I’m really worried about the state of the US despite being a white male who was I’ll coast right through it. I’ll also accept “I don’t” and “very poorly” as answers
get into areas like solarpunk that hold out hope against the dystopia
Solarpunk is amazing
say more words about it
Or you could just google it?
100% true. Or i could offer an interested audience to someone that seems passionate about the subject.
Many people in here arguing things “have never been better”. It’s true to an extent; things are pretty good in terms of poverty, liberties or world peace (for now). It’s not great, it’s never been great, but it’s a decent bit better than it’s been in the past. Overall.
We are, however, in an era of unstability and unrest, where it feels like things are constantly on the cusp of changing for the worse (and in some cases, are indeed already changing for the worse, like abortion or LGBT rights in the US, for example). Violence and discrimination are on the rise, global peace is being threatened, democracy is in jeopardy (not just in the US mind you), the 1% are getting WAY richer way faster than ever… To top it all off, climate change is objectively, unarguably as bad as it’s ever been, and it’s getting much much worse, much faster than even experts can keep up with. Like, we’re headed straight for extinction and we keep accelerating toward it.
You have every right to be worried. Yes, it’s easy to forget and take for granted the things we have now that we didn’t even a mere 60 years ago, but many of them are very much under attack at the moment. Just because shit maybe hasn’t quite yet hit the fan doesn’t mean everything is fine.
And to answer your question, I’ve found some refuge in art, both experiencing and creating it. Reading books, watching movies, playing games, etc, especially those that echo that sentiment of fear and uncertainty for the future (or present). Trying to use all that as inspiration for my own work, I think it’d help to express my feelings this way. I am indeed doing very poorly still though, it’s a lot to deal with, on top of my own personal problems.
LGBT rights in the US
LGBTQ rights in the US are, generally speaking, progressing.
climate change
I don’t think doom and gloom is warranted with climate change. Many countries have long reached peak CO2. The goal now is net zero. Rich nations also need to pony up to help developing nations that haven’t already spewed a ton of CO2 into the air as part of development. Unfortunately, that’s looking to be difficult with internal politics in the rich countries.
Some of the progress at the recent COP18 looks to be possible ground breaking. The methane related agreements in particular could be enormously beneficial. They could decrease the amount of methane released or burned off as part of fossil fuel extraction significantly. Methane has a relatively low half life, so it will cycle out of the atmosphere faster than CO2.
LGBTQ rights in the US are, generally speaking, progressing.
as a trans person in the USA
fuck you, ya ignorant removed
I’m not trans, but I’m gay and I have many trans friends in the LGTBQ+ community who have shared their experiences with me. Maybe lay off the insults?
Also, I’m talking broad strokes of history. Think about how the general public’s attitude towards LGBTQ+ people has changed in the last, say, 50 years (since Stonewall). It’s been a rough road with set backs, but we have the momentum. Young people are already much more LGBTQ+ friendly, and demographics is destiny.
I will lay off some insults, yes. If i hadn’t had experience with you before. Your politics are of a most silly kind.
Maybe in europe, but before your people decided to pillage and plunder the world, real civilizations in Native Americas, China, Oceania, and such had far far more progressive cultures than our own.
GenZ is the most pathetic excuse for a leftist generation. Even Boomers had wayyyyy better communists, America just killed them off.
As a trans person on the ground with trans organizers, we do not have the momentum. People’s support means little without active protection. Politics is actively stripping away our right to exist in every country on the globe. Well besides civilized countries like Cuba, Nigeria, South Africa, and China. The west is heading backward materially. Your “popular support” means nothing if no one has the spine to do something with it.
We got where we are with riots and subversion and rage, not pandering and concessions. Concessions are how we get washed away.
I can cite sources if you want them.
I am not interested with bizarre comparisons with Nigeria. I am focused on one time comparison. On average, are attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people trending positive. Let’s say you were born under similar circumstances, but fifty years earlier. Would your life as a trans woman be better or worse? Would the people around you treat you better or worse? Would the government treat you better or worse?
The DeSantises and the so called Moms for Liberty out there are unfortunately currently having their moment in some quarters. It is frustrating to see ignorance and hatred directed at my trans brethren. But I have seen too much positive movement, both historical and current, to expect that we anywhere but the right direction. History will be the judge of those who got in the way.
I’m not talking to someone who gets regularly temp banned for things like anti-semitism
fuck off
You’re talking about the world news mods who will find any excuse to ban someone who goes again a pro-Russia, pro-CCP, or pro-Hamas narrative? That community barely has rules, it’s just excuses for the mods to pick their preferred propaganda.
I don’t think doom and gloom is warranted with climate change. Many countries have long reached peak CO2. The goal now is net zero. Rich nations also need to pony up to help developing nations that haven’t already spewed a ton of CO2 into the air as part of development. Unfortunately, that’s looking to be difficult with internal politics in the rich countries.
This is like standing on the deck of the titanic and being like “meh, we have already scraped by most of the iceberg, so we are fine”.
The damage is done, look at global sea surface temperatures they are off the charts. We could stop everything now and things would still be spiraling out of control climate wise and I am sorry but that is just the reality of it :(
Don’t get me wrong, nothing is “fine” when it comes to climate change. There’s a lot of work to do, much of which has a lot of resistance from people with a stake in the status quo towards ruin. But at the same time, this is a situation that can at least be mitigated, with real work in progress. Humanity is not going extinct from climate change.
I believe you probably mean COP28 unless you are talking about one from 10 years ago.
Yes, thank you. I wish they had just numbered it to match the years…
It’s getting harder every year.
I remember well the constant fear of nuclear war in the 1980’s.
I remember the wonder we felt when the Berlin Wall fell and Soviet Union collapsed. A hope of a tomorrow free of fear.
I remember the dreadful recession of the early 1990’s and the steep economical rise that followed it.
I remember the amazing advancements in technology and the standard of living in the late 1990’s. And at the same time, it felt like the world was coming to it’s senses.
I was 21 in the year 2000. The world was full of promise, technological advancements were just pouring in, old mortal enemies were finding common ground and it seemed that we were slowly heading towards a Star Trek - like post scarcity utopia.
This age of hope eneded by the finance crisis of 2007-2008. Russia tried the waters with the war in Georgia. The general atmosphere of the world turned towards gloom again. And the downward spiral just seems to keeps going and going…
Yet I continue the work I started when I chose teaching as my profession in those golden years of hope. The kids are very different today, any class from 20 years ago would be a piece of cake compared with the problems they have now. But if a change for the better is to come, it will come from the kids. My generation is hopelessly lost in consumer greed and watching mindless “reality” shows that they somehow feel more important than real life.
I alone cannot be the change we need, but I CAN educate a few hundred kids and with good luck, maybe a dozen or few of them will have a some effect for a better future.
A lot of weed
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a tide that will soon raise your boat as well.
like what?
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I’m going to address your question in two ways it may be read.
The world is worse than it was
I completely disagree, I think the world has never been better. Look back even 70 years and you have the threat of cold war, other wars (Korean War, conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Middle East, …), much more poverty, starvation (China’s Great Famine), illiteracy, a lot more nasty pollutants that we’ve since moved away from.
To go a bit more US-centric, although much of this is mirrored elsewhere to varying degrees, you had much, much higher crime rates (possibly due to lead in gasoline), women could be raped by their husbands and had minimal rights, gay people were persecuted, black people were killed for fun (lynchings) along with other deplorable treatment, etc.
Right now you live in a world where practically all information is available at your fingertips at minimal cost, where most people will at least tolerate your presence even if you don’t fit neatly into their ideal world, where we’ve made a lot of progress on limiting and reversing environmental damage (ozone layer). We have more medical cures & treatments, longer lifespans, greater nutrition, more education, incredible entertainment options (Netflix, Steam, YouTube, etc.).
The world is better than it ever was, but the pace of improvement has slowed / gone stagnant
Yeah I get the anxiety, things do seem more unstable than they were 10 years ago. I’m super thankful to be living in our so-far-the-best age but I don’t take for granted that it can stay wonderful. Much of the benefits we now enjoy were hard-won victories that required hard work, and I suspect that to keep making the world a better place it’ll require us to pay it forward by also working hard. But don’t take it for a given that we’re due for pain and conflict; human events are too complex to follow simple narratives and it’s possible in 5 years we’ll all be relaxed and thankful that these current problems fizzled out.
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Everything ebbs and flows, but on the wider scale of things crime is down and life expectancy is up.
I play videogames
Same tbh
The knowledge that it was always bad helps me. The only difference is that in generations past- we didn’t have such easy access to everyone on the internet screaming about all the different ways the world will end.
I don’t cope, I go out of my way to *make it better: I volunteer my free time to hand out food at any of those food shelter events locally, I walk trails with a trash bag and collect trash, I care for my elderly neighbors by visiting them a few times a month without warning and insist they find me a job to help them around their house and refuse payments (but suggest I accept a piece of candy as compensation), I use my turn signals 100 meters before I make my turns when driving, I call my old friends who live abroad just to remind them I care about them if they aren’t feeling good and they can always talk to me. Etc, etc.
Everyone should just ignore the eternal dumpster fires around them and try to make better as much as they can within their local vicinity.
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Don’t have kids, save for your retirement.
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Yes, the average American is doing worse than 50 years ago, but the average person worldwide is doing better than 50 years ago, and the average American is doing better than 100 years ago. This is why it’s important to remember 2 things. First, be vigilant, or the improvements we’ve made can be lost. Second, keep perspective with the big picture, and remember there will be setbacks.
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I just try to enjoy each day as I can without making the world any worse than I can help.
Read the last paragraph on page 3. Things are not getting worse. Your perception of the world around you is cynical as a by product of our evolution and saturation of news/media.
Exactly. Look at any graph from the last 50-100 years from live births to life expectancy, from crime rates to living standards: life is objectively better and better, at least in the Western world.
Stop feeding yourself with negativity all day long. Grab a beer, watch a movie, go hiking with your friends etc. Do this regularly without reading too much “news” and you’ll feel it soon enough.It very much varies depending on where you look, but your timescale is skewing your comparison. If you were to look at the Japanese economy today compared to the past 50-100 years, it would look like everything is amazing because of the massive economic boom in the 80s. But that only lasted about a decade before stagnating for the past 30-40 years, and that stagnation has become so bad that Japan is very much at risk of deflation destroying their economy. The life expectancy in the US has fallen several years in a row since COVID.
There have been major improvements in society in the past century, but that means little to the man who can’t afford insulin anymore because the pharmaceutical company decided to increase the price by 1,000% because the US government won’t do anything to stop them, or the millions of Americans saddled with absurd amounts of college debt that will even follow them through bankruptcy - the only form of debt that does - because they changed the laws in the past 15 years to ensure that it does. In the US, generations post Baby Boomers are objectively doing worse than their predecessors across many aspects used to measure quality of life - largely those related to finances in any way, shape, or form. I just watched a video about the infantilisation of Millennial women that spent a long time talking about how the entire generation’s inability to hit the same metrics considered for “success/adulthood” in life compared to their parents has given rise to stuff like the use of “adult” as a verb instead of a noun (adulting - a thing you do on occasion instead of a thing you are).
Noteworthy quotes from the video relevant to this discussion:
- There are arguably four main markers that constitute traditional adulthood: housing, finances, marriage and parenthood, and agency.
- According to a 2021 study in the US, Millennials had the lowest home ownership rate of any adult generation. Only 43% of Millennials were homeowners, well below the average of 65%.
- There’s been an almost 15% rise in the number of non-dependent adult children living at home in the past decade. About 30% of 25 to 29 year olds now live with their parents and more than one in ten adult children age 30 to 34 do.
- According to Forbes, 52% of non home-owning Millennials aren’t saving for a down payment. And of these, many cite underpaying jobs or joblessness as the reason. So it isn’t just that homeownership is becoming a reality for Millennials later in their life than the previous generations, because for many it isn’t considered a reality at all.
- It’s not exactly news, but it is worth including that wage stagnation and rising house prices mean the income levels and therefore purchasing power of the average Millennial is much less than it was even a couple of decades ago. According to reporting from the Urban Institute, those earning the median income in the US or below can only afford 20% of the properties on sale in the US. Compare that to the roughly 50% of homes that they would be able to afford in 2016, and you can see the pattern here. And this is especially impactful to those on minimum wage.
- According to 2019 research by the Economic Policy Institute, the federal minimum wage was worth 17% less than in 2009 and 31% less than in 1968. If minimum wage had kept pace with productivity since 1968, it would now be $24 an hour instead of $7.25. And we see this across the Millennial experience. Hobbies become side hustles as the need to monetize spare time to keep up with the rising costs of living means salaries aren’t enough anymore.
- Journalist Sarah Hayford investigated the birth rate in the US across the decades and found “After the highs of the baby boom in the mid-20th century and the lows of the baby bust in the 1970s, birth rates were relatively stable for nearly 50 years. But during the Great Recession, from 2007-2009, birth rates declined sharply - and they’ve kept falling. In 2007, average birth rates were right around 2 children per woman. By 2021, levels had dropped more than 20%, close to the lowest level in a century.”
- Finances of course play into this. Weddings are expensive and children even more so. In America, without access to a nationalized health service, even birth itself can be unaffordable. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, labour costs on average are more than $4,500 per childbirth even if you’re insured and the price of maternity and newborn surgeries has risen by 60% over the past decade. That’s not to mention childcare costs.[…]One survey of almost 600 millennials found that nearly three in five of those without children said they didn’t have any because of their financial situation.
- Figures from the Office of National Statistics in England and Wales showed that only 213,000 heterosexual couples had married that year, down more than 50% since the peak in 1972. The number of 25 to 35 year olds who are unmarried had more than doubled since 1991.
- Adulthood is often perceived through the lens of you “leaving the nest” - when someone goes out into the world and makes a life independent of their parents; no longer living at home, depending on family income, or being under their parents’ control. Adulthood in this way is marked by a kind of agency and competence that you don’t have as a child or teen. You can make your own decisions, create a life for yourself that’s built around your own sense of self and your own values. The three previous markers of adulthood I talked about - stable housing outside your family home, healthy finances, marriage and parenthood - they’re all linked. They interweave and compound each other. They allow a sense of this adult independence and agency; but once one drops off, the others come tumbling down as well. If you have no stable place to live, no stable income, no stable sense of family, what does a stable sense of adult self look like?
The rest of the video isn’t really relevant to this topic, but it’s an interesting watch with a good perspective on the experience of Millennial women so I’ll link it here. It even has stuff like a section about how all this affects queer women specifically and how the LGBTQ+ community has a different sense of time compared to cis/hetero people due to the environment they grow up in.
Also, as an elder millennial (I’m 36 but hang with a handful of late 30s early 40s peeps) we’re pushing 40 or are beginning our 40s, but we’re still stuck in effectively entry level work. All the meaningful or well paying positions that aren’t being gutted or automated are still being held down by our parents and in some cases grandparents. We can’t move up because our parents destroyed the concept of retirement to support eagle fucking corporate freedom.
I see alot of shit talk about millennials still doing “silly” stuff like drinking and video games or whatever instead of building homes and breeding - it’s all we can afford and we can’t get those jobs that make you FEEL like an adult who’s ready to “step up life.”
Meanwhile, they’re trying to automate all the artistic and creative work so we’re stuck with only menial low paying work to choose from.
Burying one’s head in the ground is a terrible response. If everyone were to do that, nothing will ever get better. We need to be aware of the things we can change and work towards that goal.
Also, living longer is not always better. Go visit a memory care facility or a person who has been brought back from the brink of death only to prolong his suffering.
This is 11 years old. There has been an objective uptick in white nationalism, going beyond trajectory to repair climate, consolidation of wealth, “inflation” inflated prices for less goods through record profits, irrelevant and biased unemployment data from gig economy and partial employment without healthcare, debt, renters, etc There’s data on every one of those. Don’t gaslight people, these aren’t feelings or biased perceptions. The industrialized West has the (massively significant and impactful) benefits of creature comforts from bread and circuses. But as those dwindle, a population losing their mind from the current level of discomfort (and snowflakedom) is going to full on implode. They’re electing autocrats around the globe bc they’re scared of getting injections, wearing masks, and the feelings in their pants when they look at sexy members of their own gender.
I want to combat all the people saying “um, actually things are getting better”
What they mean to say is “The largely meaningless or deliberately misleading metrics the government uses to make its own report card say things are going great!”
Everybody keeps talking about how the “economy” is so strong. That just means the stock market is doing well and owners of capital are happy.
Meanwhile, the US has the highest rate of homelessness in its recorded history. Worth noting that the way numbers are reported for things like homelessness, unemployment, and the like are very intentionally designed to under-report.
Local, state, and federal government all have a long history of changing the method of reporting/calculating those metrics during a term in office so they can say “unemployment dropped 30% under my watch!” When all they really did was not count 30% of the people previously counted.
Yes, wages are finally rising, and it has nothing to do with the government. It’s entirely the work of unions and organization of labor to raise wages, and it’s still got a long way to go.
The best thing that anyone can do is vote for better representation at every opportunity.
The best thing that not everyone can do is talk to a doctor if you have signs of depression or other mental illness. Yes, it’s possible to have those things brought on by circumstance, and no, that doesn’t mean you don’t have to do anything about it.
If you can’t afford doctor’s visits like that, look up non-profit health care organizations. You may be lucky enough to have real, free Healthcare options available through places like Good Samaritan.
And don’t forget to let yourself acknowledge the REAL progress of the world. We’re seeing rapid development and insight on treatments for cancers, dementia, new vaccines, renewable tech, and computational efficiency.
There are many broken systems to overcome, but even still there are incredible humans building the foundations for an incredible future if we keep working at it. Maybe we can help make sure Gen Alpha gets a fair shot.
I just accept our fate.
Humanity will probably realize we seriously fucked up around 2050 and near the end of the century mass migration will lead to a death count much bigger than WW2 or the chinese civil wars.
The only grace is that most of us reading this thread will die from various reason before the second stage.
I will still do my part by reducing my CO2 footprint but unless we find some miracle technology producing nuclear power plant levels of energy for the cost of a charcoal power plant, shitty world leaders and corporations will ruin everything for fake wealth.
