Ask Lemmy

Always has been, the big difference is it wasn't streamed straight into your eyes in real time

No, no it was not.

Example: when they found out what caused the hole in the ozone layer, they fixed it.

If we found out now, people would say that you can't trust Big Academia or Big Science and nothing would be done. And don't get me started on vaccinations.

We're sliding rapidly backwards.

People who say it isn't are just too lazy to do anything.

We didn't start the fire was written for this exact reason. Billy Joel was talking to someone 20 years younger than him who said that when he was 20 more stuff had happened than when Billy Joel was 20, so he just started listing all the stuff that had happened before he was 20 and then expanded it into the song.

You've never had smallpox.

You probably have never been hungry. Famine used to be a thing that just happened every ten years or so.

You've probably always had ready access to drinking water.

There's always been wars, people doing terrible things. Slavery and genocide are pretty much par for the course whatever the ethnicity/region.

By most metrics this is the safest time to be alive.

But ya, shits pretty fucked still. So I say we all wake up tomorrow and try and do a little better.

Im 59, it was just easier to plead ignorance back then. Hell, beating gays was seen as ok, raping your wife was quite legal, fucking kids was mostly ok, racism was seen as humour, my mother took up teaching as she said the other career she considered forced you to leave if you got married (bank teller).

We slaughtered people all over the place with impunity, overthrew governments. Same as today really.

My mistake? I assumed it would get much better when my cohort of Gen X came through, same as young millennials think today. It's not worse, it's just we're more aware.

OP keep this in mind.

During and 18 month period in the early 1970s there was an average of five domestic terrorist bombings in the US every day. Think about that.. five a day was the average.

The world was always fucked up, but we had a sense it was improving. That's what has changed, majorly. We started having the feeling that as bad as it is, it is only going to get worse.

It used to be a lot worse for the vast majority

I'm 57 in the US and up until the last ten years I always thought that things would get better in my lifetime and that ultimately my country would eventually choose the right financial and moral paths. Now I not only don't believe that will happen in my lifetime but I doubt if this nation will bounce back in my kid's lifetime, if ever.

Not an old person. But so to put into perspective:

My maternal grandmother was born in war-torn China after the japanese imperilists wrecked our country. Food was not even a guarantee... farming sucked...

My parents were born during the cultural revolution... the way they described stuff... all they had to eat was 番薯 (sweet potatoes?)... they say my generation had it better off...

I remember rations were said to be a common thing...

By my era, I had stable access to food. I remember being so picky and they scold me for me... "back in my day... all we had to eat was..."

I wanted more things to play with... its responded with... "back in my day... all we had to play with is..." (don't remember the answer but they played with like rocks or sticks or strings or stuff like that)

Literally... all the food would've been a luxury in their era...

So like... in a way... westerners having access to food is already not bad...

I mean y'all are not being invaded by imperial japanese...

y'all not being bombed by russians in Ukraine....

y'all not being bombed by israel in Gaza

so...

(I'm not saying you should accept status quo, just trying to think positively by looking into how bad it could get...)

-From an American Citizen originally born in China in 2002

Edit: I also wanna mention the problem with people who grow up under these conditions... they had to deal with so much "real issues" that the whole topic of mental health is never a thing to them... "just get over it" as my parents say...

UGH WTF...

So yea... the west have mental health acceptance... so consider yourselves lucky...

This is actually one of the best times in human history.

My take is that everything was worse back in the day, except for two things: climate change due to an unprecedented rate of global warming, and the ability to bomb ourselves out of existence with nuclear weapons, which simply did not exist before 1945. I worry about the first more than the second.

I've just finished reading a very detailed book on 13-16 century renaissance history and yes, always fucked. Though less dark ages than you'd think and more fucked politics, same as now.

Plus we only really know the history of rich people up until very recently, so no telling how fucked the poors were.

My dad regaled me with tales of the 60s/70s once. The JFK assassination, Vietnam war, the gas crisis, hyper inflation, 20% mortgage rates.

The older you get, you realize everything isn’t a world ending crisis. I think our 24/7 outrage-based media is responsible for a lot of FUD.

The world is just as fucked up as it ever was. The only difference now is that every fucked-up thing that ever happens anywhere is getting pushed to your always-on doomscroll device in real time with people attaching their mostly ignorant opinions to it.

This is where the "touch grass" advice comes into play. In broad terms, the real world is not nearly the hellhole social media portrays it to be.

Well, there are two songs which I think answer your question:

We didn't start the Fire

And

Besuchen sie Europa, solange es noch steht

Which is a song about visiting Europe before it will be destroyed by the then assumed imminent nuclear war.

Generally, things were always fucked up. However, two major changes between this generation and previous ones:

1. Leaders were generally portrayed as being more competent than now. Even leaders who were considered dumb at the time kept themselves to a far higher standard than now.

2. The media landscape is more fractured now than before. It was common for television shows to be seen by a third of the country. It made things more uniform culturally. A lot of that is gone

YES. But a big chunk of people have been sheltered from that fact.

That’s why we have people: wanting civil war, because they’ve never had to personally suffer the loss, privations, and terror of a real war. Are anti-vax, because they haven’t had plagues of smallpox, the flu, or polio kill their kids, friends, and relatives. Pro-authoritarian, because they’ve never lived under a series of shitty power grifters and a corruption-based economy where absolutely nobody does well except the richest. Anti-social programs, because they’ve never faced homelessness or a disability.

There are so many things that people have had the luxury of avoiding that they’ve forgotten how shitty the world is. Spoiled children, they are.

I'm not that old...

But you're confusing reality for perception.

The world's been fucked up, it's just people can see it from their phones when they used to not even hear about it

Being aware of issues doesn't make them worse, just means we have a shot of fixing them.

No, the 80s and 90s were fantastic. I would go back if I could. I thought it was bad that there was wars and corruption but I had the feeling that leaders tried to do the right thing. Maybe they didnt but I felt like they did. Not today.

The creation of the universe was a mistake. It's been downhill since the big bang.

As a little preface here, I teach philosophy and world religions at community colleges for a living, and so I spend a good bit of time reading texts from ancient cultures.

The relevant thing here being that it’s pretty common to find writings from just about every point in human history that talk about their own time as one of terrible injustice, iniquity, etc. often in ways that sound like they could have written today.

So, I’d wager it’s always been this way, and not just in the last century.

Well, as an American, I can only speak for my lifetime...

Late 60s/Early 70s - Vietnam/Nixon - Pretty fucked up.

Late 70s - Iran hostage crisis - Fucked up.

80s - Reagan/Bush - Iran/Contra - Recession - Iraq War I - Fucked up.

90s - Clinton era was pretty good. Big scandal was a blowjob. People actively talking about blowjobs all the time.

2000s - Bush II, 9/11, Iraq War II, Abu Ghraib, 2008 financial crash - VERY fucked up.

Late 2000s - Obama - Not awful. He should have ended Bush's drone program, but not awful.

2017-2020 - Trump. Covid. 1,000,000 dead Americans. INCREDIBLY fucked up.

Early 2020s - Biden - Fucked up inflation. Covid weirdness.

Now? (gestures)

It never was, but there were always doom and gloomers saying it was.

Yes

It was worse. The difference is that now companies are making money off of scaring you with headlines so that you will click, click, click ...

It really depends on how you define it. There have always been locations and groups where things were terrible and there have been locations and groups where things were good. Often the locations were the same but the groups were different.

In the US, there was a general sense that things were gradually improving that may have gone back as far as World War II and lasted through the 70's. Not that there weren't a lot of problems, just that society seemed to be recognizing and working on them. The conservative resurgence in 1980, lead by Ronald Reagan and Newt Gringrich, pretty much ended that positive trend. Since then we've seen active efforts to divide people, to encourage prejudices, and, especially, to destroy the education system. That last is critical, because it makes propaganda and other forms of social manipulation far more effective.

The US is now living with the result of allowing those changes. There are vast disparities in education, wealth, and power across the population. Many people on the low end of those distributions have been convinced to blame other groups that are also on the low end. That has allowed those at the high end to corrupt our political and economic systems to their advantage.

The current situation is not sustainable, but it will do incalculable damage to hundreds of millions of people while it exists. And we don't know what will follow it.

There is strong evidence that humans became successful as a species because of their ability to put interests of the group before their own. Those instincts have been subverted, but they are not dead. That is what gives me hope for the future.

It's always been this way, just the internet has made global awareness easier

People who only go as far back as the 60s/70s, truly ignore everything that has happened prior. Things for human society and the world didn't start getting bad on those decades, that's only recent memory to those born from or grew up through.

The world didn't start getting fucked up until humans developed here the day they evolved.

In ancient history;

You could be tried and killed by just simply being allegedly accused of being a witch. The Salem Witch Trials demonstrated that happened in the early 1690s. Accusations entirely arbitrary and subjective, I may add.

5 Million people got killed because of one single messenger, the wrong one, got killed. This was through the Khwarazmian Empire dated back in 1077 - 1231.

Then we know about everything the Egyptians did and how they got the pyramids built and all. Slavery was rampant in the ancient past, nothing just built itself, you know.

So yes, the world was always fucked up long before the 1960s and 1970s. You would not last a day in the past, where all developed concepts and ideas were nothing but just thoughts of the mind and just about anyone could decide to kill you just because they can.