I remember my childhood mostly as a happy, oblivious one, affordable food, the usual disagreements between liberals and republicans, but nothing unhinged (say taxes, migrants or abortion). At least it looks reasonable today.
Now it’s like everything is unhinged: politics seem to be based on purely emotional reactions and the other side is hell bent on destroying the country: texas starts heavily gerrymandering to secure 5 extra republican seats at the next midterms? california starts lobbying for doing exactly the same and dismantling an independent redistricting commission texas never had.
When I was younger it seemed politics were more rational and cruelty never seemed to be the point of doing nothing. Now we execute people with nitrogen gas, meaning a conscious person has to breathe something he knows its going to kill him during 4 minutes. This is somehow not cruel and unusual. And nobody bats an eye.
I still don’t get how populists can be so popular now, they simplify complex issues most people without a degree in the matter, cannot grasp. This includes me.
I’m now 35 and wonder if I’m already talking like an old person who misses his young days so hard. I see that in people in their 60s and hoped never to become one of them, but here I am. To a younger person I may look like one of those old guys who lives to rant.
Am I going to feel even more detached and depressed with each passing day?
The world is not the USA. The USA is getting worse. The USA is an unhinged shit hole. Things are getting better where I live in Mexico. We have a popular leader that is pushing popular social programs and as the US kills itself we’re taking the opportunity to get closer to the rest of the world, build new infrastructure and sort out the American created cartels and chaos. China is getting better, they lifted millions of people out of dire poverty. Much of the rest of the world is doing just fine. There are always problem parts and hope simultaneously.
If you’re in the west then it’s worse now because capitalism is reaching the stages of systemic collapse. For people living in countries like China or Vietnam the picture is quite different. They see their lives improving each and every day. They have clean cities, great infrastructure, and a rate of technological progress we can only dream of. Those of us living in the west are living through a similar collapse to the one that happened in USSR in the 90s, but the west is only 13% of the world population.
It is getting worse. Humanity is entering a deeper and deeper crisis. Alienation is growing with each passing year. The inner contradiction in every one of us is getting more intense, which manifests itself in more external conflicts: between people, between people and nature, between everything.
That being sad, this crisis just highlights the slow death of the previous, deeply troubled era and marks the transition to another way of living. The destructive aspect of things, that we all suffer from, is therefore not absolute. It is not going to destroy neither us nor the world around us. It is balanced off by the progress that we’re making.
Take 3d printing, for example. If you think of it, it is actually the (very) beginning of something fundamentally new: local automated production. Automation eliminates the routine part of producing goods, which makes the process creative again, while not compromising on efficiency. This leads to production becoming a means of self-actualisation rather than something that takes away all your freedom. And since the process of making new things gives you value instead of taking it, the need for charging others for using your creations vanishes, giving way to free exchange and collaboration. This, if applied globally, would solve the fundamental issue of our current society, where creating good takes away just as much, making any growth a form of self-destruction. And solving that would spare us of all different kinds of problems, ranging from pollution, wars to emotional abuse.
So I think by getting worse it’s also getting better and these difficult times we’ve happened to live in are still marvelous.
P.S. Apart from 3d printing, there’s, of course, free software movement as well, which in my opinion is also part of the global free production evolution
25 years ago the internet was still easy dial up and smart phones were coming out like you’d go to the library with your friends to check your email
MySpace lol
When I was younger it seemed politics were more rational and cruelty never seemed to be the point of doing nothing.
The cruelty was outside our borders. The rational, reasonable debate was for domestic issues. Foreigners got the bullet.
As the empire collapses the cruelty turns inwards i.e. fascism.
the contradictions are piling up and things are more openly fascist, economic opportunities are shrinking in the west, income inequality is off the chart, yeah things are actually worse
liberals and republicans
Yes. The contradictions of capitalism are only getting worse. Workers, care givers, nature, social institutions, racialized people and countries, all can only be exploited and expropriated so much. But capitalism demands more and more. So it will continue getting worse until successful revolutions. But you don’t have to feel detached about it. You can try to understand it, tell others about it, look around for awesome people struggling against it, maybe even find ways to help them. I started reading Nancy Fraser’s new book “Cannibal Capitalism” it’s short, tries to be accessible and it explains how all those areas of struggle I mentioned above are connected.
My dad said that everything “went to shit” once they started privatizing hospitals and public infrastructure.
I think its time for you to do some self reflecting and ask yourself if it really was that good of a time for the rest of the world or just you due to your immediate context (being american).
The chickens came home to roost again ✈️🏢
I’m around your age and feel the same, it’s not just you
Grew up watching news of Palestinians and Israelis killing each other. Good thing that was 40 years ago.
In late 2023 there was a video of a tower in Gaza being hit by israeli missiles, and the media were calling it misinformstion because it was a clip from like Jan of that year
Free Palestine
In terms of politics, yes. But we are better in almost every other aspect.
Everything is political.
Believe it or not, the world has indeed been made worse, it’s just the era of American Domination due to the collapse of the USSR has waned due to previous socio-cultural issues ramping up and COVID-19 as well as the general beginning of change across the world due to the old generation dying out
