Is the world in general getting worse and worse? - Or is media clouding us?

[OhGoy]

We’re not in a world war where there’s a holocaust

and we never were

 

[Eryngium]

Socially I think we’ve gotten spoiled from the hippie era of 1970’s to late 1990’s, 1990’s being the best time to be a kid, then without the constant Cold War threat people needed a new thing to make the boogie man, this time being politics, so we had a great happy time of internet culture from 2006-2012 roughly and now we’re just hitting the boiling point of people getting wound up over politics and when the pot overflows again and everybody realizes they are just being re.tarded we’ll have more happy time for a bit before finding a new boogie man to pick sides over at the dinner table, maybe it’ll be genetically edited bogandorf babies, maybe it’ll be stop the cure for cancer nut jobs, who knows.

 

[HazamA]

Majority of people voted: Neither. That's how you know and confirm that you're in the right place: AutismFarm ; )
If you ask people hardly anyone thinks the world is getting better.
The answer to your question can get quite complex. I'll try to keep things clear and simple.
Is the world in general getting worse and worse? Better! From the standpoint of the effect on people’s safety and liberty, based on the number of people impacted by the horrors of war, death and man-made destruction, it is definitely getting better at an increasing rate over the last 100 years.

 

[Replicant Sasquatch]

Realistically we're safer now than we ever were in the past. At least on a statistical level.

However we're also inching closer and closer to some kind of environmental catastrophe so I wouldn't get too comfy.

 

[Hellbound Hellhound]

Worldwide, things are probably better now than they have ever been. Absolute poverty is at an all time low, work is less laborious than ever, food is more plentiful than ever, technology has made our lives easier than ever before, access to information is empowering us like never before, and the list goes on.

People have been saying that the world is in a state of interminable decline since the beginning of civilization. I don't take the sentiment very seriously myself, especially in light of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

 

[NerdShamer]

It's kind of hard to say that humanity is actually falling apart.

Sure, there's rioting, political unrest, unemployment, and some starvation here and there; but most of that stuff has been around since ancient times. The problem is this is that we're more aware of it than the average person was an few centuries ago. But as long as there isn't another massive war or an worldwide famine that lasts for quite an while, I doubt if we'll have any lasting issues.

 

[feedtheoctopus]

The media has a financial incentive to scare the shit out of people. Despite my general paranoia I have to remind myself that nothing we are facing now is something that hasn't been faced by somebody else at some point in history. The mean may change, the names and the process, but the end result is nothing new. Demagogues, bigotry, economic chaos, war, environmental collapse...nothing new.

That being said we're in a very unstable time period. Not so much politically but intellectually, way I see it. People don't have any sort of philosophical or moral foundation anymore and the result is..well, look around. Shit's a free for all of stupid.

 

[SpergPatrol]

I ask this question because I am curious on if anything is actually getting worse?

Or is it just we are more aware of everything that goes on in the world now that makes it seem that way?

 

[Roast Chicken]

We're just more aware of it. And quite frankly I'm numb to it.

 

[CatParty]

lol calm down

 

[BerriesArnold]

It's a combination of you and I getting older by the day, honestly. That as well as living in the most socially connected era of our time. The world has always been shit, it's just more 'in our face' now.

 

[A Useless Fish]

Things are getting better, at least in the West. You can tell by the increasing hystericism over less and less important things, like farting or air conditioners being sexist, or Apu from The Simpsons suddenly being called a racist stereotype that is killing the hopes and dreams of all Indians everywhere, as examples.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

World is a better place for the average human being. We're just unfortunately way more aware of all the different kinds of stupid and horrible shit other people get up to.

 

[UnclePhil]

In general agreement that every generation has seen the end of the goddamned world coming and lived through it. The Depression, the Dust Bowl, the World Wars, the Red Scare, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Iran, Y2k, 9/11. The planet has been wired to explode for decades. Life has always been hard because life isn't fair.

The difference? A news industry dedicated to scaring us shitless 24 hours a day for money and ratings. An entire globe we see, and hear about, all the time, all at once, so what's happening in your back yard gets cross-pollinated with South Sudan. Social media, social media, social media. More isolation, leading to increased anxiety and depression. All of it adding up to keep us in perpetual fight-or-flight response.

Yeah, the world's bleak, and the realization that "It's 2018" is a fucking weird concept to wrap one's head around. But it's always been this bleak, not more or less. There is shit going on right now and more shit on the way. But try to focus on the fact that somehow, with every pile of shit that's dropped on us, it's always evened itself out...and likely will again.

 

[Snuckening]

People always, through all cultures, all eras, instintctively believe "OMG shit's much much worse now than when I was a kid, or when my grampa was young"- It's built into our DNA or something. Same way hardcore religious people always think the rapture is only a few years away, or environmentalists always think global disaster is just over the horizon. But the overall, longterm trend is always towards longer lifespans, less violence, less crime, etc.

People just like complaining. And especially people pushing some dumb political ideologies; You aren't going to win converts to your anaarcho-syndacalist commune, or your ethno-nationalist an-cap militia by acknowledging that "Yeah, of course you have a fraction of the chance of getting murdered or raped than you did 100 or 200 years ago, and the average person has way more stability and political power than he did back then... But it's still really really pressing that we switch to my untested, theory-based political system!!" For anyone pushing a political barrow, it's absolutely vital to catastrophize and act like society is on the brink of some crazy disaster, to make it worth rolling the dice on whatever their revolutionary ideology is.

tldr- people will always think shit is getting worse and worse- and there will always be people trying to politically exploit that natural tendency we have for nostalgia-glasses. But the long-term trend is always the other way around- less crime, less violence, better health, etc. So stop whining you faggot and get your shit together.

 

[Sable]

The world's generally speaking getting better. I mean, there's plenty of countries that are shit, but even the african hellholes are starting to pull themselves together. Well, some of them. A little.

Not that you'd know it from listening to pretty much any news channel or website; 'everything is kinda ok' isn't a headline that brings in the money.

 

[Picnic_Boy]

The Western world is getting stupider, the rest of the world is staying the same.

 

[AnOminous]

The news media is peddling pure poison to scare people about everything, and Trump is calling them out for it while doing exactly the same shit himself. The fake news is attacking a fake President to cover up how fake they are, and every bit of it is pure fakery.

 

[Reeepts]

The news media is peddling pure poison to scare people about everything, and Trump is calling them out for it while doing exactly the same shit himself. The fake news is attacking a fake President to cover up how fake they are, and every bit of it is pure fakery.

How do we know you're not the fake one? Eh? Can we even trust what we see with our own eyes?

 

[TheCapybara]

Eh, I think the world's about the same as usual. The bad shit's no different then the bad shit that was happening thousands of years ago, we're just much more acutely aware of it then previous generations of people because of how quickly and effectively information spreads. Two hundred years ago something could be happening a couple of towns away and you'd have no clue, unless it managed to spread it's way over to where you live. Now something could be happening on a completely different continent, and you'd hear about it in a couple of hours.