Are things just shittier or are we more aware of shittiness?

Yes

Agreed

Some things are slightly shittier, some things are way shittier, and a lot of things are a lot better. What do you mean specifically?

Politics and the Supreme Court have gotten a lot shittier since 2016 (like a steep decline, rather than the slight decline before).

The wealth gap has been getting shittier since the 70s. Wages haven’t kept up with productivity, while living expenses have only increased.

The housing market is shitty if you’re young or don’t have generational wealth.

Technology and medicine have gotten way better over the last ~100 years.

General consumer safety has gotten way better since the 50s.

Climate change is killing the planet. Deregulation is making climate change worse. Green energy isn’t coming fast enough.

Capitalism and specifically the notion that corporations have a duty to the shareholders has made companies and products shittier, but TVs are really cheap, and computers are really fast.

Robotics has gotten incredibly advanced, as has AI. Whether that’s shitty is pretty much up to opinion. I’d say it’s neutral, and depends on how they’re used.

Speaking of which, war was already horrifying, and now robots have made it vastly more horrifying. I don’t see any way that’s going to stop.

Food has become either really nutrient dense and amazing or really calorie dense and horrible, depending on how much money you have.

Speaking of money, there are a handful of people who have like half of the money. Maybe the guillotine went out of style too soon.

Video games and movies basically just look indistinguishable from reality now. And deep fakes are about to make it a lot easier to create that kind of realism.

For the most part, high speed internet access has slowly been getting better and better, both in speed and availability. Surprisingly, it’s stayed about the same percentage of the median income while doing so.

Streaming services have gotten so shitty it’s unbelievable that they’re still in business. But piracy has been making a comeback, and self hosting pirated content has gotten a lot easier. Physical media is also making a comeback.

Bigotry has gotten worse as a problem, but not worse in terms of percentage of people who are discriminatory. It’s just that the extreme bigots have basically taken over one of the political parties. (I mean, it basically was the party of bigotry before, but they had the decency to be subtle about it.) The younger generation can hopefully fix that problem as they enter voting age.

That’s all I can think of for now.

USdefaultism?
- If you're from the US, you're going to talk about the US. You want people from other parts of the world to speak for you? No? Then shut up

If I can use a floor cleaning metaphor:

The floor was pretty filthy in the 20th century, but a lot of it was swept under the rug so it looked pretty clean at casual glance.

Thusfar in the 20th century, we threw out the rug and bought a smaller one, did a modest job at cleaning up some of the dirt under it, and there's a small number of people who deliberately shit on the rug because being decent human beings isn't a thing they can do.

And I think that brings us to 2024.

By almost every measure, the world is better than it has ever been. Violence, poverty, starvation are all at or near record lows worldwide. Average lifespans are way up. We are just way, way more aware of what is going on in the world, and bad news drives more clicks than good news.

There are some cracks, no doubt. For example climate change is showing its ugly head, inequality is rising in the US and some other developed countries, and lifespans are taking a slight dip in parts of the US. But, compared to almost anywhere at any time during history, this is a golden age.

[ ] Lie
[ ] Damn lie
[X] Statistics

I think a lot of people grew up with the internet, and don't realise just how new it is to have bad news shoved down your throat day after day just to generate clicks

That just.... wasn't a thing before

So I'd say, more aware, plus greedy cunts want to make you aware more often

As someone who grew up with the internet and 28 years clocking in. I want to go back to the internet where the only news we got, was when it was in a category and it didn't get all in your face wherever you went.
Nowadays, everyone cannot shut up to you about what's going on, news is 24/7. Even when you think you've avoided it, you'll run into places and people that make the news their identity that have to remind you, everytime, what's going on. It's annoying.
The internet back then wasn't perfect, but it was a hell of a lot more quieter than it is now.

We’re more aware of it. We constantly drink from a firehouse of outrage and anxiety. Yea technology

For certain, and in the grand scheme of things 50 years is nothing. For most of humanity generation upon generation would pass without any significant advance.
The last 100 years really hints at the speed of the singularity curve as things are getting better at an insane rate. But there are costs to those advances that if left unchecked can truly threaten the future of our species.

Both.

The top 0.01% are able to exert more and more influence over the world, and are using it to concentrate wealth even more into their own pockets.

And regular people have access to smartphones that allow them to communicate worldwide instantly. The cost of more basic smartphones has plummeted, so more people have more cameras connected straight to social media.

But it's also that some things are genuinely worse. I am fairly sure that there are still more slaves alive today than at any other point in history. However as a percentage I believe it's lower, it's just due to the world population being so high.

Why not both?

Awareness. Things used to be much worse. Lack of medical knowledge, sanitation, food safety, early warning of natural disasters, and rights.

How do you define "things"?

On a global scale and on average, life for humans is getting significantly better than, say, a century ago. The number of people dying from preventable diseases, war, natural disasters has been steadily going down for a while now.

Of course there are many more people on earth than there were 100 years ago, so accumulatively there is a lot more suffering now.

Also, the lives of individual people, the state of certain countries and areas are certainly getting worse.

As for non-human animals... For most of them the world is getting increasingly less habitable and for those who are raised in an industrial setting for human consumption, living conditions are largely atrocious.

I think your question is too broad for a single answer. But you might be interested in this now 17 year old (!) TED talk by the late Hans Rosling, which at least partially answers your question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w

Both. I asked my father this in 2008. He said he thought things were worse than ever. I asked if maybe it'd always been this bad but technology made us more aware of how terrible things are. He was taken aback by that thought experiment.

Some years later, it's absolutely worse. Trump (in USA) showed that no one has to play by any rules to remain successful / powerful. Now repubs are mask-off terrible. But I'd also argue that their party had sanity in the past. Nixon gave us the EPA. That'd never happen now. From Reagan on they've been shit. Clinton was also shit. Obama didn't care, but he was eloquent. Dems sabotaged Bernie in 2020. There's no hope. Sorry, I didn't mean to be a downer.

And ads everywhere! It wasn't like this before. It's measurably worse even if it was already terrible.

People today tend to fixate on the things that are out of their control. Perhaps it’s because we have lost our coping mechanisms. Perhaps it’s because they never learned any. We live in the most technologically advanced point in time we have ever known. Few of us need to go out and till the earth to grow our own food. The majority of us don’t have to physically work as hard as previous generations. Adults and our children find their enjoyment and existential dread by watching tiny screens filled with useless entertainment. Maybe things are fine. We just make shitty choices about what to do with our time, and what we give our attention to.

Great thoughts. I think you did the question justice.

People tend to be more educated and more empathetic. Violent crime is significantly down to the lowest levels ever, especially compared to the 70s.

What sucks is that some people are becoming irrelevant: old age, certain political beliefs, certain religious beliefs, etc. They are burning down the house on the way out. Also the house of cards that is the economy that was always going to collapse one day is now collapsing.

Socially we’re better off. Economically we’re worse off. I suspect that we go back to a mainly urban and more sustainable form of living like prior to the baby boom.

I grew up in a realm where there was no internet, or cell phones. I don't use social media at all and continue to try very hard to tell the people that I care about that it's bad for you. It's like trying to convince a smoker to stop smoking (I am an ex-smoker of 30 years). I decry the need for always on always connected, right here, right now, listen to me. We're not evolved for that. We're apes, very complex, occasionally fun apes. We need that social and interpersonal and personal interaction.

As we stray further from the way our ancestors lived, we stray further from who we are as a species. There is a great argument to be made for cooperation but it takes a lot of strenuous effort to happen over distance and time that we struggle with.

I have lost my train of thought and with great trepidation at your misinterpretation, I bid you adieu good reader.