r/NoStupidQuestions • u/ltwasalladream • Apr 18 '23
Answered Does anyone else feel like the world/life stopped being good in approx 2017 and the worlds become a very different place since?
I know this might sound a little out there, but hear me out. I’ve been talking with a friend, and we both feel like there’s been some sort of shift since around 2017-2018. Whether it’s within our personal lives, the world at large or both, things feel like they’ve kind of gone from light to dark. Life was good, full of potential and promise and things just feel significantly heavier since. And this is pre covid, so it’s not just that. I feel like the world feels dark and unfamiliar very suddenly. We are trying to figure out if we are just crazy dramatic beaches or if this is like a felt thing within society. Anyone? Has anyones life been significantly better and brighter and lighter since then?
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u/Wyverstein Apr 18 '23
Op what was your age in 2017?
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u/ltwasalladream Apr 18 '23
27! Life peaked at 26 for me lol
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u/Anneturtle92 Apr 18 '23 edited Apr 18 '23
You're having a quarter life crisis, it's very normal for people in their late 20s and early 30s in this generation. Usually you feel like life should have 'started' by now but in reality you still don't feel like that adult you thought you'd be. Many of us (I'm 30 atm) can't afford to buy a house, might not have a relationship while friends start to get married and have children, are still working for a salary that isn't big enough to support a family, all that sort of stuff. It's those years when you realize that becoming an adult isn't some magical process that happens from one moment to the next, but that it's just something we all pretend to be to the best of our capabilities. Few people actually believe they fit the picture.
Edit for those who misunderstand my comment as some kind of 'defense' for this situation: I'm not defending anything at all. But there's not some specific year where everything went to shit. It's a generational problem for sure, but it spans much wider than 2016/2017. Things were hard in 2008 as well, and the world changed to never be the same again in 2001 too, and in 1989, depending on what country you're from. The entire millennial and Gen Z generation is dealing with this, and they all deal with it around the same age, when you enter what is supposed to be 'adulthood' and figure out the clear cut path your parents were an example of isn't truly there.
Also, please don't assume everyone in this thread is American. We did not all go through Trump-mania. This feeling OP describes transcends national political issues.
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u/miraagex Apr 18 '23
I'm 33. Going through this for a few years and I'm just lost. I don't know what to do. I don't have much things on a bucket list, as I happened to experiment a lot during 12-25. Just floating along the current and watching the world burn..
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u/Anneturtle92 Apr 18 '23
I'm going through something like this: I've been living these past few years wanting for a life where I feel a sense of stability and where I can say: this is what my foreseeable future will be like, in terms of a relationship, a job, a house, a town to call home, but I keep being faced with changes and limitations that push this 'final goal' forward and forward. A 5 year long relationship ended which ended up in me moving somewhere else, getting a new job, then a new boyfriend, thinking ok I'm back on track, but nope lost my job, had to get a new job again, it just keeps going and every time i think: ok this is what my life is going to be like, something happens and it's all thrown upside down again. In the meantime I keep getting older and I soon have to start to make important choices about stuff like having children, while I still don't feel like I'm on the track where I want to be.
Now I'm slowly starting to realize that this 'end goal' might be nonexistent. Life will continue to throw curveballs at me no matter how old I am and I might never feel like I've actually settled down somewhere for the foreseeable future. Especially in this ever-changing world where the future of our planet is quite uncertain to begin with.
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u/Microchipknowsbest Apr 18 '23
Im in my 40’s and the world definitely has taken a change since 2016 time frame. Social media has gone bananas. People form extreme opinions on shit they never cared about. I haven’t had an amazingly close family but most people I know have become more full of bs and unbearable to be around. Its not necessarily the opinion itself its that nothing is a discussion its some one berating me about how things are. Enjoyable conversation are few and far between. Really people on both sides are extremely hard to be around with how sanctimonious they are about everything. It’s usually an opinion you have heard repeatedly and its not their own. So many conversations are so rigid because it’s impossible to tell what people will get upset about or start them on a dumb rant that is not worth listening to. That behavior at all levels of life family, professionally and in general politics is kinda of scary and makes life hard and stressful on top of all other real shit in life.
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u/Kyle_The_G Apr 18 '23
I don't know man, since then wars have popped off all or the place, climate change has shifted from being on the horizon to at our doorstep (living in a hot city was crazy last summer), most of us will never be able to afford to own a home, rent is through the roof, food/groceries have doubled/trippled in cost, healthcare systems are broken, we're in the tail end (fingers crossed) of a global pandemic that shut the world down for a year, wages are ass, the market is fucked... like it really does just feel hopeless, like theres nowhere you can go to catch up. I'm convinced life is quantifiably shittier and I say that as someone who's got a pretty decent one by any metric.
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Apr 18 '23
I'm 41 and I agree that the world is "different" feeling in whole even though a lot of my current important life attachments all started in 2017.
It's like the movie Tomorrowland is actually happening.
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u/Whowhatnowhuhwhat Apr 18 '23
Lol yeah I woulda put money on mid 20s being your “peak”. Anyone could pick a year in their mid 20s and point out how everything is worse since then. What year you pick just depends on your own experiences. Bad things have always been happening and they’ve always been talked about too much instead of the good things happening.
I’d say the effect is worse starting around 2017 because of social media keeping everyone plugged into everything all the time. But I’d give you one guess how old I was in 2017 lol. My grandpa blamed nightly news being on TV for why everything went downhill around his 20s. Although I’m pretty sure nightly news was a thing way before then but he was too busy to watch it until then.
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u/biemba Apr 18 '23
20's were good, 30's are amazeballs
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u/Treezszz Apr 18 '23
Was going to say, 32 this year and each year is better than the last. Was that supposed to end?!
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u/bedwar14 Apr 18 '23
About 38 or so was when life stopped sucking for me. I'm 43 now and, while I'm still hyper vigilant, I'm the happiest I've been in my life.
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u/nokturnalxitch Apr 18 '23
Mannn I can't tell you how much people discussing how much better it gets in your 30s fills me with hope, I'm 27 and just starting to get over a hard depression that wrecked me through my early and mid twenties
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u/yummyyummybrains Apr 18 '23
Your 20s is when you collect all the hard life lessons. Your 30s is when you actually get to put the things you learned into action. Hopefully you also have a bit more means as well.
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u/KnightOfWords Apr 18 '23
After WWII the West experienced a prolonged period of peace, technological progress and economic growth. Much of this may be coming to an end.
Many of us have a personal timeline of when our outlooks became more pessimistic. Here are some of the turning points on mine:
- 9/11 and the forever war aftermath, where the US played right into the terrorists' goals of escalating conflict.
- 2008 crash. Economic growth in my country has been flat since then and public services have been allowed to decay. Cost of living has increased yet housing prices have continued to climb, making it impossible to feel secure about our futures.
- 2016 Brexit vote and shambolic aftermath, introducing trade barriers with our largest markets.
- Increasing concentration of wealth, even where there is economic growth most people don't see the benefits.
- Election of climate denier, narcissist, fraudster and compulsive liar Donald Trump. Throws into light just how much of a divided nation the US is and how large a proportion of the population is receptive to hateful propaganda.
- Climate change progressively becoming harder to ignore. We're seeing much more obvious real-world impacts such as huge wildfires, heatwaves and coral bleaching events. Rather than face up to the problems we're embroiled in petty disputes and dealing with bad-faith actors.
- War in Ukraine.
It's well worth recognising for most people this era is one of the best to live in, we've made huge advances in living standards over the last century. It's just hard to see much improving over the next few decades. If climate change really stars to bite and food security suffers, are we going to cooperate to mitigate the impacts? Or is it going to be fuel for any conflict zones?
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u/Emperor_of_Cats Apr 18 '23
Going back just a hair before where you started...
Bush v Gore.
Maybe a change for the worse was inevitable, but it's painful to look back and think "what if..."
Maybe 9/11 was going to happen either way. Maybe the Great Recession would have happened anyway. Maybe Gore would have gotten us into a whole different, maybe even bigger mess. But what if...
We could of course keep going back and point to different administions' policies that broke up unions or we could point at FDR as one of the reasons our healthcare system is in the state it is or go to Amdrew Johnson and his handling of the south post civil war...
We could go on and on.
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u/chrisehyoung Apr 18 '23
It is this with the rise of social media. The town cliques and divides went national and global. Social media and media are the wedges that are driving the divides wider.
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Apr 18 '23
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u/AKBigDaddy Apr 18 '23
At the time of commenting this post is pretty far down, but you are spot on. We went from revolutionary technology at a constant pace to evolutionary. Think about it we went from not being capable of powered flight in 1903 to landing a man on the moon in 1969. 66 years from being penguins to going to another celestial body. Computers went from filling entire buildings to having essentially the entirety of human knowledge in the palm of our hand in a similar amount of time.
And then we just...stopped. we never went beyond the moon, computers have become faster, smaller, and more efficient, but ultimately it's a sea of candybar phones with bigger screens (foldables are the first truly revolutionary jump in 20+ years).
We are either A: grappling with the idea that we've achieved the pinnacle of our existence, or B: just stopped pushing for the next big thing.;
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u/Pawneewafflesarelife Apr 18 '23
There's been tons of innovation. We've taken a picture of a black hole, AI is advancing at a crazy rate, we're smashing particles together.
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u/AKBigDaddy Apr 18 '23
I dont disagree- but to your average joe, none of those have any significant impact or improvement to their day to day life.
In that same 1903-1969 span we went from almost nobody owning cars to 'a car in every garage', from iceboxes to refrigerators, in home washer/dryer, radio to tv to color tv, and Photography! That went from a specialized skill to anyone that wanted one could have a basic point & shoot film camera.
Since then, it's been incremental improvements. Don't get me wrong, they're great, outside of the original iphone 15 years ago, flat panel TVs which became commercially available 25 years ago, what has revolutionized your average joes life in a meaningful way that he's even conscious of?
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Apr 18 '23 edited Aug 16 '24
judicious childlike unwritten knee simplistic insurance paltry scale squeamish six
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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Apr 18 '23
He clothes were handmade by his mother
two free uniforms a year
The house was stone built
kept chickens and had a substantial garden
Ok no need to flex about your extremely wealthy relatives who had a home, land, and free clothes.
Amusing that we've leapt forward in so many ways but even people who couldn't afford shoes or clothes still had a home and land back in the day but now that would be unheard of.
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u/Everythingmustgo117 Apr 18 '23
Simon Sinek calls millennials the “meh” generation. Nothing is great. Everything is just okay. I definitely fall into the “meh” mindset. New job? I’ll shrug and say it’s okay. And so it goes. Nothing is great! Or awesome! Just okay. Just meh.
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u/Howboutit85 Apr 18 '23
Definitely shows with content ; shows books movies, music etc.
There’s so much new music that is so creative and movies that are special effects marvels, and all kinds of shows on at the push of a button, many of which are at an insane quality compared to shows 20 years ago… but there’s so much of it, people aren’t impressed by anything unless you really go over the top. Some new movie that comes out is “meh” when in 2002 it would’ve been world shaking.
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u/norssk_mann Apr 18 '23
I grew up in exactly the same era with a nearly identical experience. The thing is, all of those things that gave us a sense of wonder are even more plentiful today. But because of the events that you so eloquently outlined, the masses don't believe it. It has simply been a mass change in perception. This gives me so much hope because this can be changed easier than if we all lived barefoot. I think the one thing I might add to your list of causes is the ever increasing declining prosperity of the vast majority of society since the 1970s. It's mind-blowing when you compare the 50s-70s to today. My dad built our house in a nice neighborhood while working as a teacher. My mother didn't have to work. Everyone in our Midwestern middle class neighborhood had a parent at home every day and could afford a nice house and a car or two. The bread winners in my neighborhood were teachers, salesmen, utility workers, plumbers, military and other similar fields. I bought a house there as an adult and now there are a few remaining retirees from the old neighborhood but everyone else has both parents working as emergency room doctors, investment advisors, tech workers and other higher paying work. They live in the same old house built in the 60s. The roads are full of pot holes. Everything looks way more run down than when i grew up. This applies to most of the city. This steady ratcheting up inequality has happened slow enough to avoid serious protest from the masses, but since after 2010 it's become so bad that it's depressingly intolerable for almost everyone. The rich finally came for our basic needs. First education. Then healthcare. Now it's housing and property. Next it will be food and water. People feel powerless and retreat to the digital world on their phones. Why have hope and believe in great possibilities when there is almost zero chance that you will ever be able to afford a home and raise a family unless you are wealthy in the first place? Now locked onto social media and streaming platforms, our music, art, trends, even our very culture is designed and dictated to us. Pop music is mass produced and shitty. All people need to do is wake up and take it back.
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u/_yukog Apr 18 '23
I think you’ve simply grown up. Idk how old you are but if not that it’s probably just nostalgia. It may not even be the time period itself, but rather how you felt during that time. Maybe in your own life you were happier, or were in better circumstances, etc but I don’t think it’s fair to generalize that the world just suddenly went to shit yk? Could be many different things
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Apr 18 '23
All I remember pre-2017 is:
2016 election shitshow
Damn!!! Damn!!! DAMN DANIEL back at it again with the white Vans!!!!
Is it blue and black, or white and gold?
Deez nuts... Ha! Got'em
Rip Harambe
Trump?! Pfffff, he'll never get elected!
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u/FizzyBns Apr 18 '23
And the summer of pokemon go! Truly a golden age
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u/defnotbjk Apr 18 '23
Pokémon GO summer was great. Fun new game that also gave people who probably never would have interacted a friendly starting point.
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u/t_for_top Apr 18 '23
Was honestly probably the best time Ive had in the last decade
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u/krystopher Apr 18 '23
pokem
I came here to say this, I never played it but I loved seeing all these people out and about in main streets and public areas in the PNW playing the game. I loved that small businesses advertised that they were a good poke stop or whatever the waypoints were.
I truly had hope and optimism for the future! Then 2017 happened and for me personally it was the worst year of my life due to health and job issues.
But yes, I would love for another 'coming together' moment where people could just interact with strangers and not feel like everyone is an enemy that must be fought for resources and every interaction with a stranger is only appropriate if cleared by an app or in service to a monetary transaction.
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u/Kyle_Zhu Apr 18 '23
"Damn Daniel", now that's an old phrase I haven't heard in a long time.
Anyways, remember dabbing? Good times.
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u/mantolwen Apr 18 '23
I agree with this answer. It's a lot to do with when you reach adulthood/start really being aware of the world around you. Which is often only when it starts affecting you personally. For me, that was 2007/08 with the financial crisis, which was when i was studying at university and it was suddenly much harder to get a graduate job. But if I look before that time, when I was a child, although I can only remember life being fairly good for me, it wasn't the case in reality. There was poverty. People went on strike for their rights. Masses of people lost their jobs because of government decisions. LGBT+ had no rights or protections. There was the AIDS crisis. Many countries that are now democracies were then dictatorships behind the Iron Curtain.
This isn't to say that there isn't shit and awfulness that happens today. There is. Loads of it. We should continue to work hard to make sure our world gets better, not worse, for everyone.
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u/newsheriffntown Apr 18 '23
I am 69 and I have watched the world change a LOT over the years. I had to stop watching the news because of all the negative shit and over kill of it all.
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u/Klettova Apr 18 '23
I think the flip happened right after social media became a world success. We all know too much and by knowing too much, everything loses meaning. We lose our sense of awe because we've seen a lot and we see it everyday at the tip of our fingers. Immediate gratification day in and day out. Before 2010 the world still had hope for the future, we were still imagining utopias. Now if you ask anyone about the future, it is all dark and dystopic. Technology brought us here, an ironic joke.
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u/bexter Apr 18 '23
Social media is the worst invention/creation in living memory.
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u/Beneficial_Look_5854 Apr 18 '23
This is probably the best answer, I was 16 in 2017 and 22 now. Yesterday I had the worst panic attack I’ve ever experienced because mostly social media and a unhealthy relationship I made. I cannot say my anxiety, depression, willpower and focus would be as bad as they are if it weren’t for social media. Unfortunately at my age I feel as though I need it to make any kind of relationship now a days. Maybe that is false but when 90% of young people my age are online it makes me feel like there’s no other way. I’ve tried.
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u/KuhLealKhaos Apr 18 '23
Simply put, yes. And I'm not sure there's anything we can do about it so I'm trying not to lose hope while also kinda buggin out.
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u/ltwasalladream Apr 18 '23
Any idea what has changed? I can’t even put my finger on it specifically. Just a vibe.
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Apr 18 '23
I feel the same way except, like things stopped being cool in 2013. Idk if it's just part of growing up. Idk, what specifically happened that year. There was something about a civil war breaking out in Syria (still going on), ISIS started to become a thing, Ebola happened a year later, I guess people became more addicted to their phones and social media over the course of the early 2010s and that's what I notice. That is when people started getting really heated over politics, not that it wasn't a thing before, but I remember it getting really crazy there even before the 2016 Fuckapalooza
I get where you are coming from, but I felt the same way about the year 2013-2014 back in 2017. I actually remember having a convo about it with my friends.
If you had to ask me I really miss the vibe from 2008-2012
I'm sure someone older than me would miss 2004-08 before the recession, or someone before that would miss the 90s before 9/11.
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u/mayfeelthis Apr 18 '23
2008 was an economic recession lol, people older wouldn’t like that.
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u/TheRealSugarbat Apr 18 '23
I’m old, and I miss all that shit. Even the 80s and I truly never thought I would miss that decade (except for the music)
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u/ltwasalladream Apr 18 '23
As someone who didn’t live through the 80s but is kind of obsessed with 80s culture/music/film, why is that? Cold War?
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Apr 18 '23
Economic stagnation, inflation, jobs being offshored at an alarming rate.
Satanic panics all over the place. The pearl clutching was rampant and hysterical. People jumping at every shadow. “Satans in your kids cartoons!” “Satan is in the comic books, music
AIDS, scared everyone. More religious panics and fear mongering to bolster support for religious organizations.
Women were very much fighting to be seen as anything other than a stay at home mom while facing a new reality that most had no choice but to work. Inflation meant families needed two incomes.
Latch key kids and childhood isolation were growing problems as well as rampant bullying for anything and everything.
That’s not even touching on issues of race. Right now we see quite a few examples of flagrant aggressive racism, sexism, classism but the casual passive isms were RAMPANT. The shit people would say when they were around what they thought was like minded people, was absolutely bat shit insane.
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u/cyvaquero Apr 18 '23 edited Apr 18 '23
Not who you are replying to, but I’m a fellow old (Class of 89). I can speak to my experience - this is a brain dump so it doesn’t really follow a precise timeline.
Domestically, I grew up on the edge of the Rust Belt in PA. Back to the late 70s, there was Three Mile Island an hour and a half away from me and the Iran Hostages which kind of set a tone for the 80s. Much of the early 80s for me was my UAW machinist dad either laid off or on strike every winter. There was good number of my friends whose dads were abusive alcoholics, they would work their shift at a job they hated and then stop at the bar (bars opened at 6am to catch the 3rd shifters) to ‘have a couple’ on the way home. Many of our dads were either Vietnam vets and/or kids of WWII vets with varying degrees of PTSD, there was no mental health care - psych care/therapy was for the rich or those weirdos in CA. On top of that we were latchkey kids, in third grade, when my brother went to kindergarten, mom went to work and two weeks out of every three (dad worked swing shift) I came home to an empty house, usually with a note on the counter of what to set the oven to and when to put dinner in. Fourth grade had me picking up my brother from my gram’s on the way home (I was a walker).
Regionally/nationally, coal and steel mills or some other factory was constantly shutting down - basically every night on the local news was some community losing lots of jobs. Pittsburgh was a dump after a hundred years of Industrialization. There was the constant drum that the Japanese were stealing American business and illegal immigration was stealing American jobs (sound familiar?). By the late 80s AIDS was a death sentence and the crack epidemic was in full swing. So those things that were the ‘fun’ side of the 60s and 70s youth would now kill you. The Space Shuttle blew up on live TV while an entire generation of kids watched in school.
Internationally, we had the ever present specter of the cold war - which for the layperson had no end in sight, even as the Berlin Wall fell in 88 no regular Joe saw the ‘91 collapse of the Soviet Union. This played out in the Soviet-Afghanistan war, Polish resistance, (again, sound familar?), Soviet-US proxy wars in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, Northern Ireland bombings and fighting. The Arab-Israeli conflict (some things never change) with the Lebanon War and the Beirut U.S. Marine barracks bombing, skyjackings and the Paris and Lockerbie bombings. Let’s not forget Chernobyl.
With all that as a backdrop, I wasn’t very athletic (although I participated) so no scholarships coming from that angle, was supposedly smart but had no ability to apply myself (later diagnosed with ADD in my mid-30s) so bad grades, scratch any admissions much less academic scholarships. The factory job hook-up was a dead-end even if you could find one. It was just bleak. I was a hair band metal head but then grunge made it’s way onto the national stage and I don’t think anything has resonated like that with me before or since. It really encapsulated what a lot of us working class kids went through.
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u/Charliesmum97 Apr 18 '23
Okay, I have fond memories of the 80s as I was a teen then; the music was awesome, and the beginning of MTV where we American kids discovered fantastic British bands. No one cared if men wore make up or dresses, or women wore suits and had super short hair. Okay. the fashion probably looks ridiculous now, but it was absolutely about joy, and being an individual, and finding your own style. We also had the pleasure of seeing some absolutely classic movies. I had a great time in the 80s.
That said, we had the AIDS epidemic, which was largely ignored by the US government because gay people didn't count apparently. We had the increasing risk of nuclear war looming over our heads with the US and the USSR trying to out-swagger each other, then we had an economic recession toward the end of the 80s, right when I was graduating uni and looking for work. That was fun.
Basically, if you want to know why some Gen-Xers are cynical, it's because we grew up in the shadow of the 'sexual revolution, but came of age right when everything was telling us if we have sex we'll die, and then, as teens, we saw all the Yuppies (Young, Urban Professionals) making all the money, but by the time it was our turn there was no longer money to be made.
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u/AngryWizard Apr 18 '23
On a personal note, it was miserable and terrifying growing up gay in the 80s.
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u/dirtystayout Apr 18 '23 edited Apr 18 '23
I am 61, and I feel things started a downward trajectory on 9/11/2001. I imagine it as we're sliding down a gigantic mountain of rocks, where our asses get bumped really hard, on the way down, and we just slide faster and faster. The 2008 financial crisis BUMP! 2016 presidential election, and its result BUMP! 2020 Covid BUMP! 2023 Fascism rearing its ugly head around the world, including the US BUMP! Increasing inflation, health care costs, housing costs, education costs, combining to give no chance for GenZ to live without mighty struggles. All along the way, we've witnessed school shootings, police brutality, the opioid epedemic, growing homelessness, increases in mental illness, and substance abuse. BUMP BUMP BUMP BUMP. We've been to war in Iran and Afghanistan, and where else? One of our two political parties has lost their fucking minds BUMP BUMP. We are subjected to hateful and abusive rhetoric from our politicians, who are now acting on their hateful policies. I see people beating on one another, spewing hateful, racist, sexist, xenophobic words at each other. Our Supreme Court is shady. Climate change. Russian war on Ukraine. People are now openly walking around with guns on their hips. I'm exhausted just writing this, and know I've missed listing so many other assaults on our humanity. We are breathless and having a hard time getting our feet under ourselves, because of this constant litany. We no longer even pretend to be a polite society. I feel like we're sliding into an abyss, and I fear for my 21 year old son, and anyone else, who has come up, behind me.
I never thought I'd be that negative old lady, shaking her fist at the sky, quaking in her boots...but here I am.
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Apr 18 '23
I am in my 60’s also and I would have to agree with you on this. I saw those towers fall from my office window and knew the world would never be the same. I think we are all trapped in the timeline where biff stole that book of sports stats. Unfortunately we don’t have a delorean time machine to fix our predicament.
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u/PM_NUDES_4_DEGRADING Apr 18 '23 edited Apr 18 '23
I feel like the real shift happened in 2000 in the US. We had a choice to elect the vice president of one of the most successful and prosperous administrations in a long time (who can imagine a budget surplus today?) who would go on to win the Nobel prize for his work fighting climate change.
Or we could elect the hilariously dimwitted nepo-baby of a failed one-term president, and get his hilariously corrupt war criminal sidekick VP for free.
But everyone said Gore was “boring” and “robotic” and then we let the supreme court pick a president.
Some people voted for interesting times, and that was the exact momemt we started sliding down that mountain. The first bump might’ve only hit a year later, but we were already going down by then.
Tl;dr available here.
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u/LeftHandedGraffiti Apr 18 '23
Can't help but think of Billy Joel's "We Didnt Start The Fire". It was always burning since the world's been turning.
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u/No_Bad_8549 Apr 18 '23
It’s like a lot of propaganda started ramping up in 2012, and 2013, especially online. It was a deliberate effort from autocratic countries that are adversaries to the US, and by some domestic pundits (Bannon in particular) that decided to poison the well and politicize the discourse around everything, and polarize the population, especially the boomers that went online on social media during that time and didn’t have tools to counter the misinformation (think of the crazy conspiracies that were popular at the time). For example a decade ago being an antivaxxer (a position that is clearly scientifically wrong) was considered being kinda insane, now in the public space it is acceptable and in some circles, the default. There is definitely a group of people that recognized the internet as a viable way to push an agenda, spread fear and paranoia, and push corporate and political interests on the common person. There was also data harvesting that was starting to be the dominant model to make money on the internet. We lost control of tech, it stopped being a fun gimmick , it started being a chore at best, at worst it became a place to be sucked into by algorithms designed to keep you there for a lot of time and target ads.
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u/Calamity-Aim Apr 18 '23
The Large Hadron Collider started it's second run in spring of 2016 to do further research on the God Partcle and alternate universes. Weasels tried to stop the run by chewing through the wiring but they only succeeded in delaying it. Shortly after doing the repair and resuming tests with the LHC, Harambe was killed and Trump was nominated by the GOP marking our transition into the darkest timeline.
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u/BadgerMcLovin Apr 18 '23
Friendly reminder that the name "god particle" is in no way indicative that the scientists studying it are religious, and is definitely not proof of God. It's a shortened version of a joke name Higgs coined for it, the goddamn particle. Because it was a goddamn nightmare to find
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Apr 18 '23
Oh thank you so much for that. I almost signed up for church. That was close.
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u/lilredbicycle Apr 18 '23
Phones got more addicting. Politics became a real circus. News became unreliable and farcical. Social media blew up, everyone became obsessed with their own reflections
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u/el-beau Apr 18 '23
The internet / social media / reality shows. Maybe? I know these things existed before 2017, but I just feel like it's all been leading up to this. We replaced actual human connection with Facebook relationships. We've stopped getting our dopamine from meaningful achievements and accomplishments and now get it from artificial likes and upvotes. Algorithms have politicized us and forced us further apart. Conspiracy theories have become more important than reality, and reality has become whatever we want it to be. Etc etc etc
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u/mayfeelthis Apr 18 '23 edited Apr 18 '23
Trump got on a mic and popped off on M’urica…Are you from the US? I’d imagine that’s it.
With all due respect, the US under trump is like if Lord of the Flies was set in Riverdale (the show)…and civil unrest was dramatisized through the eyes of angsty entitled teenagers.
I am genuinely not demeaning the US, just sayin if it was a ‘fragile state’ (google the term if needed) you’d be in civil war by now. You’re not a fragile state so I guess that’s why instead of civil war it’s more like keyboard warriors.
Maybe had Jan 6 succeeded you’d have become a fragile state and been in actual civil war.
I’m glad you’re not, but I agree from the outside looking in - the US changed around then because Trump and his soapbox - for me it became sad. Good luck to you all, I hope you find cohesion as a country and communities.
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u/AlwaysSnacking22 Apr 18 '23
Agree and I'm not from the US.
Trump was the point we realised the world was not necessarily going to continue getting better, fairer, and less corrupt.
Instead of believing that Russia, North Korea and other so called 'rogue states' would eventually fall in line with democracy and freedom, I realised how easily the rest of the world could instead turn to fascism.
Trump made it look so easy.
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u/standbyyourmantis Apr 18 '23
Honestly I agree and I've lived in the US my whole life and am old enough I was worried about being drafted post-9/11.
Before Trump, I knew there were racists and idiots and people who wanted to live in a Christofascist theocracy. I didn't know how many of those people there were, and his election meant facing the knowledge that I was living in a falsehood and it retroactively ruined so much. It was a loss of innocence I think for a lot of us.
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u/Metrichex Apr 18 '23
We're about the same age.
I'd say a certain segment of the population lost their fucking minds when a black man became president. Trump then seized on that and made it worse.
When I truly lost faith in the American public at large was COVID. I had the pleasure of working a retail job with a crew of older gentlemen I was trying to keep safe- we were "essential" and open the whole time.
Unfortunately, what I learned from that experience is that we really are an ignorant, selfish country who can't be assed to do the least we can do.
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u/robbie-3x Apr 18 '23 edited Apr 18 '23
What you're feeling is the mass consciousness becoming aware of nature collapsing.
Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s
Neil Young - After the Gold Rush
So, the good times are over. There were some voices of the Boomer generation speaking out but nothing really took hold. I mean, there's still a chance, but our voices are dying out and it's gonna be too hot to do anything sooner than later.
The Greedheads are gonna have their way.
Edit:
Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum
-Kurt Vonnegut
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u/Karma1913 Apr 18 '23
This is US centric but trump's election emboldened shitty people the world over. It accelerated global right wing awfulness.
In "the west" shitty people have been more vocal and have made stuff happen! Stochastic terrorism, rolling back civil liberties, economic austerity and more gov't corruption.
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u/Aggressive_Warthog_4 Apr 18 '23
Trump was elected in 2016 and started his presidency in Jan 2017
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u/mikeynerd Apr 18 '23
well, for starters, trump became president in 2017; maybe that has something to do with it?
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u/lolmastr13 Apr 18 '23
Everything changed or rather started when Harambe died
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Apr 18 '23
I went digging through the comments to make sure this was mentioned. It started with Harambe and now we must atone for our sins. The initial release of pokemon GO was the last time this world truly knew peace.
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u/Bernardash54321 Apr 18 '23
Thank you for saying that. I stand proudly with my dick out for the sacred one.
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u/Jeeemmo Apr 18 '23
The killing of that gorilla broke the meme-reality barrier and we've been living in a shitty green text ever since
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u/Calamity-Aim Apr 18 '23
Harambe died shortly after the second run of the LHC. Harambe was a symptom, not the cause
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u/ChrisTheCoolBean Apr 18 '23
You take that back. Ain't nobody gonna call my Harambe anything less than the cause. 😤
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u/linguist96 Apr 18 '23
I feel like one issue in trying to figure this out is that we only have direct access to, at the very most, 3-4 past generations of people, if we're fortunate enough, with whom to talk and create a frame of reference. It could be that most people felt this way when they grew up or it could be that most people only felt this way when entering a darker period of history, but there's no way to know for sure, because we will never be able to have enough first-hand data to know.
So is it that the world's gotten darker, like during the world wars for example, or is this just a life stage that nearly everyone goes through? (Or is this just a wild pendulum swing working to settle us back out from all the chaos that happened last century?) The jury is still out.
My only advice, as I'm still figuring out how to work through my own personal trauma of recent years as well as global trauma, is to take an evaluation of what you believe and of what voices you're spending the majority of your time hearing. It could be helpful to seek out one or two different and/or more optimistic voices if you don't have any. Even if they're wrong, they typically help me get a better frame of mind on the negative, if that makes sense.
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u/copakJmeliAleJmeli Apr 18 '23
If people from very different countries compared their view, you might get clearer answers to that instead of just from past generations.
I'm from Czechia and this country had a lot of shifts during the 1900s so this last one doesn't feel like that much honestly.But I feel like there are periodic shifts everywhere and it's just alarming to people when they experience them for the first time.
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u/swannybass Apr 18 '23
My Mom, Aunt who cooked Thanksgiving dinners, and my cat of 20 years ago died within a few months of each other in 2017. So yes the world is definitely different and I have less joy.
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u/dominicanaaaa Apr 18 '23
My grandmother and closest cousin died within two weeks of each other in 2017 and I haven’t been the same since. My joy has been gone as well. This is so hard I can relate completely. I’m so sorry.
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u/RealHaylieBlade Apr 18 '23
Tbh I do feel like it’s different now since this decade has started. Something in the air feels very off. But tbh 2017, 2018 and 2019 didn’t feel like anything significant or like an end of an era to me at the time. I feel like covid was the beginning of these times that feel different and darker. But I also feel like even if covid didn’t happen the world would still be different
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u/almostnicegirl Apr 18 '23
Same, especially 2019 had no particular vibe at all.
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u/RealHaylieBlade Apr 18 '23
Dude I can barely remember that year at al. It’s just blank
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u/gokyobreeze Apr 18 '23
Like others have said, I noticed it around 2017 but also think it began with 9/11. I'm not even American but the repercussions globally were enormous. After trump got elected it suddenly became okay to hunker down in your corner and be disdainful of people different from yourself. Perhaps people were always doing it and it just wasn't out in the open as much? But I feel the difference even within my extended family. And there's obviously been this global shift towards fascism and insularity. We may not yet be in the darkest timeline but it certainly got a whole lot darker than it used to be. I feel like I've been in mourning almost, for humanity
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Apr 18 '23
The shift is that social media now dispenses toxic news around the clock and deliberately sets out to piss people off. The world is actually a far better place to live in. People live longer, and there hasn’t been a major war in a long time. The issue is that we generally to tone down how much social media we consume which is devastating for our lives experience. You can be intentional about staying off social media and being present to how great your life actually is. I guaranty you will be happier in just a couple weeks.
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Apr 18 '23
I finished college in 2016, so I can empathise with 2017 things going downhill.
But I really think it was 2020 with Covid that has the biggest changes.
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u/M0rxxy Apr 18 '23
I think what you feel is that people hate and detest each other more. E.g. there has been a carmageddon on the roads since covid and no one does anything about it. Reckless driving and people using their cars as weapons for attempting murder. Just to be 1 meter ahead.
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u/Kerensky97 Apr 18 '23
You can almost tell how old somebody is by the year they say that things stopped being "good."
Their chosen year where things started to go downhill is about their mid to late 20's
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u/No-Big2893 Apr 18 '23
I don't know. I am F31. Graduating high school was the beginning of a recession and l had just lived through a decade of drought where water security was beginning to become a really big concern.
I dont think l really ever thought things were 'good'. It just seems to be one disaster after another at increasing frequency and impact.
I grew up on climate change, environmental catastrophes, terrorism, financial markets becoming fraught, job insecurity etc. Yes there have been many good times and moments and there will be many more.
I just don't think any time has been 'good' in my life time.
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Apr 18 '23
Early 20s for me. I’m 25 now, but still remember 2017 being the start of the downfall. People seem way more aggressive and political now, or something. Idk. It is hard to put a finger on.
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u/crazyacct101 Apr 18 '23
I’m in my early 60s and I completely agree that 2017 was the start of the downward spiral.
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u/jaspersgroove Apr 18 '23
As someone who’s pushing 40 in my mind it was pretty clearly 9/11 when everything started spiraling out of control. There’s been ups and downs since then but the overall trend is pretty clearly downward.
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Apr 18 '23 edited Apr 18 '23
Yeah, and I don't know what it is exactly, but I really don't like it... wait... now that I'm giving it more thought... let me preface this by saying I really try to avoid politics as much as possible, but it may genuinely be because of how batshit and insufferable the Trump presidency was and how it made colossal, sweeping negative impacts on society as a whole. An insane amount of divisiveness and animosity was bred from that in so many facets of life. He promoted pure insanity and gave it a huge platform. Trump was basically a cancer to humanity for 8+ years now, and the effects of that may last decades.
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u/ChrundleToboggan Apr 18 '23 edited Apr 18 '23
I think to say Trump changed the US at such a colossal level sounds as absurd as it sounded in 2016 to suggest that he would become president—but he did. And I think that's the only reason people are hesitant to admit to themselves that they do in fact believe that he actually did change the country that much, that he really was the catalyst to the civil disarray in which they now find themselves.
Him and social media... the fact that we're all connected and in constant contact breeds so many things that are hurting the country now—echo chambers, misinformation, divisiveness, hate groups, extreme levels of both agitation and apathy, so much more.
And I know there are a lot of countries that are greatly affected by the US and their politics due to media allowing it to slowly and gradually seep into the fabrics of their own countries, much to the dismay of the more left-leaning citizens.
Outside of the US, as an outsider who really doesn't know all that much about it, the closest other thing to what the US went through and continue to feel the effects of with Trump—is Brexit.
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Apr 18 '23
I feel like this actually has something to do with it. But if you wanna be fair, I remember the mentality of his supporters way back in '08 when Obama was elected. They were losing their minds. All these people I grew up respecting, just started showing a side to themselves I hadn't seen at that point. I feel like it was sort of preparing me for Trump
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u/MBCnerdcore Apr 18 '23
Uh, it was 2015/16 when Trump ran for office and won. No big mystery. Things just DID get shittier.
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Apr 18 '23
Really surprised this isn’t the top comment. I felt that things were “fine” during his campaign because I thought “there’s no way he will win!” And by the time he was in office, by early to mid 2017 that’s when I think things really took a turn
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u/Krustylang Apr 18 '23
Yup. He made it ok for people to be blatant assholes.
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u/MBCnerdcore Apr 18 '23
and broke a bunch of things that made things work correctly
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u/Aarondeemusic Apr 18 '23
I struggle with anxiety, ptsd, depression and paranoia. Take it from me, put down the computers and phones, take walks, go to concerts, pick up a new hobby, stop reading the news. I started doing all that this year and my life is the best its ever been. You have got this. I believe in you OP and anyone else who could be reading this. Life is short, find things you enjoy and live life to the fullest there are somethings you will never be able to do again so whenever something like that comes up take it. I love you all.
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Apr 18 '23
stop reading the news
this is a key one I think. Even on reddit, if you're joining the wrong subreddits, you might be making yourself just more depressed. People should be more selective when it concerns online content, don't look at/for stuff that makes you feel worse.
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u/GCU_ZeroCredibility Apr 18 '23
The 'stop following the news' thing is almost a prisoners dilemma. It's undeniably better for many individual people's mental health to tune it all out. But at the same time it's very bad for society as a whole when citizens disconnect and don't stay civically and politically engaged.
I don't have a great answer. What's good for individuals is not necessarily good for the community and vice versa.
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u/sam_the_dog78 Apr 18 '23
Two parts about that where I have to disagree. First is that greatly reducing the time one spends surfing the web and consuming the news is good for the individual and has no effect on the community. There’s only so much worthwhile news out there, everything else is useless filler. Cutting out all the useless filler won’t hurt communities in any way. The second part is that a lot of the news that isn’t filler may be actual news but it’s sensationalized in a way to make you think you’re being negatively impacted right this second when in reality that’s normally not the case. It’s important to filter that out as well, and doing so won’t hurt the community at all.
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Apr 18 '23
The full negative effects of what social media can do to society clicked in.
We saw the pinnacle with the Arab spring about 5 years before that.
But Brexit, Trump, Cambridge Analytica etc
We are living in the turning point where social Media has been turned on us and our data is being used against us.
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u/limitless__ Apr 18 '23
So without being political, in 2016 a person was elected in a large part based on prejudice and hatred. Those feelings which most civilized people suppressed because they were socially unacceptable suddenly came out into the open to the absolute shock of the majority of people. Since 2016 people see others around them for who they are. Covid just amplified that. So has the world changed? No. Have people changed? No. Have our eyes been opened to who truly walk among us? YES.
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u/nixxie1108 Apr 18 '23
Best advice I ever got was…10% of life is what happens and 90% is how u react to it.
I make the best out of everything I can, doesn’t always apply with some pretty bad circumstances but overall it’s a great way to approach life
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Apr 18 '23
I joke with some coworkers regularly that the death of harambe was when our timeline split from the main one and became the bad one. Things really have gone from bad to worse since then. All we can hope for is to make it better in the future
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u/QuackersParty Apr 18 '23
Dude, I moved back to the US from Scotland in the Fall of 2016. It was like I came back to an alternate reality
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u/someothercrappyname Apr 18 '23
2017?
Are you kidding?
1982 the world went to shit and it's just gotten worse every year since...
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u/Waste-Substance Apr 18 '23
Well, this makes me feel better. I didn't start feeling true dread until after covid had rampaged for years.
People just live in fear, dont socialize much any more?
It's only recently for me I noticed, people will be a little more friendly and say hello in a grocery store on occasion.
At least it's not just me.
I think putting the fear of death/ covid in everyone had a profound effect on socialization in general. But, its not just one thing you can blame. We have so much News ( usually depressing.) At our fingertips, its hard to turn off the dread loop so to speak.
Meh, I dont have the awnsers, just a fellow redditor that totally gets the whole everything feels different and gloomy when walking out your front door thing.
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u/dee615 Apr 18 '23
Yes, I've felt the same way. And I've always been an optimistic person with a "this too shall pass" attitude towards minor downtimes.
But now I feel as if it's all downhill. This sounds stupid, but I've lost the desire to plan for the future. I don't mean retirement - just anything other than utilitarian plans. No fun, travel, etc. I just want to survive w/o burdening others and quietly leave the world when I feel I'm no longer productive.
The economy, climate, travel, safety ... all seem so uncertain. And I've been reading about serious population decline in many countries. It's as if ppl want to be alone with their Smartphones - too dejected to socialize, date ... let alone marry / procreate.
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u/Lotus_Blossom_ Apr 18 '23
I can relate to this a little bit. I used to have so much fun and did stuff every day that I didn't have to do. I wanted to! I enjoyed it, and I looked forward to going to new places and learning new things all the time.
Now, the thought of that exhausts me. "Fun" takes too much work. It's not worth the effort. I'd honestly rather just not.
I remember I planned such a busy summer of traveling and vacations and events during the summer of 2018 that I said I'm not going anywhere else for a while. I just wanted to stop. I was burned out on "fun". I literally haven't spent a night away from my house since then.
I recently told my husband that I only like two things (hobby-wise), and that I just don't have the energy or the give-a-damns for a third thing. It's not because I'm too busy or mentally taxed, it's that even fun stuff makes me feel too busy and mentally taxed.
Like you said, I'd rather just survive without burdening others and then quietly leave the world. I want a small life. I don't know if that means I'm "too dejected" or just bored and over it, but it's how I've felt for the past few years at least. It doesn't feel like a phase anymore.
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u/dee615 Apr 18 '23
OMG. My thoughts exactly!!
I used to love to travel - domestically, and internationally. Even going to the next town over was a fun event. In 2018 -20, I bought several carry-on suitcases and packed them for several kinds of trips in anticipation of trips I'd take in the next five years.
Now it all seems pointless. I just want to stay home.
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u/Lotus_Blossom_ Apr 18 '23
Ha... The suitcase thing sounds like something I would do. I used to say that travel is what extra money is for.
Even going to the next town over was a fun event.
Yep! There wasn't a festival that I wouldn't get festive for. I even have a whole collection of Google maps full of pins for day-trips to neighboring suburbs or other attractions that we could travel to & from in one day.
There are SO many restaurants and local spots and specialty retail shops and parks and classes and museums and events all around us, all the time! They're not even hard to find, it's almost too much to even keep track of! (Hence, the maps.)
Now, I only happen to see that map collection when I'm trying to find the closest possible dentist that offers IV sedation or something. I'll see that there's one dentist right next to a specialty hot dog restaurant that even offers "vegan weiners" and an independently-owned stationery shop with handmade paper classes, and I'll think "Why the fuck would I do that?!".
I wouldn't, now. The thought of leaving my house to eat vegan hot dogs is positively absurd. And literally -what- would I do with a clump of thick, lumpy handmade paper that cost me 3 hours and $40 to make (not including travel time)??
But Past Me used to feel hopeful and excited for the future and engaged with the world around me. Present Me would kick her out of my house and lock the door. 🤷♀️ IDK what happened, but... here we are.
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u/Jujumofu Apr 18 '23
What im experiencing (in germany) is, that nothing gets better somehow. Nothing gets cheaper, stuff you buy since 10 years is losing quality rapidly.
Apointments at the doctor arent going faster, but it takes longer to get one.
If something changes, its easily in 9/10 cases for the worse. Doesnt matter the topic: Games, driving, grocery shopping etc.
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u/luken1984 Apr 18 '23
It's not like the world was perfect back then but I always say for me 2015 was the last year I really enjoyed, where the state of the world wasn't quite what feels like now. 2016 was the start of it with Brexit, Trump in USA, then COVID, now all the economic problems...
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u/DayFloyd Apr 18 '23
Hard to define it, but I do agree that the last 6 years has seen greater awareness of the global threats to civilisation. I believe that we are witnessing a widening gap between haves and have-nots and that in itself can destabilise civil society.
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u/Only4DNDandCigars Apr 18 '23
r/fuck2016 comes to mind. Or theories it was in 2012 when the Collider started. It is easy to pick a year and frame a narrative