Hacker News Reader

Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

> When I came to the US in 2000 it was a fairly optimistic and happy place. Now....

I've been thinking about that, and trying to put my finger on when things changed, and I realized it's not the US that changed, it's the internet!

Every single complaint and little thing now has a wide wide audience. The good stuff does not however, since it's [relatively] boring.

Talk to some people 40+ and ask them when they thought things went downhill, then ask them when they started using social networks.

View on HN

On the A16Z podcast someone made the great suggestion that as the news cycle shortens the news gets more negative. Good things and progress tends to happen on a longer time down but in the long run wins out. Imagine a news paper that gets published every hundred years. Yes, it would certainly cover the world wars, 9/11, probably the cold war. However, massive increases in life expectancy, decrease in poverty, decrease in violent deaths from crime or war, incredible scientific progress would overshadow almost everything dreadful we are concerned about on a daily basis. It probably would be mostly uplifting to read such a news paper. Our news cycle instead is down to a point where it's hard to imagine it could get any shorter.

I would give all my upvotes to this if I could.

I'm 40+ and can tell you exactly when things started going down hill: September 11, 2001.

We were told the world had changed and that we had to fear the unknown. We have been a nation of frightened children ever since.

Nearly 36 here, and I concur. Everyone's been clothed in fear ever since.

Those of us who are 50+ remember The threat of nuclear war, and 60+ remember the reality of the Cuban Missile Crisis. When you've lived through "100 Million people could die in the next 24 hours" (like was a real possibility during the Cuban Missile Crisis), the current threat level just makes people look like panicked children.

mid-40s here, and I remember growing up under the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction. "a terrorist might get a small pocket of us" as a national fear is small-fry compared to "a superpower might lay permanent waste to our entire country"...

... and while terrorist strikes do happen and nuclear war doesn't, the fear of terrorist strikes is much greater than the danger they represent.

That is still the case w/r/t nuclear war, we just don't worry about it anymore... all it takes is one false alarm.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_al...

We still need to worry about that. We seemingly keep adding things to worry about, antibiotic resistance, climate change, big data, and not solving many. Hmm.

Yes but then Communism fell. We all saw the wall come down and expected the world to be less fearful.

I remember being a kid in the 1980s and my dad explained why there were air raid sirens.

And then the wall fell and all was peaceful until around September 11. For some reason the regular Irish troubles never really registered.

I would put that first number at 35+ or so. I'm 36 and the threat of nuclear war was a vivid part of my childhood.

It's really hard to understand how we went from tolerating MAD to freaking out about a handful of people with box cutters in only a decade. I guess people have really short memories.

"I'm 40+ and can tell you exactly when things started going down hill: September 11, 2001."

older, 22 Nov '63.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com