Yeah, I'm a Computer and Electrical Engineering student from Nebraska.
I know the world gets continually better. Crime, infant fatality, hunger, etc. rates throughout history have gotten continually better. Socially, more and more previously marginalized groups are gaining rights. I don't expect to be in a utopia where everything is perfect or for the world to suddenly 'get it' and all wars to stop. I don't think the world is going to stop turning.
What I do think, is we've been setting ourselves up for greater and great inequality to exist in ways that mankind has never known, that we're destroying our environment, and that large businesses and governments both are able to carry out corruption and misinformation campaigns like the world has never seen, and that more and more the government is becoming a puppet of businesses with deep pockets. Maybe that has gotten better, but if nothing else it's as bad as it's always been, but now with light on it people still can't do anything about it.
I don't think our problems are nothing compared to those of the past. Let's look at 50 years ago- Do you think the racial progress that we had in the 60's and 70's could have happened today, in a world where social media platforms and the internet can be used to drag anybody down. The FBI had a wire tap on MLK and used the information they gained as blackmail, imagine if that were today. Today we're carrying the perfect spytool in our pockets and we either have the choice of join Facebook, Twitter, etc. or have limited contact with many people we care about. We're facing police that have been given military equipment but with none of the training. We face an impending climate disaster that has already caused the number of disasters requiring FEMA responses to skyrocket in the last decade. I think our problems are less personal, I think we have new tools that make everyday life better, but I think on a societal and global scale things are absolutely worse than they were 100 years ago.
We made tools that give each and every person access to untold information and communication with everyone else, so now we have a generation split between those that are under constant stress about how boned our planet is, about governments and large corporations being able to see and censor all that we say online, etc. but can't do anything about it and those that have given up and just accept the state of the world and use TikTok and Twitter and Facebook and go out to drink every night on the money they're getting from their student loans they'll never be able to repay, that probably have at least one mental illness because they're just repressing that fear.
Yeah. 20, 50, 100, 200 years ago we had different problems, but today, today our problems are 2019 having more mass shootings than days, in CO2 levels rising to over 400ppm, and teen suicide rates keep going up.
I'm 22. I'm right on the edge of what a lot of adults call a kid. I don't think schooling or my parents insulated me. I think they tried, but I think if anything they made it worse by not taking us seriously when we do see though it. By saying, 20, 50, 100 years ago things were worse.