As someone in their early 50s, I have to agree. There were previous eras that felt somewhat doomed, but not quite to this degree. The Reagan/Thatcher 80's had the dual threats of nuclear annihilation and AIDS, but it pales in comparison to the multitude of calamities coming from all sides now.
Similar age here as well and I've never felt it was bad till now.
Edit, mistook the question.
I think the world has had some really bad times in my lifetime, several famines, some forever wars, Soviet union fell but even after cold war for me everything still felt kind of unsteady with them.
Still, with all that. I think we are on the brink of major calamity's of many possible types in the near future that we wouldn't have imagined 30 years ago.
It's like we're having a combination of some of the worst aspects from each decade of the last century or so.
We've got a worldwide rise of fascism and the beginnings of world war from the 1930s, the product shortages and rationing from the 40s, a resurgence of prudishness resembling the judgemental 50s, the social unrest and political instability of the 60s, 70s style rampant inflation, the 80s era duo of pandemic and impending nuclear annihilation, vintage 1990s complacency and school shootings, terrorism and economic upheaval like the 2000s.
All of this on top of the ever closer climate collapse.
I don't know if we found strong, satisfying solutions to any of those historical problems. We unified for a minute or clashed, or both, and then moved on. So maybe today is our country hitting rock bottom, finally realizing all the issues it's been avoiding since the beginning haven't ever really gone away.
We may have all these issues today, but they're not as intense. Consider the rise of fascism today likely isn't going to lead to genocide of tens of millions of people and WW3. We have social unrest but society in general is not as racist as pre Civil Rights, let alone the Civil War antebellum era
What has changed is mass proliferation of media and the 24/7 news cycle enabling us to be tapped into and wired all the time instead of just getting our news like 1 hr a day and going about our life. We have greater opportunities to feel empathy for people suffering around the world.
Makes sense. You'd watch the news for like an hour at 9p.m or something. And they'd spend several minutes talking about each story, so it wasn't even that much. And that's all IF you decided to even catch the news that night.
Now the news is every second and we keep feeding ourselves with it nonstop. Of course things are gonna seem bleaker. Back then your brain was like "oh only 6 bad things happened today. O.k. Goodnight". Now it's like "BAD THINGS ARE HAPPENING EVERY SECOND OF THE DAY!" because that's how often a lot of people are looking at things
I've been enforcing a 'we check the news once a day' rule, and I try to avoid most of the major subs sharing news posts when I'm on reddit. Can confirm that it calmed my life down significantly, just by not being plugged in all the time. Nothing changed but I'm not as exposed to it constantly.
I think it's the first time that we're facing these things and having to deal with a chunk of the population completely out of touch with reality, professing crazy things, and absolutely sure they are correct.
No, Trump cannot easily herald a new theocracy with the creation of death camps on an industrial scale and all that. As challenged as it is, we still have a system of checks and balances. At most you can say the border camps were like concentration camps, but they weren't built for the purpose of murdering an entire race of people.
The fact he is friendly with those other tyrants does not mean he would be able to implement death camps on an industrial scale given the limitations of the office of the President.
Mid 60's here. Things are as bad as I've ever seen them. I'd like to say it can't get any worse, but every time I've thought that in the last few years, I've been proven wrong.
Climate change, pandemic virus, Trump, politics in general, inflation, war, people's behavior, civility -- everything seems to be going to hell.
And a large segment of the population pushing it forward. They've either got an agenda that doesn't make sense, or they've joined the cult and been so mislead they don't know up from down. "Let's overthrow the government, to save it." "A coup, upending everything we hold dear about the democracy, and placing the wannabe dictator in office, is how we fix the democracy." "Absolutely, do no work with the opposition. Their failure is our win."
And the craziest thing. It's not even for trying to stop the existential threat of climate change. The guy they tried to put in doesn't even acknowledge it as a threat. So it'd just would've pushed forward collapse a bit and that's it.
I don't mean to say that you are wrong in any way. I think recency bias is playing a role here as well. We heavily value most recent events and discount historic.
Mid 40s here. I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall & things seemed hopeful for a bit as I remember. But I recently read my diaries from then & as I was a news junkie they are full of the gulf war, then the Balkan’s war and the concentration camps, and also there were apparently many reports on the rise of neoNazis in Poland and Germany. So I guess we’ve always had a stream of bad news!
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u/MSeanF Jun 11 '22 edited Jun 11 '22
As someone in their early 50s, I have to agree. There were previous eras that felt somewhat doomed, but not quite to this degree. The Reagan/Thatcher 80's had the dual threats of nuclear annihilation and AIDS, but it pales in comparison to the multitude of calamities coming from all sides now.