was pretty anemic. None of the laws were repealed that regressed us in the aughts and the universal healthcare that finally materialized was a conservative concept that at least did have a lot of work to make it actually function. It was becoming obvious that "normal" had really come down. Then the teens just started getting crazy and we blipped out of it for a sec but went right back in. Again you have folks still for the most part house and eating but there are tons of adults living with parents or vice versa kind of things. The house of cards gets taller and the peanut butter keeps getting spread thinner and we know we can't scrape the jar forever.

Those ancient writings. Were the times and cultures full of justice and equity and they writers are just whiners?

I find this hard to believe.

Those conflicts didn't have drone strikes though

I feel @starlinguk@lemmy.world was saying more than that. I don't recall any serious studies or news articles suggesting the ozone hole was a hoax or that debunking a human cause. Although it was kinda an aside but the anti vaxine thing he points to. I mean one of the most effective medical interventions since soap and sterilization has people acting like its some sort of evil witchcraft that will actually harm you despite the clear evidence both clinical and personal to its effectiveness.

I think it depends how we slice it. last century compared to previous. yeah will take this century. this quarter century to the quarter century before. Ill take before. I mean if we are at the tail of of a falling post world war 2 blip that is not a great thing.

It certainly is, but it makes sense if you know about logging practices.

Generally, logging companies will cycle through parcels of land and replant parcels that have been clear cut so they can have guaranteed lumber in the future without having to negotiate new leases and such.

And with the massive amount of protected forests, the places they're allowed to cut is way less than it used to be.

before internet, local problems remained local though. now everything is kind of in the same pot. I guess there are objectively less problems now than before, but before individual people had to deal with only local problems and maybe some from further away if things got really bad there.

I don't know of any for the ozone hole specifically, but you can look to the fight over cigarettes to see the same science-denying approach during the 50s and beyond. That was literally the blueprint for climate change denial by the fossil fuel industry in later decades.

Exactly how?

I mean maybe. If you count little seedlings or such. there was this thing about how a squirrel could go from one ocean to the other without ever touching the ground. I mean the logging practices prior to the settlers landing on plymouth rock were pretty anemic. I mean the natives had few buildings. All our towns and cities and buildings in general were for the most part forest or prarie and even prarie had trees especially long water sources like lakes and rivers.

I think that is an apt comparison and it just outlines the things to me. We really did not know smoking was bad till the 40's and the 50's is when it was much more conclusive and the industry was able to push off legislation for like a decade into the 60's. The greenhouse effect although known for awhile similarly did not really become conclusive till the 50's and still it was like the late eighties when congressional hearings brought it more into the us public sphere although many folk still did not really know about it till gores 2006 movie put it more into the common culture. The industry fud started with the congressional hearings when there was indication it might lead to regulation. So they have pretty effectively stalled it for the most part for over 30 years! In addition we have had some regulation and then had it pulled back. I think it really highlights the decline compared to before when you look at cigarettes compared to greenhouse gases.

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.

Yep, only in my 50s but this is correct. All the shit under Reagan, Nixon etc, decades of meddling in the middle east before that. A century of oppressing South America. All the labor struggles. It's like the increase in the diagnosed cases of autism. The number of cases didn't increase. Only our awareness.

Two things:

Native peoples very much built buildings.

Lots of where towns are now in the south and in the plains weren’t prairie as is commonly thought, they were lowlands populated with bamboo.

If you're comparing to a decade ago, yes. However, even with the increased number of wars, it is still more peaceful than before 1945.

But there were a lot of news articles suggesting at that time that global warming was overrated.

If only Fall Out Boy wrote the update better.

ok. So just to be clear we just care about if there are technically more trees like saplings in tree farms than any type of environmental thing yeah?

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.

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."

No? I care about accurate representations of Native American environments. My comment was specifically directed at your comment, not the entire thread.

I honestly think there’s no way to know if there’s really more trees now than there was. But I kind of doubt it, unless like you said, we’re specifically counting saplings on farms versus old growth forests.

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