+100 million people died in war in the 20th century. Not to mention preventable famines, etc.

Increase your time horizons to see things aren’t even close to as bad as they can be. Our lifetimes are a vapor.

IMO… You need to detach yourself from the big data straw you’re gagging on.

Go outside and interact with people.

There is enough “content” IRL or otherwise on this planet that is immeasurably beyond a single person experiencing that affords you the opportunity to choose the life you can live.

Teach yourself how to choose

I don't think its getting especially dumber and crazier now, but more like we let dumb and crazy fester and let the problems keep building for decades while we used technological progress as a distraction from it all and an excuse to do as little as possible. People started believing technological progress will fix everything and that 30 years down the live they will be living like the Jetsons with personal butler robots so that the problems of today don't matter, except it didn't happen, and will continue to not happen, and problems continue to mount.

And here I am in camp "it's always been this way".

All the older generations found ways through. We'll find ways through.

> I really do think the world is getting crazier, dumber, and just all around worse, this past decade most specifically. It seems the world has decided to just go nuts, shift into overdrive and metaphorically drive off a cliff.

At the turn of the last century 80 percent of the world was illiterate. In just a few generations the average Westerner has gone from subsistence farming to living in a nigh-indestructible air-conditioned box littered with supercomputers that let them transact financially and socially with billions of people around the world. We're living in completely uncharted territory and it isn't a huge leap to speculate that human brains aren't adapted for modern society. A few hundred years ago the average person's attention was devoted to pulling turnips out of the ground and hugging their family; now they must contend with high finance, complicated machinery, ever-evolving fashion and social mores, etc. The proliferation of smartphones and algorithmically-curated entertainment are merely accelerants of this trend.

Of course one must take the good with the bad. I'd rather have cool music and exotic cuisine than live in a lean-to in the woods, so my solution is twofold: I aggressively curate my interactions with media (no socials, no traditional news outlets, etc) and always try to keep in mind that most people in this world don't do this and are therefore in a constant state of cognitive exhaustion. When you consider how much more shit the average person has to deal with these days their negative behaviors suddenly become a lot more understandable.

I'm optimistic that the current wave of dopamine depletion pop pseudo-science will lead to substantial changes in our society's media literacy but that remains to be seen.

The bad guys might seem to have won but the story isn't over yet!

The screen thing has been going on for a century or more, whether that be the nonsense we have now or the nonsense we had when TV ruled the world, or the silver-screen before that.

Arguably the aftermath of 9/11 was crazier than what we have now, before that we had the joys of the Cold War, before that WW2 and, before that WW1. Right now, we still have whole cities getting razed off the map, but, in the WW2 days that was a daily occurence.

Everything must be destroyed for there to be a 'new ark'. This is the story with many a religion, and many a religion was founded in 'end times', hence there is this common eschatology. Normally there is some heaven-sent messiah character that magically fixes all the problems caused by man by undocumented means as part of this story. We even have some fundamentalists that want to blow up the world just to bring on this scenario, and you can't reason with these people.

The parties of the left and the right have died intellectually in the West. DJT is in the White House ruling by decree and tweet right now, which we can deal with. However, the Democrats and the Republicans are both as dead as a dodo, with it being the same in the USA's mini-me, the UK, where both Labour and the Conservatives are finished.

The secret services have successfully managed to nip in the bud anything that could be an alternative, in particular any eco-friendly save-the-earth ideology. That was easy for them to do, they just had to infiltrate whatever was going and present those guys as crazy. For an example, look at what happened to 'Extinction Rebellion' - they went extinct.

It is glass half-empty or glass half-full, and, if you want to look at it positively, the decks are getting well and truly cleared for something new, and the new does not necessarily mean a choice between a Hitler, a DJT, a benevolent dictator, Skynet or whomever the promised messiah is.

There are plenty of countries that have lived through terrible times to come out of it with a sensible grown adult taking the leadership role. I am loathed to provide examples of that because anyone that lifts millions out of poverty will be negatively portrayed in Western media, but there are examples today in Africa, South America and Asia.

However, one example I can give you is that of the post-war UK. Despite everything being destroyed, the post war Labour government built the health service, built the schools, built the houses and got the country back on its feet, with the accomplishments recognised by those today on both the left and the right. Sure, it has been decline all the way since then, but the bad guys didn't win and there was a 'new ark'.

Trust the process. The post 9/11 repetitive negative thinking, when every day had a colour-coded terror alert level led to moral and cognitive decline, with this excellent situation where left-right Western politics is dead, which is where we want to be for the new.

For many nations, DJT has been the best thing that has ever happened, by a wide indisputable margin. Not all nations, but some.

If you're well off economically, then maybe.

But outside of the freedom in how you spend whatever money you are able to 'earn', I'd argue that the Western model of life (i.e. work) is pretty damn authoritarian. It's entirely possible that people in the past felt that they had more freedom than they realistically do now.

edit: To the coward who down-voted me without deigning to engage in debate, here's some evidence that when empires (like the west) collapse it can improve the lives of the 99%: https://aeon.co/essays/the-great-myth-of-empire-collapse

If you have a lot of money, sure. But coming back to reality, prices for everything has risen and lots of people are living harder lives than a few years ago.

There is no meaningful 'best time to be alive' distinct from psychological reality. If people are not adapted to their environment and either don't value it or aren't valued by it, it doesn't matter how much material comfort is available. There is a reason the suicide rate jumps during industrial revolutions.

Yes, it's an absurd situation for so many to be so unhappy when, by all measurements, this is "the best time to be alive. But do you really think that Americans are simply that spoiled and stupid? When an entire nation sinks into a despair, surely there must be a better answer than "ignorance"? So I am positing that there must be some underlying problem, something that is difficult to quantify, dare I say it, some kind of mass psychological-spiritual disfunction at play.

Most would agree the 21st century is better than the 16th century, but is 2025 better than 2019 or even 2010?

If you ignore future developments that seem impossible to avoid, I’m talking demographics mostly, then you might have an argument.