Honestly, as I've grown older, the more I've come to realize that "rationality" is such an energy intensive skill to cultivate and its payoff so long-term that

Honestly, as I've grown older, the more I've come to realize that "rationality" is such an energy intensive skill to cultivate and its payoff so long-term that humans have always been like this and that what we witness in modern times is just a clearer picture of that fact due to the scale of our populations and speed of information transfer. Rationality is energy intensive and difficult to cultivate and is usually a socially learned or reinforced skill (similar to the fact that long-term research is usually only funded by public tax dollars and not corporations). So I don't think now is any different, it's just at a different scale and behooves those of us who have had the privilege to cultivate the skill to not gloom and doom and to instead show the way up the ladder (if possible, not all people want to cultivate rationality).