Asklemmy

I realize that it is materially better than it has ever been and it continues to improve, despite very obvious issues and inequalities.

I just don't expose myself to the 24h news cycle very much. My life is good, the life of the people around me is good, and nobody is helped by worrying about things I can't change.

get into areas like solarpunk that hold out hope against the dystopia

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.

By realizing that it IS getting better. We live in a world now where information has exploded out of control. What this means is that we now know exactly what's going on everywhere, and it turns out that's a lot of shit.

That shit was still happening, but until fairly recently it was just out of the picture. The average person didn't know about any of it , couldn't do anything about it anyway, and thus it didn't really impact them.

Fast forward to today you hear of tragedies ALL THE TIME. Bad shit happening to good people for seemingly no reason. The difference here is that you just happen to know about it. The objective truth is that bad shit happens less today than it did at any other time in history. We just see every instance of it, not just our local community instances.

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.

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.

I play videogames

Try this: Don't Believe The Hype

(DarkMatter2525 - Is Society Collapsing)

TLDW: No, things are getting better, some things aren't, but it's not an easy answer because there are 8 billion perspectives to consider. We are living longer and enjoy more technology, so there's that.

Be the change you want to see. I switched things up and took a job where I work to feed hungry people. It's pretty great and I feel good about myself and what I do. I'm not gonna fix the whole world, but I am making a difference for those who I reach.

I avoid the news, if it's important one of my friends or family will tell me. Also, if something is going on but isn't actionable (I can't do anything about it) I try not to let it occupy much of my headspace.

Fascists took over my country, and now they use a devestating attack as an excuse to start a total war that might evolve to world war, while the rest of the world sees our country as a "faschist genocide machine" our own citizens oppose it, and suffer from it, but still being fooled by propaganda.

I'm teriified. That's the truth.

Don't have kids, save for your retirement.

With some ways of looking at things, the world as a whole is getting better, rather than worse.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190111-seven-reasons-why-the-world-is-improving

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/09/bill-melinda-gates-foundation-goalkeepers-report-poverty/671415/

I'm pretty sure long covid and climate chaos will put a stop to that soon enough but we'll see. For now, some stuff is getting worse and some stuff is getting better.

Is it getting worse? How do we measure the goodness or badness?

One measure of economic indicators suggests we are relatively stable.

I'm sure there are a variety of measures that are up and down.

Stoicism, move somewhere else, get active, make the small world around you better and stop reading national/world news.

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.

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.

Depends on perspective. Ask my grandma who lives through the second world war whether it is better or worse. Our modern problem seem trivial to her comparing having no non-bombed house, very little food and very little way of taking care of her family.

Some very good replies here. I share some of your worries, but with some recent issues I have also gotten a lot of practice seeing the good in things. Consider these 2 angles:

First is the Louis CK routine that includes “Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.” I think it comes down to humans getting used to things that work well and taking them for granted. Compared against most people who have ever lived, we are genius magical wizards who live in luxury. Unfortunately some of our magical technologies let us see the bad shit all around the world (and close to us) that our brains haven’t evolved to deal with.

Second is how absurdly unlikely and unique the existence of our consciousness seems. We are a collection of atoms forged in inconceivably massive exploding stars billions of years ago, aware of its own existence. We are literally the universe experiencing itself.

I'm doing good. I'm doing things that I enjoy, and I strive to improve. I believe we'll sort most of our shit out, it will never be even close to perfect, because we're dumb, materialistic, belligerent apes by nature, but it will be enough.

Focus on the things you can control. My emotional state has significantly improved when I decided to do this.

Being the history nerd I am, I tell myself that this has happened before. Think of the Bronze Age Collapse or the Fall of Rome. For people who lived back then, it probably felt like the end of the world. But after many generations, they still managed to rebuild. I must keep going in order to document as much history as possible for future generations in the case that humanity survives all this crazy shit that is going on.

I just stopped caring. I just want a meal a day and do stuff to not be bored.

What do you mean "the world isn't getting better"? It definitely is. I mean, just look at, well, uhh... well uhhh... nevermind.

I find great comfort in history personally. Dan Carlin (a favorite podcaster of mine) always says we must grade history on a curve. Sure, to us it looks like everything is falling apart and existence is pointless. But by very real measures things are better than they have ever been. My favorite is violence against children has been normalized as being bad.

Within living memory it has gone from being completely socially acceptable to beat children as being the preferred method of parenting to people getting thrown in jail for that behavior. What does it mean that previous to 100 years ago all of society could have been considered battered children? We are extremely aware of the negative effects of violence against children and for the very first time we are seeing a generation raised in an environment that kind of behavior has carrots and sticks motivating parents to behave properly. Of course all manner of horrid things still happen, but I call it progress that it have become widely condemnable to beat a child with a stick or take them to public hangings. It's a small victory, but it gives me hope for the future. That we may yet still build a better human being capable of taking on the heroic task of fixing this world.

Further, history has shown to me low points that I am glad to have missed. I never knew how ghastly WWI was. I am currently in a warm bed and not in a trench filled with mud, flys, dead body parts, with shells exploding constantly, seconds away from needing to charge out into near certain death. But my great grandfather knew that feeling. He watched as whole generations of young men were gassed to death and blown up uselessly. The numbers who die in war are less now. Still tragic, but less. Again, we must grade on a curve.

Death, despair, and hopelessness may be in 8K live streamed constantly now, but I assure you the analog version was something to behold. Not saying the horror of the past makes living any easier now. It is not to minimize your own pain. I just find hope that others managed to break the back of an unshakable world and hope for a better one while surviving a suffering I have not yet known. I am made of the same stuff. That gives me strength.

I cope with the US falling further by not living in the US, unfortunately I'm just privileged like that, sorry.

I have a few friends over there, and the state of things absolutely breaks my heart.

I fully embrace the fact and wonder what will be ruined next.

The world is getting better. There are some setbacks, yes. But there are lots of normal people making the world a better place, like the guy who figured out how to make artificial glaciers with river water in India, or the guy who recently built a forest on arid land by refining local techniques in Burkina Faso. Things will be okay!

It is getting better though. We are all just facing the issues of our era's.

Tech keeps going up, we are slowly making progress on climate change, the space race is back on, and superpowers don't directly fight eachother anymore. Hell, we've proven to beat once in a century pandemics in a few years with relatively speaking barely any deaths. Life's good

Yes, we have squabbles in the middle east and Africa, but that's par for the course and not an indicator for human development. The only thing that has really gone backwards is that war has been brought back to europe