4 ms·

I’m always a little stunned when this (and many sibling comments) is almost always the first response to something like this. It’s probably generally true, and

I’m always a little stunned when this (and many sibling comments) is almost always the first response to something like this. It’s probably generally true, and an appropriate response to the most dire decline narratives or things easily disproven by stats . . . But like also: really? None of this resonates with you on a personal level? If yes are you that distrustful of your own anecdata? If no: I hypothesize that you got significantly wealthier over the last decade and spent accordingly to choose/manage your surroundings, and/or live in a blessed location with a healthy friend/family group and a healthy relationship to social media. I think all of these are outliers to majority experience. It sometimes feels like there’s a Panglossian Gaslighting Society operating in threads like this.

whatshisface 4y ago
>If yes are you that distrustful of your own anecdata? Hackernews is approaching the topic in a very characteristic way but depression is an important phenomenon that manifests to the individual as, among other things, worsening negative appraisals of everything. So do the consequences of poor fiscal and monetary policy. Funny how we use the same word for both.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ben_w 4y ago
> None of this resonates with you on a personal level? Not really, no. Don't get me wrong, 5 years ago I was in the UK, I moved to Berlin towards the end of 2018. Visiting the UK again last December… it felt very broken. But it was the same kind of broken that I saw in Portsmouth when I was a child. And Berlin still feels as good as it did on my first visit. Landlords being greedy? Sure. That's one of the things Marx and (from what little I've read of him) Adam Smith agreed on. People are loud? I'm remembering a neighbour in my mid-terrace place in Sheffield in 2009-10, the husband and wife yelled at each other every night loud enough I could hear the words. I'm remembering a biker housemate in Cambridge who openly discussed the motorcycles with illegal loud exhausts. I'm remembering the stories in my childhood about illegal raves being shut down. Worker apathy, that's hard to gauge. Could therefore believe it if it came with evidence stronger than an anecdote. Software development looks like it's much the same combination of fads, technical debt, and Peter Principles as it ever was. But that's anecdotes, the proof is in the pudding, and everything is more stable and less crashy than I remember — while I think that Apple's UI peaked a decade ago, that's mainly because I am deeply nostalgic for skeuomorphic UI. Subscription models: well, if you don't like them, don't get them. We're getting Netflix for one month of the year because that's enough to watch what we want, and there's plenty of others with different stuff we can watch later. I'm not going to get a Photoshop subscription, but I did buy Pixelmator, and if that hadn't existed I'd have used GIMP. The police? BLM started in 2013, the word "woke" originated in 1938 in the lyrics to a song about racial injustice in the legal system. I have become very cynical about the legal system as a whole, but for very different reasons: if you were fully enforce all the traffic laws the only people who would be allowed to drive would be people like me who don't, if you fully enforced the drug laws you'd bankrupt whichever country you were in, and so on. But none of this is new, as evidenced by Sir Patrick Stewart's stories about his father. For rich grifters, I suggest Robert Maxwell. He's… mostly forgotten. Fraudsters often are, so the question should be: what's the fraud rate in your country? Everything is poison? I grew up with acid rain (solved), a hole in the ozone layer (getting better), indoor public smoking (banned in the UK, doesn't seem to be here in Berlin), asbestos (banned), and leaded petrol (banned). Do we still have problems? I assume so! But they don't appear to be worse, rather they appear to be milder.
- cudgy 4y ago
  “ Everything is poison? I grew up with acid rain (solved), a hole in the ozone layer (getting better), indoor public smoking (banned in the UK, doesn't seem to be here in Berlin), asbestos (banned), and leaded petrol (banned).” But now you have to worry about plastics in your food, leaching of chemicals from batteries that power new technology, depression and suicide, resulting from social media (especially amongst young children and teens), loss of privacy due to technological devices, dangerous side effects from new drugs that are pushed and marketed onto the public, dangerous chemicals and metals found in modern vaping devices, reduced quality of life due to income stagnation and exorbitant real estate prices, etc
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Grew up vegetarian because my mum was worried about mad cow disease. The batteries were also toxic when I was a kid. So were more of the lightbulbs. Suicide rate is significantly lower in the UK today then when I was born. Loss of privacy concerns me. Most people seem happy to over-share, presumably because the thing also allows more connections with more niche interests than most people can name. Dangerous side effects of drugs? I remember seeing thalidomide victims in my local mall. We're a lot more cautious these days because of things like that. Vaping is an odd thing to have a moral panic about, as the alternative for many people is to set fire to a tube of things known to produce carcinogenic smoke, and stick it in their mouth. Stagnant quality of life is by definition not getting worse. Exorbitant real estate prices are the only thing where I agree with you they're a genuine concern for the average Millennial and post-Millennial.
    - cudgy 4y ago
      In US, suicide rates increased 36% between 2000-2018 and declined 5% between 2018-2020. Overall, a huge increase and we still have covid years to add to the mix. https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/suicide-data-statistics.html https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/suicide-data-statistics.html “A "vape," or electronic cigarette, is a device that heats up a liquid to create a vapor you inhale.” https://www.webmd.com/connect-to-care/vaping/what-is-vaping https://www.webmd.com/connect-to-care/vaping/what-is-vaping What liquid? I know what tobacco is, but I don’t know what a “liquid” is. It could be anything and many of them contain dangerous metals, fragrances, and other mysterious chemicals. Hardly an improvement over cigarettes. Stagnant wages over time, while they may have the same numeric value, result in far less purchasing power due to inflation. Ridiculous real estate values are a concern for every generation.
yucky 4y ago
My experience has been that the more time people spend on social media and/or consuming the "news" (such as FOX/CNN), the more they have these feelings of impending doom. That being said, some things are far better now and other things have gotten worse. Our social isolation and self-imposed echo chambers are the primary cause from what I can tell.
- Shocka1 4y ago
  Social media and mainstream media is pretty much cancer for the mind. I've been unplugged from all the garbage since around 2015, which is around when people seemed to totally start losing their minds. I still get current event updates from friends as they are all still plugged into the hive mind and basically talk about the same things like clockwork. I've noticed the doomsday type of rhetoric as well. I really just don't see how people can keep eating this stuff up and not get tired of it.
quanticle 4y ago
None of this resonates with you on a personal level? Honestly? Not really, no. I think the world has gotten a lot better over the past few decades. My gripes are that, mostly due to short sighted and avoidable decisions, things could have been even better. But if you asked me, "Okay quanticle, I can take you back in a time machine and strand you twenty-five years in the past, would you prefer that?" my answer would be an instant, "Are you kidding? Get outta here." Just personally, when my family and I came over from India, roughly twenty-five years ago, we could only afford to call our relatives in the home country once every other month, for five to ten minutes at a time. And, on half of those phone calls, the line would be too noisy to actually hear or make out anything from the other end. Today, my mom (in the US) and my grandmother (in India) speak for anywhere between ten minutes and two hours, every day, in high resolution video. No, things haven't gotten worse. We might not have gotten flying cars, but we did get videophones, and that's pretty cool.

whatshisface 4y ago

>If yes are you that distrustful of your own anecdata? Hackernews is approaching the topic in a very characteristic way but depression is an important phenomenon that manifests to the individual as, among other things, worsening negative appraisals of everything. So do the consequences of poor fiscal and monetary policy. Funny how we use the same word for both.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ben_w 4y ago

> None of this resonates with you on a personal level? Not really, no. Don't get me wrong, 5 years ago I was in the UK, I moved to Berlin towards the end of 2018. Visiting the UK again last December… it felt very broken. But it was the same kind of broken that I saw in Portsmouth when I was a child. And Berlin still feels as good as it did on my first visit. Landlords being greedy? Sure. That's one of the things Marx and (from what little I've read of him) Adam Smith agreed on. People are loud? I'm remembering a neighbour in my mid-terrace place in Sheffield in 2009-10, the husband and wife yelled at each other every night loud enough I could hear the words. I'm remembering a biker housemate in Cambridge who openly discussed the motorcycles with illegal loud exhausts. I'm remembering the stories in my childhood about illegal raves being shut down. Worker apathy, that's hard to gauge. Could therefore believe it if it came with evidence stronger than an anecdote. Software development looks like it's much the same combination of fads, technical debt, and Peter Principles as it ever was. But that's anecdotes, the proof is in the pudding, and everything is more stable and less crashy than I remember — while I think that Apple's UI peaked a decade ago, that's mainly because I am deeply nostalgic for skeuomorphic UI. Subscription models: well, if you don't like them, don't get them. We're getting Netflix for one month of the year because that's enough to watch what we want, and there's plenty of others with different stuff we can watch later. I'm not going to get a Photoshop subscription, but I did buy Pixelmator, and if that hadn't existed I'd have used GIMP. The police? BLM started in 2013, the word "woke" originated in 1938 in the lyrics to a song about racial injustice in the legal system. I have become very cynical about the legal system as a whole, but for very different reasons: if you were fully enforce all the traffic laws the only people who would be allowed to drive would be people like me who don't, if you fully enforced the drug laws you'd bankrupt whichever country you were in, and so on. But none of this is new, as evidenced by Sir Patrick Stewart's stories about his father. For rich grifters, I suggest Robert Maxwell. He's… mostly forgotten. Fraudsters often are, so the question should be: what's the fraud rate in your country? Everything is poison? I grew up with acid rain (solved), a hole in the ozone layer (getting better), indoor public smoking (banned in the UK, doesn't seem to be here in Berlin), asbestos (banned), and leaded petrol (banned). Do we still have problems? I assume so! But they don't appear to be worse, rather they appear to be milder.

cudgy 4y ago
“ Everything is poison? I grew up with acid rain (solved), a hole in the ozone layer (getting better), indoor public smoking (banned in the UK, doesn't seem to be here in Berlin), asbestos (banned), and leaded petrol (banned).” But now you have to worry about plastics in your food, leaching of chemicals from batteries that power new technology, depression and suicide, resulting from social media (especially amongst young children and teens), loss of privacy due to technological devices, dangerous side effects from new drugs that are pushed and marketed onto the public, dangerous chemicals and metals found in modern vaping devices, reduced quality of life due to income stagnation and exorbitant real estate prices, etc
- ben_w 4y ago
  Grew up vegetarian because my mum was worried about mad cow disease. The batteries were also toxic when I was a kid. So were more of the lightbulbs. Suicide rate is significantly lower in the UK today then when I was born. Loss of privacy concerns me. Most people seem happy to over-share, presumably because the thing also allows more connections with more niche interests than most people can name. Dangerous side effects of drugs? I remember seeing thalidomide victims in my local mall. We're a lot more cautious these days because of things like that. Vaping is an odd thing to have a moral panic about, as the alternative for many people is to set fire to a tube of things known to produce carcinogenic smoke, and stick it in their mouth. Stagnant quality of life is by definition not getting worse. Exorbitant real estate prices are the only thing where I agree with you they're a genuine concern for the average Millennial and post-Millennial.
  - cudgy 4y ago
    In US, suicide rates increased 36% between 2000-2018 and declined 5% between 2018-2020. Overall, a huge increase and we still have covid years to add to the mix. https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/suicide-data-statistics.html https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/suicide-data-statistics.html “A "vape," or electronic cigarette, is a device that heats up a liquid to create a vapor you inhale.” https://www.webmd.com/connect-to-care/vaping/what-is-vaping https://www.webmd.com/connect-to-care/vaping/what-is-vaping What liquid? I know what tobacco is, but I don’t know what a “liquid” is. It could be anything and many of them contain dangerous metals, fragrances, and other mysterious chemicals. Hardly an improvement over cigarettes. Stagnant wages over time, while they may have the same numeric value, result in far less purchasing power due to inflation. Ridiculous real estate values are a concern for every generation.

yucky 4y ago

My experience has been that the more time people spend on social media and/or consuming the "news" (such as FOX/CNN), the more they have these feelings of impending doom. That being said, some things are far better now and other things have gotten worse. Our social isolation and self-imposed echo chambers are the primary cause from what I can tell.

Shocka1 4y ago
Social media and mainstream media is pretty much cancer for the mind. I've been unplugged from all the garbage since around 2015, which is around when people seemed to totally start losing their minds. I still get current event updates from friends as they are all still plugged into the hive mind and basically talk about the same things like clockwork. I've noticed the doomsday type of rhetoric as well. I really just don't see how people can keep eating this stuff up and not get tired of it.

quanticle 4y ago

None of this resonates with you on a personal level? Honestly? Not really, no. I think the world has gotten a lot better over the past few decades. My gripes are that, mostly due to short sighted and avoidable decisions, things could have been even better. But if you asked me, "Okay quanticle, I can take you back in a time machine and strand you twenty-five years in the past, would you prefer that?" my answer would be an instant, "Are you kidding? Get outta here." Just personally, when my family and I came over from India, roughly twenty-five years ago, we could only afford to call our relatives in the home country once every other month, for five to ten minutes at a time. And, on half of those phone calls, the line would be too noisy to actually hear or make out anything from the other end. Today, my mom (in the US) and my grandmother (in India) speak for anywhere between ten minutes and two hours, every day, in high resolution video. No, things haven't gotten worse. We might not have gotten flying cars, but we did get videophones, and that's pretty cool.