Why not both?
Which makes it all the worse.
There are things that are better and things that are worse
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Things are shittier by design. It’s called planned obsolescence. Things are designed to maximize profits:
- crappy quality
- high price
- bonus of making you buy another one when the first one breaks
You wrote this on what even to recent ancestors of yours would be classified as Clarke Tech, AKA “Indistinguishable From Magic”
We have some new problems, some old problems, some problems that are getting better and some that are getting worse, that’s just how history works most of the time.
The significant change vs 20 or 30 years ago is the increased attention focus on those bad things because literally every form of media has at least some form of perverse incentive to fixate on those bad things “if it bleeds it leads”, an idea so old it’s how the western world knows about Vlad the Impaler some also ran count of part of Romania that spent more time as a hostage than he did as a ruler, but who ruled with a hand so bloody that it inspired the creation of one of the three quintessential gothic horrors of English literature.
I’d say shittier. When I was little, politicians were bad but were at least relatively sane. Now it’s just one big game of Moby Dick.
Things are shittier right now than they were 10-20 years ago, but they’re a lot better than they were 50+ years ago.
For certain, and in the grand scheme of things 50 years is nothing. For most of humanity generation upon generation would pass without any significant advance.
The last 100 years really hints at the speed of the singularity curve as things are getting better at an insane rate. But there are costs to those advances that if left unchecked can truly threaten the future of our species.
If I can use a floor cleaning metaphor:
The floor was pretty filthy in the 20th century, but a lot of it was swept under the rug so it looked pretty clean at casual glance.
Thusfar in the 21st century, we threw out the rug and bought a smaller one, did a modest job at cleaning up some of the dirt under it, and there’s a small number of people who deliberately shit on the rug because being decent human beings isn’t a thing they can do.
And I think that brings us to 2024.
there’s also a fully automatic turbo-vacuum sitting in the closet, which the people who shit on the carpet are actively restricting our access to and trying to make us forget it exists.
That’s really well done!
Neither, we just tend to look at the past with rose-colored glasses, forgetting how shitty things have always been.
According to the Grandpa association the good old times are way back before you’re born, so how would you even know?
(Sorry, I still don’t know how to do a Lemmy link.)
https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/112308356048172080
From Aral Balkin: “I don’t understand why everything is so fucked up and we seem incapable of fixing any of it!” This is because you believe you live in a democracy when you actually live under capitalism. (And it is functioning exactly as designed.) PS. Not your fault; you’ve been taught your whole life that the two are complementary when they’re diametrically-opposed. #capitalism #versus #democracy
both.
and being more aware is the first step to fixing.
People today tend to fixate on the things that are out of their control. Perhaps it’s because we have lost our coping mechanisms. Perhaps it’s because they never learned any. We live in the most technologically advanced point in time we have ever known. Few of us need to go out and till the earth to grow our own food. The majority of us don’t have to physically work as hard as previous generations. Adults and our children find their enjoyment and existential dread by watching tiny screens filled with useless entertainment. Maybe things are fine. We just make shitty choices about what to do with our time, and what we give our attention to.
Great thoughts. I think you did the question justice.
Both.
The top 0.01% are able to exert more and more influence over the world, and are using it to concentrate wealth even more into their own pockets.
And regular people have access to smartphones that allow them to communicate worldwide instantly. The cost of more basic smartphones has plummeted, so more people have more cameras connected straight to social media.
But it’s also that some things are genuinely worse. I am fairly sure that there are still more slaves alive today than at any other point in history. However as a percentage I believe it’s lower, it’s just due to the world population being so high.
My vote is more awareness. Things are definitely not good still you have no idea what we are missing, like a fish in a tank trying to picture the ocean.
That said things were fucking awful back in the day. Don’t worry, this entire way of life is a giant bubble and we will regress to the old norm
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And not just any god, but the right god and worship in the right way? People were literally killing each other over whether altars should have rails around them or not and how a church’s middle management should be organized.
Yeah I’ve had people complain to me about being “born in the wrong era” before and I just don’t get it.
Me: What about the lack of modern medicine and death from easily preventable things? What about a crazy high risk of death in childbirth? You and I would be dead.
Me: What about being a second class citizen because you’re a woman?
Me: What about society hating literally any ethnic minority or LGBT person to the point where those friends you have now wouldn’t have been your friends back then? What about them being treated as second class citizens without any rights? What about these people literally being straight up murdered for just existing?
Me: What about periods of famine where people would literally starve to death?
Me: What about an even greater wealth divide than we have now?
Them: True, but it was still a lot better back then.
Me: …
