I remember my childhood mostly as a happy, oblivious one, affordable food, the usual disagreements between liberals and republicans, but nothing unhinged (say taxes, migrants or abortion). At least it looks reasonable today.
Now it’s like everything is unhinged: politics seem to be based on purely emotional reactions and the other side is hell bent on destroying the country: texas starts heavily gerrymandering to secure 5 extra republican seats at the next midterms? california starts lobbying for doing exactly the same and dismantling an independent redistricting commission texas never had.
When I was younger it seemed politics were more rational and cruelty never seemed to be the point of doing nothing. Now we execute people with nitrogen gas, meaning a conscious person has to breathe something he knows its going to kill him during 4 minutes. This is somehow not cruel and unusual. And nobody bats an eye.
I still don’t get how populists can be so popular now, they simplify complex issues most people without a degree in the matter, cannot grasp. This includes me.
I’m now 35 and wonder if I’m already talking like an old person who misses his young days so hard. I see that in people in their 60s and hoped never to become one of them, but here I am. To a younger person I may look like one of those old guys who lives to rant.
Am I going to feel even more detached and depressed with each passing day?
Apart from politics, which is always pretty up and down, my two biggest concerns for the world are
Nobody seems to know how to build things any more. Watching companies fumble around trying to build almost anything that has the same usable life as something built 60 years ago, with fewer materials and almost no computers, is infuriating.
The environment is in a MUCH worse state. I was born in the 80s and I can say anyone my age or older who tells you climate change is a myth is either lying or never went outside. I remember seeing large flocks of birds overhead several times at dusk. Now there’s almost nothing. Insect- and bird-life have largely collapsed, forests look sad and unhealthy, we are getting hot days earlier in the year and rainfall is nowhere near as consistent as it used to be. Do humans move farmland to places where rain now falls? Nope, they pump the rivers dry and make even more problems downstream. The situation is unsustainable and, with so many global leaders in the pockets of oil and gas companies, it is going to get a lot worse.
That said, I would say general quality of life, especially through medical advances has made a lot of people’s lives better.
My observation is that the accomplishments of older times would be entirely impossible today, like basically all the public services we enjoy wouldn’t be possible if they were proposed as a new thing.
Take the post office, if somebody had a big idea for the government to build tens of thousands of buildings and hire over a million people just to move around pieces of paper - they’d be laughed out of the room. Impossible, the government couldn’t and shouldn’t do any of that. All public services: the fire department, the police department, and especially public libraries, that all couldn’t be created in the current political environment if it hadn’t already been built.