Is it just me or i feel life is getting more difficult these days?
i am middle aged man, i experienced life since before even computer and smartphone is a thing like today.
back then, i feel that life is much easier, what i mean easier is more simple life, less competition, less stress, fresh environment, and more happiness despite lack of technology.
but right now, everything is just too complicated despite of power of tech, internet, smartphone, and AI helps, i feel that life is much harder right now, what i mean is like competition is everywhere, stressful everyday, crowded city, and i easily depressed these days.
is it just me or everyone else can relate to what happens right now?
It’s basically impossible to go out and relax or have any kind of good time when you know you’re probably being filmed from 20 different angles throughout the night, and the cost of any kind of faux pas is that you might get video uploaded to make you a laughing-stock… and that was before the millions of AI surveillance cameras that have like a ~2% chance to hallucinate imaginary crimes and file automatic police reports went up.
But yeah, everything is also really fucking expensive now.
The amish are quite awful if you look into them. Ultimately they’re just another group that exist for the sole purpose of protecting a core of old privileged men who just want to continue diddling kids and beating their wives…
im putting groceries on credit. i had a great credit score till this year, i havent even tried making payments on certain things including ER bills. only a matter of time before im bankrupt, and i am also disabled. i have given up on having a future and I’m only 32.
Yeah companies used to pretend to please customers and now they don’t even pretend.
The staff are minimum wage and don’t care because it’s a big corporation so you can’t get good service.
The price is high because the shareholders must be kept happy so you pay over the OSA
Odds.
Corners were cut in several places making the product to please the shareholders too and the workers manufacturing got minimum wage in the factory wherever it was located and have zero interest in making good products as a result.
My dad used to rant about how government should be run like a business, no, no dad, it really, really should not. Businesses do not care about people, businesses don’t want anything but money, your money, and they will twist, turn, manipulate, lobby, and flat out steal or harm people to get it.
So the next time you call 311, the non emergency police line, or God forbid 911 remember, your call is very important to us, a representative will be with you shortly. If you’d like to take a brief survey after the call just stay on the line. If you’d like to talk to our chat bot Sally just say, hey Sally!
imo the governments should be run like businesses. As in, efficiently. But the “shareholders” should be the people of the country - instead of profit the goal should be the betterment of the country itself.
They like to say we are doing better than ever because the the numbers and technology are great. Yeah, I might not be starving, but what’s the dignity in a rising tide of techno-feudalism and serfdom? And the technology that, in another society, could have freed us from long hours is instead being used by the ruling class to further exploit us.
It’s both: it’s just you and it’s everyone else. In the modern age of relatively fast technological development, people tend to get overwhelmed by change in their later years. But also things are getting worse for almost everyone[^1] under late-stage capitalism.
[^1]: Almost everyone living under capitalism, that is. In China most people’s lives have been getting easier.
i am not sure about china but even developed countries such as australia and singapore has their struggles now despite they are one of high income countries.
You’re correct OP. I think the difficulty of modern times is multifaceted. A lot of other comments here speak to various parts of it these days, but I want to add one I’ve noticed related to this issue.
Pre mid-2000’s, technology worked for us. If you look at the hayday of tech (1980 thru early 2000’s), it seemed like every tech innovation was aimed at the consumer. The tech got better and we did too. The tech worked for us.
Nowadays (and I think I can see all this turning course around the time of the 2008 collapse), tech is not for us. The consumer has become the product, and tech is built around working through us instead of for us. Manipulating us instead of helping us. It sucks.
I have no doubt that if the washing machine was invented today instead of like ~100 years ago, they would be the size of car, and only installed in corporate offices. You’d have to go to an office to get your clothes washed. Consumer-level washers wouldn’t be a thing. They’d tie it to work like healthcare. It seems like no one is interested in making quality consumer devices. The consumer devices we do have are designed to become obsolete quickly without any repairability, so you buy another fast (i.e. all modern cars).
So yea, I think when you add this on top of everything else, it help explains what is amiss with life today. My 2c
you are totally correct, it feels like tech is no longer for us, we are the product and we are forced to buy stuff with planned obsolescence, also they are getting more expensive.
Technology has enabled drastic increases to efficiency. Capitalism ensures that the gains of which are expropriated away from the working class and into the hands of the capitalists. Instead of reduced hours, increased vacation time, and higher pay, we’re working longer, taking less time off, and earning less.
I think this is due to increased alienation. We’ve become more isolated and distanced from one another and, more importantly, more distanced from our own creative self. This is what happens when production is largely automated but humans are still involved - we turn into small faceless gears in a big mechanism.
I feel the same way, so many things are objectively worse. Cost of living up, government services and safety nets going away, taxpayer money funneled to billionaires, scammers, and wars. Technology is getting more expensive and more invasive. Everything is a scam or a trick now even from previously reputable businesses. The environment is being ravaged and natural resources are being used up and none of the big players doing most of the pollution care, they only care about revenue. Ethics and accountability are down, grift and cruelty are up.
All of the things that were supposed to help us by making our lives easier really helped them and now our lives are harder. I don’t see an end to that.
I think a lot of it comes down to paperwork burden. It used to be if you were entitled to something there was an office you could sit down in and they had a responsibility to get you want you needed before you left. Now, they send you home with a link to a webpage that doesn’t work and a million online forms that time out that you have to fill in perfectly or they get auto-rejected.
I’m dealing with this with a work friend who’s trying to apply for medical leave with hostile management. If you can’t count on your immediate boss getting you the paperwork you need in a timely manner without throwing a fit because you’re “trying to get out of work”, it just becomes a million times harder to live a normal life. It used to be that there was a chair somewhere you sat in and could reasonably expect your problems to be solved by the time you stood up again.
As someone who is also middle aged, I’d say some of this is very possibly looking at the past through rose-colored glasses. Personally I don’t think my life say 15 years ago was significantly less competitive, stessful, etc.
What is different though… I make over double what I made 15 years ago. I’ve had steady progression in my career from 15 years ago. But financially I am not better off than I was then (in terms of how much I have left at the end of the month). Which makes sense, in that while my salary has gone up say 5% per annum, the real cost of living has exceeded that rate.
In 1995 I could leave the house with nothing in my pocket except $10.00 and have a great day. Ride the bus with cash, get food with cash, buy stuff with cash. If I needed a ride there were free phones to car services in most stores.
Today, if I go out the door I need cash, a credit card, and a phone.
Back in the day, it was always keep a quarter in your shoe so you could always make a phone call.
I don’t like the idea of having financial information on the phone. No Apple pay. In my area you need a credit card or metro card to get on a bus, so you have to have the phone and the wallet. And cash in case there’s a power blackout
I believe it’s a mix. Both ’nostalgia goggles’ and straight up facts.
What I mean is that, when we were kids or teenagers we didn’t see things the same way our parents did. They were the ones struggling, and we were pretty much just playing around and complaining of mundane stuff. So it’s hard to tell how much ‘easier’ life was back then… we were just young.
But at the same time I do completely agree that the advancement of technology and growth of USA giant corporations really fucked a lot of things up badly. While back in the day we couldn’t find answers or information to everything so easily, we lived a more ’natural’ life, where everyone actually expected things to take a while to happen: you had to wake up, literally read the news if you wanted, take the car or bus to the job, and just then you started working, and while working you had to do some research and so on.
Nowadays things either happen immediately or you’re tagged as lazy or something like it. You wake up with a lot of e-mails or message notifications on your smartphone, and people expect you to answer these demands ASAP. It’s not expected anymore that we do each thing in it’s own time anymore, and the volume of work is much bigger because you’re expected to solve problems much faster. This volume of demand and unrealistic expectations definitely generate stress and anxiety, which are huge health issues nowadays.
And the fact that we now realize, thanks to the amount and speed of information we have today, how the industry leads are fucking everyone up without consequences doesn’t help in the slightest, since it leads to a feeling of being powerless and exploited.
Life isn’t that bad yet but owning things is starting to become impossible. You used to buy and own things now you are more and more only allowed to rent them. Be it movies, video games or your house.
Wealth divide is worse. We are also in a time of change geopolitically. Also in a time where powerful actors benefit from creating controversy including media, social medial, political, and geopolitical. We live in interesting times.
Well, before smartphones people didn’t get bombarded with bad news all the time. The changes were there but we hardly noticed them. Now they’re being shoved in our schnozes to instill fear and push us all to the far right.
The Cold War.
Transfer of Hong Kong to China.
The collapse of the USSR.
Arab/Israeli wars.
Vietnam and the Peace Movement.
The oil crisis.
9/11.
End of Segregation in the US.
Womens’ Rights especially after the Pill
Gay/Trans Rights
The Korean War
The Beatles
That has not ended. Russia and China have large supplies of nuclear weapons. Just like WW2, Russia has initiate a war in Europe with China, NK, and Iran as allies. China will invade TW at some point. NK may do the same to SK. All of these allies are nuclear powers except Iran which will be.
OP, it’s also going to sound like a cliche, but touch grass. The cancer-like tech companies want to replace your sense of community so that they have more power over you. F them, join a local group, and find yourself feeling more powerful when you have a real community behind you.
Also middle aged and my only real issue is how stupid everyone is
They don’t read. They don’t research. They don’t question… not in a “conspiracy theory” way, but they don’t see a headline and go, “is that true?”
They’re morons that feed off negativity.
They’ll post an article about something terrible but then I’ll look it up, find out it’s bullshit, and then post the data that shows it’s bullshit and instead of everybody being like, “oh thank God, I was worried there for a second” they go, “Fuck you. Obviously everything is shitty and how dare you even try to point out that it’s not”
Seriously though, it’s the phones. Instant-gratification dopamine delivery devices aren’t good for the vast majority of humans. They don’t even see what is happening.
It’s really hard to tell what was just younger kids not being exposed to the world vs. things actually getting worse. I was a kid during '08, and things didn’t really change for me at home cuz my family was always very frugal, especially my dad.
Climate change has empirically gotten worse tho. Inflation, enshitification, food quality, all of it SEEMS worse but it’s hard to quantify it you know?
nah lil bro.
The enshittification is real and huge. The quality of goods, particularly what used to be reputable brands, is 100% in the shitter. I have started only buying fabric with natural fibers in them because polyester sucks. Turns out that’s a lot harder than it used to be.
I’ve been a regular grocery shopper for the entirety of this century. Things were pretty much the same price for years and years. There was a bump in 08 to punish us for electing a half-black guy and demanding reasonable pay, but then it stabilized until around 2018. Shit has increased in price by multiples while quantity and quality have plummeted.
We’re fucked bro. Get whatever enjoyment out of this life while you can. There are some unprecedented hard times coming. We’re going to pay for the recklessness and irresponsibility of the boomers. Buy hey, they got theirs, didn’t they?
This isn’t the boomers fault, what did they do? There is no reason we can’t get good pay and cheap groceries now, aside from capitalists knowing they don’t need to anymore.
Fucking yanks have an 80yr old for fucks sake. Can’t be any more out of touch then being older then most of your country.
Australia is no better really anyone in politics gets there sits there gets old and out of touch.
Their needs to be a hard limit on politicians so they don’t run the country based on how it was as they grew up 65 years ago. That’s an entirely different world
No politician, older or younger can make change without permission from the ruling class. In the case of capitalist countries that is the capitalist class. A younger politician won’t change the fact that the capitalist class forces them to do there bidding for them.
What unions? Union membership in Australia has been falling since at least the '70s (source). The press is almost always anti union resulting in some of them being legally dismantled when they ask for too many rights. Such as the BLF. The unions that remain today only ever go on strike as a last resort, when conditions are dire.
Regardless unions are able to go on strike because they take away something bosses need: workers. When workers go on strike profits for bosses fall immediately and bosses are forced to do what they need to get workers working again.
Politicians don’t have this leverage. Political parties must do the bidding of capitalists in order to maintain donations to fund their advertising campaign. The capitalist class owns virtually all media and have almost complete control in terms of shaping peoples opinion on the current government. Politicians can’t implement policies that benefits workers at the expense of the rich.
Not to mention authoritarian countries stand up to corporations they don’t support.
I’m going to assume by “authoritarian” you mean socialist countries such as Vietnam, China, Cuba etc. These countries have the ability to stand up to corporations because they are truly democratic. The press of our capitalist country (I’m Australian too) has told us these country’s are authoritarian because they pose a social order that competes with capitalism.
The reality is that these countries are able to stand up to corporations because their government is ruled by the working class, not by the capitalist class. This is also why these countries consistently make decisions that benefit the working class at the expense of the capitalist class. Decisions such as cheap or free healthcare, immense poverty reduction schemes, increasing wages etc.
deregulated the environment, media, antitrust - all the things that kept water and air clean, houses affordable, and an empowered middle class possible.
Allowed the uber-corrupt Machiavellian shitbird pals of Nixon to run and influence the country for decades.
killed pensions
Supported Israel, turning a blind eye to their blackmail, false-flag attacks, and war crimes.
fostered evangelical dumbassery, satanic panic, etc.
I mean, Boomer greed and selfishness has given us the burning heap we have now. Good news is it’s too late. They benefitted from the establishment of the middle class and then shot it in the face.
I’m going to start by saying I’m not entirely sure if a lot of these claims you have made are true or not since you don’t have any sources and I don’t really have time to do much research myself. But I believe a lot of these are relatively meaningless regardless of their factuality.
Hoarding wealth is hardly an idea that has any real effect, that is assuming you are referring to wealth and not capital. People who earn their own money through working have the right to spend or not spend it as they see fit. Regardless they aren’t going to simply give you the money so them spending wealth doesn’t cause your conditions to improve anyway.
I actually do not understand why refusing to retire is a bad thing for younger generations. Also why do you think older people choose not to retire? Older people not retiring might be a sign of a deeper issue such as them not having enough savings to properly retire.
If you ask a random boomer “why did you outsource all the manufacturing to asia” they will most likely stare at you with a confused look. They did not decide to do it, the people who own factories decided to.
I do agree that many of the older generation are quite anti-union and antilabour, these pushes particularly happened around the late 80’s and 90’s. But this is true only because the capitalist press made them believe the lie that unions are disrupting the economy and workers are asking for more pay than they can afford.
The United States is a capitalist state is therefore dictated by the capitalist class. The media currently is and always has been controlled by the capitalist class that owns it. The government never regulated the press for the benifit of workers and workers of the boomer generation never had any control over the press. The things that kept houses affordable was the existence of socialist states in Europe and the USSR that had extremely affordable housing as well as more militant workers organising to improve conditions.
Could you actually provide a source to pensions? I’m not a USian and I was under the impression that the US never had pensions, I didn’t know they used to.
The “middle class” is not really a social class in the fact that it represents a material relationship with the means of production. By that I mean the only difference between the “lower class” and the “middle class” is the amount of wealth they own. It’s much better to talk about social classes in terms of weather they are earning money based of the work they do or earning money from other peoples work. That’s why Marxists prefer to talk about 2 main social classes: working class and capitalist class.
I realise now that most of my writing boils down to a similar argument: The boomer generation did not inflict most of the decisions you listed, the capitalist class did. Since when the capitalist class dictates the decisions made by the capitalist state the boomer working class (around 99% of the entire boomer generation) does not make the decisions themselves.
So, I hear you, but i saw this meme of newspaper clippings going back to like 1900 where business owners were quoted “people don’t want to work anymore”. We think it’s a new idea but its like 100+ years old.
Maybe companies have always looked for ways to cut corners and screw customers, we just focus on our last 20 years. And it’s not that before we got older they were all reputable and its only recently they’ve gone this greedy path. Its just cuz we didn’t know about it as kids, especially cuz the interent wasn’t huge yet.
I’m not trying to say things aren’t getting worse. They definitely are. But what if we’ve had this long, general decline of everything that’s always been happening and we didn’t see it or feel it cuz we were just kids.
The more you look into things, the more you find out that entire sectors of the economy are held by a handful of multinational conglomerates. Say there are 5 widgets on the shelf, all at different prices making different claims. then you find out that 3 of the 5 are all made in the same factory and put in different boxes, with the only difference being the brand name. The other 2 are both made in a different factory. Of the 3 from the same factory, one company has bought out the original two competitors and they now just use the old competitors’ branding. A different company owns the other two brands and then you find out that both of those companies are actually owned by a faceless multinational conglomerate. It is the illusion of choice. There is no actual competition. Koch, Proctor and Gamble, Nestle, Stellantis - all things you should investigate. All companies selling you garbage, shitting up the Earth, and convincing you that you still have some agency and aren’t just a critter to be milked for your labor.
You are definitely not alone. Ordinary people should stand against imperialist and extreme capitalist system .when you vote ,you should not let bastards politicians exploit you by your weakness
Thirty-something Norwegian here. I am born into a rich, relatively functioning social democracy with a good welfare state. Buying my own home was a real struggle, even with a good salary. Many of my peers will never own, my younger friends will struggle to ever own, or never.
Unfortunately the welfare state is eroding, prices for everything is increasing heavily, and the private sector is a growing leech on the state.
Is competition actually everywhere? There is hardly any service/product right now that does not make me feel like i am being robbed, and i live in a cheap country, i can’t imagine what it feels like in the imperial core.
Can definitely relate. Am in my early 50’s. Canadian government sold out Canadians, and now the country is a complete shithole. We’re actively looking to leave Canada.
Idk much about Canadian politics, but the premier from Manitoba (if im remembering that correctly?) is absolutely right. Any deal you make with trump, he’ll break again, almost certainly before the midterms to score political points too.
Def not just you, it’s everyone some people are just better at ignoring it. I’ve always been raised around computers myself, but we’re talking Windows 3.1 and 95 lol. I do indeed think it’s the tech though. People have alter egos they try to pretend is real on social media. News travels faster with it, real or fake. Music you’d have to buy, listen to the radio, or watch TRL or 106 in park. Things are so immediate these days. People used to read, learn, etc. I got kids, and a large chunk of the shit they tell me they’ve learned was from TikTok. It truly is a different world, and it is stressful. It’s hard to keep up, but you’re here, and you’re doing just fine.
Yeah, i mean we make more stuff than ever before per capita and all that, and yet we still have to fight harder and harder to survive. How so? We’ll these fucking billionaires are also richer than ever before. Crassus’ wealth is estimated at like $2B in today’s dollars. Rockefeller is estimated at like $300-400B. Musk is more than double that. It’s very clear what’s happening, the rich use the capitalist surplus as a weapon to extract more wealth from the poor.
I was born in the 60’s and feel ya. Funny that there’s a lot of people who never knew life before internet like we never knew life without television.
My take on it is we are bombarded. We see everything that happens all over the planet as soon as it happens. Yet our ability to affect things is still the same. That I feel makes us feel small. Spend less time looking at screens
They broke the social contract. The thing that a polite, cooperative society is built on. So now we see what that means as more everyday folk realize it over time.
I’m not even sure if the average rich person’s life is actually getting better by hoarding even more wealth. I tend to believe that being really rich is kind of an illness. Like an addiction where you never feel powerful or rich enough because there’s always someone that’s ahead of you. I feel that capitalism, especially in its current stage, is really bad for everyone.
You could post this exact question at literally any time in history and get a whole host of agreeing answers. That’s a basic sanity test you should use to determine that this is a question incorrectly put.
It’s all I seem to see on forums these days, people complain about how the internet has gotten more depressing but don’t stop to realise it’s those same people posting stuff like this that makes it depressing.
Yes it is, we are being squeezed! We have less ways out. I’m far better than I ever was, actually have better health, and fitness. Yet, it is hopeless.
I mostly don’t, my job forced me to be fit and lean. I at most hydrate, shower, and shave. I eat whatever garbage I can, and sleep in a dump.
My father revealed a secret. If he feels it is funny to just have secret income while letting me handle the debt, it’s going to be less funny when I give my 2 weeks in October. Maybe I will survive, or maybe kill myself. Will see.
But I can’t be sane with this kind of job, need to self-correct.
