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?
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.
Where are you thinking of going? It’s kind of funny how many people want to move into your country rn.
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.
Bills went up, pay did not keep up.
here i am still unable to buy a house or car
This is true, but It’s not just that. There is friction built into everything, designed to squeeze as much as possible out of us.
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.
Basically capitalism ate itself
Good time to unplug.
How do you unplug your rent payments that are due every month?
disconnect your landlord’s internet not yours
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.
Mid twenties here, same situation. My bank closed my accounts lol
It’s both: it’s just you and it’s everyone else. In the modern age, people tend to get overwhelmed by change in their later years. But also, things are getting worse for everyone[1] under late-stage capitalism.
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.
The United Nations and the World Bank are sure about China.
Just so we’re clear, China is not a utopia, lol.
Just so we’re clear, no one is saying it is, lol.
You were implying it, so I wanted to clarify.
Just so we’re clear, you may need to retake reading classes lol
I wasn’t implying it; you were inferring it.
If you talk to Chinese they have the same complaints though.
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.
I’m sure many people can relate. I’m not sure how helpful this is. You sound like you’re not from an area currently in a state of war or suffering from famine. So you’re probably somewhere where you could try to talk a therapist.
i am actually in crowded city, but unfortunately with poor therapist quality and you need to have long queue (2 hours+) and in the end just to get poor consultation results.
what i mean poor quality such as blatantly says : “just dont think about it”, “its not a problem”, “you are just overthinking” , etc. they just throw template answer so they can be done with you as fast as they can.
Therapy can’t help with this. Op doesn’t have a problem they personally need to work through.
Therapy can’t fix this, bit it can help OP with it. A good therapist will help you find more effective strategies to help you cope with a situation you can’t personally change.
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.
with smartphone and meta glasses everywhere, it is just impossible to avoid privacy anymore
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.
yes, join your local communist party
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.
Describe a time of geopolitical non-change please.
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.
Largely from 1947 to 2020.
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
It’s pretty much constant.
All fairly minor. Now we are leaving the post WW2 era. No one knows what is next.
The Cold War, the threat of “Mutually Assure Destruction” that hung over all of heads for decades until the USSR dissolved, was “fairly minor”???
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.
It’s definitely getting worse, you’re not imagining it.
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.
