If you feel that way then you have to question what it is that you’re doing that puts you in a place where you are made to feel that way. Many people (most that I know) don’t feel that way. It may be the online communities that you are in or the news you consume, and the great news about that is that is stuff that is not only optional; you choose to consume it. You can just stop consuming it.
It's significantly an Anglosphere thing. Look at the recent world happiness survey and all the English-speaking countries are taking a nose dive in relative ranking versus other countries. Meanwhile world GDP is increasing.
I have a handful of idiosyncratic hypotheses, that I view as stacking on top of the more general cause of inflation and inequality:
- Western hegemony is weakening. Russia is attacking, China is gaining in strength, and many former backwaters are gaining ground. This creates uncertainty. In 1991, the US was the supreme undisputed hegemon.
- Global Social media is significantly English, and the US is the center of the now globalized culture wars, so there's no linguistic barriers to the resulting pathologies. The online world feels borderless and chaotic.
- There is now sectarian strife within English-speaking countries due to different moral tribes (some of those tribes being recent immigrants) living in the same country when there wasn't before. This is a new phenomenon in living memory in the Anglosphere.
- Russia and Iran are running cognitive warfare and other operations to destabilize social cohesion in the Anglosphere. Examples: (i) online - Gucifer, Internet Research Agency, (ii) real world - paying local gangsters to attack minorities.
> what it is that you’re doing that puts you in a place where you are made to feel that way.
I live in the US, read the news, and have relationships with other people.
I lived through a global pandemic several years ago and know people who lost loved ones. Now the head of HHS in the US doesn't believe in vaccines. My kids go to school and we've had multiple lockdowns because of shootings nearby. My company and all of the similar companies I might work at have been doing rolling layoffs the past few years. A guy attempted an insurrection and then somehow got himself back in office. We started a pointless war in Iran. My tax dollars went to killing schoolchildren. I had to get air conditioning installed after being comfortable without it for a decade because of climate change. The ultra-rich have a larger fraction of wealth then we've seen at least since the era of robber barons. My daughter is trying to figure out where to go to college and I don't know what to tell her because I don't know what careers will exist after AI.
If you don't think the world is going through some shit right now, I don't know what to tell you.
> My daughter is trying to figure out where to go to college and I don't know what to tell her because I don't know what careers will exist after AI.
It is rather upsetting to see. I have a unique perspective in that I’m currently a college student in the US pursuing a degree in Computer Engineering. A lot of my peers have been of a constant plight of not having opportunity in the form of internships, co-ops, whatever it may be and I’m guilty of it myself.
From what I’ve observed, and have been personally fortunate to benefit from, connections seem to be the way amidst ATS, layoffs, shrinking budgets and otherwise. I’ve also seen a fair share of people going to graduate school, possibly out of fear of graduating into a bleak market, but some have done so to become more specialized and I think that’s a good approach, maybe something to discuss with your daughter. Just my two cents.
If you spend all day on Reddit or twitter etc., and you say “all these Reddit and twitter things are making me feel sad and anxious”, then you can’t avoid all the blame for making yourself feel that way.
