Europe’s experiencing the longest hot war since World War II. The war in the Gulf seems to be escalating as we speak. Extremism has been on the rise for years now. Is it actually getting worse or is it simply the fact that we can access information from all four corners of the world so easily as never before?
Yes, there was a long period of post WWII stability, though there were still lots of problems including the Cold War that ended by 1990. Then there’s also been a series of slowly escalating Middle East conflicts. I think a lot of people are pointing to that period 1990-2001 or so with no “major” global conflicts happening. But even then, there was genocide in Rwanda. But the information/reporting was less global at the time.
People are conditioned to pay attention to bad news.
It’s a survival mechanism. If you find out there’s lions in the savannah to the left, then you want to know that so you can go to the right, you know?
News organizations profit off of that survival mechanism by constantly telling you that the world is ending so that you keep paying attention to them so that they get ad revenue.
There are bad things going on, but it’s not as bad as it seems.
It’s just the bad gets so much more attention because it is actively being shoved into your face, whether you’re looking for it or not.
Abundance. Everything looks smaller in the rear view mirror. As someone who’s been in both decades, it actually feels a lot like the 80s all over again.
The extremism thing is definitely real.
So in the 90s we had news over sensationalize crime and we thought our cities were all unsafe. Moms kept their kids inside. Now in the 10s and 20s we have the news sensationalizing politics and we think we are under fascists or communists when the real problem is the corpos nobody is talking about.
yep. my folks basically thought if you spend more than two hours in the city we were gonna get car jacked and murdered. they were terrified when i moved to the city and lived in it.
my older siblings never lived in the city, they lived in suburbs their entire life and still think cities are full of rapists and murderers. they also watch nothing but TV news. they only go to major sports games or like big events, and they drive straight there and back, and tell you how terrified they were the entire time something bad was gonna happen.
Have you considered the possibility it’s both? Yes the world is becoming less stable and less safe, but also, the immediacy of information has also made it all seem much more urgent and close? We don’t live in a closed test environment. Two variables can be moving simultaneously.
It’s multiplied and accelerated, so yeah.
History always had power struggles, empire exploitation, death disasters, etc. but the modern era has significantly expanded on that with the boom in technology and the global population.
Add to the fact that we are digging our own grave in several forthcoming critical problems that the world is already starting to see the effects of.
It is a wave of volatility not seen since the end of the Cold War.
Climate change makes it worse. Not yet, but soon.
Definitely now when it comes to many islands.
Definitely now with the forest fires.
Both
Authoritarianism is increasing globally and with it come atrocities.it’s just the downfall of the west
most of the world is doing better than ever and rising
I think that it was just the last 30 years being an anomaly. In Europe you had lots of very interesting stuff happening pre WW2. Also pre WW1 was calm just briefly. After WW2 you had communist revolutions in the east which took a while, then in the west you had Basques, Northern Ireland, extremists in Italy and Germany doing interesting happenings. And decolonization struggle in the rest of the world. All very eventful. Real calm for Europe came after end of cold war up until 2014 Ukraine. And that is if you disregard the wars in ex Yugoslavia that was ongoing for 10 years! And included eventful things like a genocide and several ethnic expulsions. So maybe real calm was for all in all 14 years in the 21st century…not to say that Middle East was anything but calm in that period. And that Russia ended its civil war circa 2008 and invaded Georgia that same year. That leaves us with 6 whole consecutive years of calm on European continent.
The first school shooting in the US was in the late 1800s.
During an 18 month period between 1973 and 1975 there were an average of five terrorist bombings a day in the US.
There were more serial killers in the 1970s than any decade since.
Before 1974 a women could not open a bank account unless she had her father’s or husband’s prmission.
It seems to me that many responses in this thread lean towards oversimplification which in turn garners the most votes.
While these simpler responses contain a grain of truth and that the big picture viewed trough the lens of day to day news might seem elusive; if we look at the evidence it seems we are on the cusp of a demographic collapse in global economy dominated by geriatric capitalist superpowers that lean heavily towards techno feudalism.
Most signs point towards a quite unpleasant next 40 or so years.
If you’d like a data driven analysis with realistic estimates of the likelihood of some things happening in the near future I would recommend intelligence reports, or at least the danish one seems quite well thought out: https://www.fe-ddis.dk/globalassets/fe/dokumenter/2025/-fe-intelligenceoutlook-25-.pdf
Both but for your example extreme weather events are factually becoming much more common and will continue to worsen.
