I’m just really wondering… To the trump voters in the US, is this what you wanted? Do you really think and feel that things have improved? Do you really think the world is a better, safer, place now than it was 10 years ago?
It’s like, we had issues for sure, but they were manageable. We had climate change at a critical level but we could still stave off the worst of it and now we’re speed running to something worse than the worst predictions that were made. At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if earth is like Venus not 200 years from now due to some runaway effect.
I mean, we had a nice run but fuck you, you really really ruined the world for everyone including yourself. I sincerely hope you’re happy because then at least someone will before were all dead.
Fuck you.
That’s nonsense.
Good things will be happening all the time!
Just not to you.
Am 39 and feel this
… and I can see how I contributed to things going to shit, too. And I did a lot of good things, too.
Kind of feels like there’s two kinds of people out there right now in the US. Once you think we’re fucked, and the ones who think they have enough generational wealth that “their” kids won’t be fucked.
There’s probably a sizeable third pool out there that are just watching propaganda and going everything is fine everybody’s overreacting or I don’t care it doesn’t affect me. I think even that pool’s shrinking a bit.
There’s also people who are absolutely going to get fucked but are still living in a comfortable dream-world where they think someone is going to come make everything normal again.
Some of us know its fucked and are just trying to get by.
There are whole swathes of us who are still foolishly optimistic enough to think we can pull ourselves out of this nose dive too.
I fear we’re into parachute territory, we’ll need to rebuild the plane from parts after we touch down.
Please don’t let it be a Lost sequel…Please…
Half a century here, I’ve never had a time in my life where the next year was better than the last
Same age-ish, and I feel the same.
The hard part is trying to figure out what part of that comes from societal collapse, and how much of that comes from just getting older and seeing more and more of how the world works… or doesn’t work.
Despite all we see and hear, objectively the world is better than it’s ever been. We are at a shocking low level of international conflict, starvation, disease, crime, famine, even teen pregnancy has fallen to the lowest rates we’ve ever seen.
But all of these gains have been made by people forming communities of various kinds, of linking up, sharing ideals and compiling resources. This “downturn” we’re feeling is a localized result of a lot of people turning their backs on community.
We are incredibly communal animals, we need social identities to survive. This has been studied. When community abandons you, or when it feels like they have, people broadly stop caring about things and themselves and become selfish, bitter, cynical and hateful. We’re feeling this all around us, and inside us. And I don’t think it’s a natural phenomenon, there are active groups working to cause this, they want to undo all that progress and bypass war and pillaging and destruction and just rot out the world’s wealthiest countries from the inside out.
I don’t know if these objective, global gains will continue for everyone. But I fully believe that the USA at least is in a nose-dive it won’t pull out of. Things are breaking as we speak, in ways we can’t repair.
Hell, I’m 46 and it’s really hard to not be cynical these days. I want to believe there’s still good people out there but I run into so many assholes.
Uhh, ok hmm…so I learned in life if everyone you see is an asshole, you’re the asshole.
Think about it this way: there are countless good people in your life but as a society we get taught to get fixated on the worst to complain about. Maybe it’s more entertaining. Maybe we sync to it cuz maybe we have similar features in ourselves we don’t like … which ever the reason it’s personal why we do this. But in doing so It’s easy to discount the good people by ignoring them and what they do. We notice every mistake and bad person out there.
And how do you think that makes good people around you feel?
Well they stop coming around. They get drained from being ignored. They put up boundaries where they don’t want to be around assholes fixated on the negative and don’t spend their time on assholes.
And that’s how we become assholes telling on ourselves by admitting everyone is assholes.
It’s the shoe smells like shit every where you go analogy.
Uhh, ok hmm…so I learned in life if everyone you see is an asshole, you’re the asshole.
I lived by this phrase until I realized that most people are so blitheringly stupid that they are by default “assholes.” I still treat everyone with respect and compassion, but I don’t feel connected or very sympathetic to anyone anymore because now I know the truth and it’s dark and if you don’t see the broad, creeping darkness that is covering everything right now, you’re choosing willful ignorance over community. You can still build community and make things better even accepting that there are lots of terrible assholes out there who will also benefit from your efforts.
Lack of curiosity, willful ignorance, science denial, choosing emotionally-pandering media, tuning out and not caring about anything outside of their immediate stimulation-sphere, creates a whole lot of people who aren’t even thinking themselves better than you, because they’re not thinking. People are training themselves broadly to not think and we’re living in the effects of this decision.
Every time you choose to surround yourself with media and people whom would never argue or disagree with your notions, every time you say “I can’t deal with this” every time you sneer at someone’s personal story, every time you spend an hour scrolling social media, every time you avoid learning new things, you are pushing that “societal asshole meter” higher and higher.
And all of this doesn’t even begin to touch on the very real, very prevalent people who are fucking hateful. Again, you can choose to be blind to other people’s hate if you’re not of the demographic that experiences being hated for arbitrary reasons, but there are plenty of people who are hated and bullied every day by people who are indeed, evil. We can’t be afraid to call a goddamn spade a spade.
And people (like you) who are trying to convince us that spades are not spades, are upholding an unfair and deeply oppressive system because they have either privilege of class, race or ignorance.
I’m also 40 something. Oh for the dizzy optimism of the 90s…
I will forever seethe that I missed out on the 1990s, especially considering how IT was a money printer back then & the rave scene was top notch. I just about caught the tail end of the old internet as well, even that has gone to complete corporate dogshit.
And owning a house wasnt a Pipedream : (
I got in on the 90’s dream and had a house with a handshake and a smile, lost it eventually because of family medical problems. Probably will never own a home again.
'Murca.
Ah the rave scene really was amazing. Have you seen the tiktok videos? The music and feeling will stay with me forever
Don’t use tiktok lol, I’ve seen a few old clips passed around on forums and stuff uploaded to youtube though, shit looked great. Meanwhile the smallest rave gets shut down pretty quickly by the police these days : ( also pretty envious of pints being far more affordable back then, I barely even go to spoons as a student as it just costs way too fuckin much. I guess one upside of the modern day though is party drugs being cheap, pure and plentiful but that can obviously also have significant drawbacks.
I joined and deleted tiktok just to download the videos! I’m properly old now I swear everything was just better back then
I am over 60 and I can plainly see everything it fucked.
I’m quickly catching up to your age and I don’t really understand either why it would be a young people thing either. (not that I’m not still young of course, my white hair are just an affectation)
It’s just a matter of looking around.Welcome to the age of the smartphone, where we’re more informed while being more misinformed and where we’re all connected but can’t actually connect. We’ve hit the point where people can watch something, stare the truth in the eye and say “that’s a lie” or be told an obvious lie that could be disproved in less than a minute and say “that’s so true.”
There’s no easy way out of the hole now either. If the government stepped in, the people spreading lies would simply lie and say the government was misleading people and people would gobble it up, and there’s no way I’d trust anything privately owned to tell me the truth.
Our huge problem here is that we’ve ignored warning signs for so long, that the entire system is broadly fuuuuucked. We always said “well the education system here sucks, I’m sure someone will fix it eventually.”
Then we said “Well the heathcare system here sucks, I’m sure someone will fix it eventually.”
Then we said “The internet is becoming weird, it’s making people think different because of algorithms and outside influence, I hope someone fixes it eventually.”
Then we said “Corporations are consolidating power and making the wealth-gap much wider, we’re losing our entire middle-class and educated people… is someone going to fix this?”
The whole time not wanting to admit what we all know somewhere deep inside, which is nobody is coming.
Agreed, we’ve spent so long waiting it’s all we’re conditioned to do. We believed our elected officials would do what’s in the country’s interest but here we are.
We as a nation need to bury both political parties and get this train back on the tracks because while Dems are far better than maga they’re still corpo bootlickers.
I’m glad to see folks talking on here. Makes me feel better knowing we’re here all going through it. Gives me that Band of Brothers vibe “We stand alone, together.”
I wouldn’t be gentle. But then again both my parents are dead so I don’t actually have anyone to be bitter at.
Hello
Hi!
Cool it with the down votes guys…
They are probably new to the fediverse and trying to understand how it works.
Glad you could join us, fren
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hello
Yes
It’s really sad that many young people are so pessimistic about the future. Despite some setbacks the last years, in many ways the world is still in a better place than it has ever been in human history.
Child mortality is still lower than ever, (extreme) poverty is still on a declining trend, we’re actually on track to stop the worst climate change (thanks to massive Chinese investments), AI could vastly improve our lives in the future…
That said we do live in uncertain times, fascism is on the rise again, a nuclear war could still kill us all, fighting climate change is not done,l and AI could ruine all our lives; but pessimism is not the right mindset.
we’re actually on track to stop the worst climate change (thanks to massive Chinese investments)
No, we damn well aren’t.
AI could vastly improve our lives in the future
It could also make it vastly worse in the future, which is the more likely scenario.
We have climbed so high as a species in such a short time that we genuinely can’t remember where the ground was when we started.
Climate change will be devastating. But for most of human life, the fear of the future was much closer. It wasn’t about the next five or ten years, it wasn’t about the world we were leaving for our children - it was about the food we were feeding our children today. It was about making it through the next winter. It was about survival.
We didn’t have refrigeration, penicillin, HVAC, germ theory… people weren’t worried about undervaccination because there was no such thing as vaccination.
Even in recent history. In the 1920s, we had a war so huge and devastating and terrifying that they called it the war to end all wars.
Then they almost immediately did it again, but bigger.
Every adult in the early 20th century lived through the greatest horror in mankind’s history so far. The first heavy machine guns, the first aerial bombers, the first atom bomb. Then the massive, unstable world powers spent decades building up an arsenal of global annihilation, and very nearly triggered that annihilation at least twice.
All of human existence - from the daily survival of pre-industry, to The Jungle of industrialization, the still-ongoing plague of tuberculosis (“consumption”), the brutal violence of the 20th century - all of it - has been a struggle to survive.
Human existence has always been, on some level, terrifying. Disease, famine, war - these apocalyptic horsemen weren’t on the horizon, they were constant companions to historical humans. And that’s not even getting into all of the historical oppression and bigotry that always has been.
But people weren’t constantly scared by default. They made art, wrote books, told stories. Started families, had children, almost half of their children died as children, had more children anyway.
Humans just lived. This isn’t the first time we’ve faced self destruction. This isn’t the first time we’ve faced oppression, tyranny, poverty, and yes, even climate disasters. A drought could devastate nations. A harsh winter could leave no survivors. Entire settlements just… failed.
Humans are still thriving compared to one or two lifetimes ago. It feels like we plateau’d and then began to decline - because in a sense we did. We were taking massive leaps toward the future with every passing decade, and now we just feel like we’re making incremental improvements in meaningless gadgets, while social progress stalls - or worse- actively regresses.
But we live in the future. That’s why we plateau’d. We made it. Humans have effectively gained the power to make life on Earth as it is in Heaven, and we just choose not to. We choose other things, mainly because a small handful of humans have the power to make those choices for the rest of us.
That doesn’t mean we should lose faith. Humans can still make a golden age of the future, climate change or not.
We just need to fight for it. We live in unprecedented times, and we are capable of unprecedented things. We absolutely have the capability to make the future better than the past.
I do joke a lol, but things in many areas are so much better than 30-50 years ago and considering Brits in WW II had to turn out all their lights to hinder German bombings - most of us are being peddled fear by the media and it’s not THAT bad.
Where did you get the climate hope bit? last articles I glazed over were ‘we missed 1.5 deg target and instead put the foot on the pedal to make it faster’ and ‘climate migrations coming and mass famine’.
Sounder doomerism to me but I don’t really have a good source to be optimistic at all.
Your daily life not being an actual warzone is an extremely low bar to set for things not being bad.
Also the climate claim they made was pure fantasy.
Not to mention each message to chatGPT burns the equivalent of a water bottle worth of water.
And does not provide a bottles worth of water value in return
In short, solar prices are declining exponentially and deployment is growing exponentially. There are even companies claiming to be able to make efuels from air using solar cheaper than fossil fuels by the end of the decade.
Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie is a good book if you want to read something optimistic.
Extreme poverty may be declining but that doesn’t mean more people in the west are not being pushed into food scarcity due to stagnated wages and corporate greed.
In the West too life is generally better than ever, also for people under 40
It remains sad that in the world with enough artificial nitrate fertiliser to produce enough food for everyone in abundance and enough food in abundance to feed everyone in the west companies are still putting perfectly edible food into dumpsters and then covering them in motor oil to prevent freegans and dumpster divers while elsewere, famine still happens.
Everyone over 40: “Yup, social media has really fucked those kids’ brains up”
I have seen so many 50+ year olds that waste several hours a day doomscrolling Facebook say this unironically.
Whereas the reality is that things are so fucked because these idiots get their news from Facebook. The Trump administration admitted to making a mistake deporting Kilmer Garcia - they’ll never find out because they’re too busy sharing OAN articles about that trans women they bullied out of fencing.
Social media was a mistake. User age has nothing to do with it.
I am well over 40 and I agree with OP. Then again, I didn’t give up my empathy at the door to adulthood.
Judging by the typical Facebookfeed, I’d strongly argue the opposite.
At this point we have to contend with small wins like Die Linke getting almost 10% of the vote in Germany, Elon Musk getting bullied out of politics, and Carney winning in Canada.
Unfortunately Musk didn’t get bullied out of politics, his office was always meant to expire at the beginning of May. He achieved what he set out to do: dismantling federal government completely to make deruglation, tax avoidance and corruption much easier.
This is just him doing the typical right wing martyrdom whining whenever somebody criticises them.
Dutton getting his arse absolutely handed to him in Australia, ditto palmer
I won’t contend with small wins anymore. I want it all, heaven or hell
PEACE JUSTICE AND ANARCHY
Die Linke (Formel SPD) used to be close to a majority in our parents time.
Idk what you mean by that, the SPD was always centre left, at least since Bismarck times. Sure, they moved to be basically no-opinion-at-all centrism recently, but it is not like they were the shining sunshine of socialism before.
The Die Linke of today is popular for the positions of the SPD of the past.
Maybe you are older than me. In the last ~20 years that I was old enough to understand the news, the SPD was always the center-left party and the Left/PDS the far left (for a non-fringe party) one. Fugging hell, my conservative grandma voted SPD because she dislikes Merz for his AfD bullshit back in January, and she is everything but left-wing.
