Maybe, among other things, more widespread and easily ingested news has something to do with it. Centuries ago, foreign news was what happened two villages over

Maybe, among other things, more widespread and easily ingested news has something to do with it. Centuries ago, foreign news was what happened two villages over, and you only knew about that because of some wanderer that came and told you, because you couldn't read and there were no newspapers to read anyway. And it your world was limited to a radius of a few tens of kilometres, then most of the time, in that world, everything wasn't going to hell in a handbasket. Now, it's easier to find that there's lots of things happening across the entire world, so it's more likely to feel that 'everything's turning to shit.'