I'm 57 in the US and up until the last ten years I always thought that things would get better in my lifetime and that ultimately my country would eventually choose the right financial and moral paths. Now I not only don't believe that will happen in my lifetime but I doubt if this nation will bounce back in my kid's lifetime, if ever.
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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Same age, same thoughts. The past was violent & sucky but it really felt like we were making progress, things were getting better. Some things have, there's a lot less violence where I live, and more to do, the city has progressed.
Honestly I think the slide started after Bush vs Gore, and very often wish I had been in the other timeline, where the votes got counted before he conceded, Gore seemed conceited but smart, geeky and took good ideas seriously.
Well, there are two songs which I think answer your question:
And
Besuchen sie Europa, solange es noch steht
Which is a song about visiting Europe before it will be destroyed by the then assumed imminent nuclear war.
No, the 80s and 90s were fantastic. I would go back if I could. I thought it was bad that there was wars and corruption but I had the feeling that leaders tried to do the right thing. Maybe they didnt but I felt like they did. Not today.
Always has been, the big difference is it wasn't streamed straight into your eyes in real time
Yep, only in my 50s but this is correct. All the shit under Reagan, Nixon etc, decades of meddling in the middle east before that. A century of oppressing South America. All the labor struggles. It's like the increase in the diagnosed cases of autism. The number of cases didn't increase. Only our awareness.
Yep, you had to get out of bed, and walk a few miles, if you wanted to see public torture and humiliation of others.
But executions and all that were public events. Not behind closed doors like today.
No, no it was not.
Example: when they found out what caused the hole in the ozone layer, they fixed it.
If we found out now, people would say that you can't trust Big Academia or Big Science and nothing would be done. And don't get me started on vaccinations.
We're sliding rapidly backwards.
Stopping climate change is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE harder than protecting the ozone layer. Protecting ozone requires switching the chemicals we used in refrigerants and propellants to other, viable alternatives. That affected products worth, generously, maybe 1% of GDP?
Stopping climate changing the vast majority of the vehicles on the planet, along with the majority of our electrical power plants. It also necessitates stopping deforestation and overhauling a wide number of industrial processes, including for basic materials like steel and concrete. And that's not even getting into methane emissions from livestock.
All of these things add up to a massive chunk of the planets GDP. It's an extremely heavy lift, and it's not fair to say that the world has gotten worse because we're struggling more with climate change than the ozone hole.
I feel @starlinguk@lemmy.world was saying more than that. I don't recall any serious studies or news articles suggesting the ozone hole was a hoax or that debunking a human cause. Although it was kinda an aside but the anti vaxine thing he points to. I mean one of the most effective medical interventions since soap and sterilization has people acting like its some sort of evil witchcraft that will actually harm you despite the clear evidence both clinical and personal to its effectiveness.
But there were a lot of news articles suggesting at that time that global warming was overrated.
But at that time the science was just solidifying so overrated was not that contrary to say its overrated or inconclusive or something. Its like at one point there was a microbiologist that thought hiv was a passenger virus and did not cause aids. Which at the time was reasonable given koch's postulates although they are basically impossible to apply to aids but eventually we had some much evidence built up that it became moot. Which is very similar with global warming. Someone might say we don't know enough or have done enough studies and that might be reasonable in the 50's but becomes silly by the 90's
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Well, as an American, I can only speak for my lifetime...
Late 60s/Early 70s - Vietnam/Nixon - Pretty fucked up.
Late 70s - Iran hostage crisis - Fucked up.
80s - Reagan/Bush - Iran/Contra - Recession - Iraq War I - Fucked up.
90s - Clinton era was pretty good. Big scandal was a blowjob. People actively talking about blowjobs all the time.
2000s - Bush II, 9/11, Iraq War II, Abu Ghraib, 2008 financial crash - VERY fucked up.
Late 2000s - Obama - Not awful. He should have ended Bush's drone program, but not awful.
2017-2020 - Trump. Covid. 1,000,000 dead Americans. INCREDIBLY fucked up.
Early 2020s - Biden - Fucked up inflation. Covid weirdness.
Now? (gestures)
I guess this is accurate but people were different during these eras too. Leaders did bad things but there was a sense of ordinary people being mostly good. At least I had that feeling.
As a kid, I noticed the price of comic books going up from $0.25 to $0.75. If course they are $5 to $10 now. 😉
Generally, things were always fucked up. However, two major changes between this generation and previous ones:
-
Leaders were generally portrayed as being more competent than now. Even leaders who were considered dumb at the time kept themselves to a far higher standard than now.
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The media landscape is more fractured now than before. It was common for television shows to be seen by a third of the country. It made things more uniform culturally. A lot of that is gone
My take is that everything was worse back in the day, except for two things: climate change due to an unprecedented rate of global warming, and the ability to bomb ourselves out of existence with nuclear weapons, which simply did not exist before 1945. I worry about the first more than the second.
We didn't start the fire was written for this exact reason. Billy Joel was talking to someone 20 years younger than him who said that when he was 20 more stuff had happened than when Billy Joel was 20, so he just started listing all the stuff that had happened before he was 20 and then expanded it into the song.
If only Fall Out Boy wrote the update better.
This is actually one of the best times in human history.
Not anymore. Conflict around the world has statistically shot way up. There's also a significant increase in political polarisation around the world.
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It used to be a lot worse for the vast majority
OP keep this in mind.
During and 18 month period in the early 1970s there was an average of five domestic terrorist bombings in the US every day. Think about that.. five a day was the average.
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The creation of the universe was a mistake. It's been downhill since the big bang.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
—Douglas Adams
Thank you all for your comments. I have read them all but not able to reply to them individually. I must say though, we are living in the most comfortable time in any point in human history. Modern conveniences and access to medicine is definitely the highlight of modern times. I also recognise I have much to be thankful for in my personal life. Stable, well paying job, a wonderful wife and healthy wonderful children. I could've been born in any part of the world, at any point in human history and overall I am grateful for where I am right now.
However, after more thought, it does feel like globally something has shifted since 2020. More conflict, more division, more anger. Are we leading up to something much worse? Who knows. Social media hasn't helped either - immediate access to everyone's thoughts and opinions I don't believe is a good thing whereas before people had to specifically write to a newspaper and maybe have their one liner on an issue published, now it's all open for everyone to know. When I start feeling this way, I tend to switch off for a while and come back when I've had a breather from the world. Looks like I'm due again.
In most measurable ways, it was much worse. Crime, mortality, institutionalized racism, war, etc. It looks worse now because every action and word by the people considered newsworthy is magnified and judged by thousands of opinions, many of which originate in troll farms, and many which are intended to be deliberately divisive.
Yes, the US government is infested with fascists. Yes, wealth inequality is worse than it ever was. These are real problems, and worse than they ever were before. (Though I wonder sometimes about how much damage was done by Reagan, and whether denying basic government protections to the poor was just more acceptable then.)
Not an old person. But so to put into perspective:
My maternal grandmother was born in war-torn China after the japanese imperilists wrecked our country. Food was not even a guarantee... farming sucked...
My parents were born during the cultural revolution... the way they described stuff... all they had to eat was 番薯 (sweet potatoes?)... they say my generation had it better off...
I remember rations were said to be a common thing...
By my era, I had stable access to food. I remember being so picky and they scold me for me... "back in my day... all we had to eat was..."
I wanted more things to play with... its responded with... "back in my day... all we had to play with is..." (don't remember the answer but they played with like rocks or sticks or strings or stuff like that)
Literally... all the food would've been a luxury in their era...
So like... in a way... westerners having access to food is already not bad...
I mean y'all are not being invaded by imperial japanese...
y'all not being bombed by russians in Ukraine....
y'all not being bombed by israel in Gaza
so...
(I'm not saying you should accept status quo, just trying to think positively by looking into how bad it could get...)
-From an American Citizen originally born in China in 2002
Edit: I also wanna mention the problem with people who grow up under these conditions... they had to deal with so much "real issues" that the whole topic of mental health is never a thing to them... "just get over it" as my parents say...
UGH WTF...
So yea... the west have mental health acceptance... so consider yourselves lucky...
I'm not that old...
But you're confusing reality for perception.
The world's been fucked up, it's just people can see it from their phones when they used to not even hear about it
Being aware of issues doesn't make them worse, just means we have a shot of fixing them.
Yes
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