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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

I take your point, but a lot of people are worn out from the pandemic, increasingly hopeless about climate change, and observing the decline of democracy in almost every influential country.

Those are all justifiable things to be more depressed about now than people were in the past. People are smarter, wealthier, and more educated now than they were in the past, and that causes them to think further into the future (which is depressing).

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Very much agree with this sentiment.

Even 10 years ago everything seemed to be "normal" in the sense that it's same old stuff, nothing too major. There's always going to be the political disagreements and all that. But things have shifted like crazy.

And I don't think it's just because of technology that we are able to read what more people are thinking right away and have more instant access to news. Although, it kind of is simply because we are able to see how insane more and more people are.. but it's more than that.

There has been a massive shift and divide in many countries and it's literally to the point that it impacts people on a daily basis. Seeing how so many people care so little about others has never been more apparent.

You had the US president trolling people every day on twitter for 4 years straight. And then seeing just how much of the population is OK with the utter insanity. Don't tell me that doesn't take a toll on people even if you try as much as you can to avoid it.

We also have rights we've had for generations being stripped away and threatened along with more recent hard-fought rights, we're living under the eye of a panopticon watching our every move and collecting data that is increasingly being used against us, a bad day or careless word can cause you to lose everything you have as mobs (online and offline) are foaming at the mouth to punish whatever they personally don't like, we're learning that many of the everyday products around us are poisoning us and our children like the PFAS in our clothes or the arsenic we've been spooning directly into our baby's mouths (https://apnews.com/b3e7bea244cdf68da3e0d91842fe3e87) and we're seeing our standard of living decline and our children struggle in ways we never had to while an increasing number of Americans can't reliably get the most basic services like electricity and drinkable water.

There is very little hope of any of this being fixed any time soon. You'd pretty much have to be crazy to not be having a mental health crisis right now.

As a 20-something, I see a lot of people my age that way, way overestimate the negative impacts of climate change, to the point where they admonish and make fun of people who want to have kids. I can’t help but think their media diet is somewhat to blame. Climate change is not going to be good, but there is good news on the technology front that you’d almost never hear if you got all your news from the big news outlets. For example, the IEA predictions for new solar additions have been terribly out of touch with reality for nearly a decade now [1], and before I saw this all I had seen was doom and gloom about how we could never scale up renewables fast enough. Seeing even the IEA be so wrong really makes me wonder what other good news I’m missing out on seeing.

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/experts-bad-forecasting-sol...

I think it’s increasingly likely that technology change will not be fast enough to offset the worst effects of climate change due to the non-linearities in the process, including things like vicious cycles (melting permafrost causing massive methane leaks) and tipping points.

I also don’t think most people anticipate the political instability that will result from hundreds of millions of people needing to move.

It seems like people on the Internet have very short memories, or are just all somehow very young. The "past" goes back further than 2012. Bad times have happened before. Is this even worse than the late 80s/early 90s? We had much of the world still behind the Iron Curtain, the specter of nuclear holocaust, toxic waste dumps, acid rain, holes in the ozone layer, all things painted as much worse than climate change. I would rate the AIDS epidemic as quite a bit worse than Covid. There was a time not so long ago that it seemed a legitimate prospect that much of Africa just wasn't going to exist any more a few decades out.

If you go back to the 1930s and 1940s, now you're talking 25-50% unemployment globally, countries losing half their breeding age males to war, entire cities being wiped out in seconds due to nuclear explosions and not just the specter of them. Existentialism and post-modernism came out of that shit. We got Kafka and Sartre, things were so depressing.

Go back further and then what? Slavery? Post-industrial black lung? 8 year-olds working 100 hour weeks in factories?

When were things better than they are now other than some tiny blip of early 21st century techno-optimism?

As far as mental health is concerned, I guarantee you every male in my family that I ever knew going back to at least the 1920s suffered from severe undiagnosed depression. They all drank like crazy, beat the hell out of their kids, never smiled. The trauma they experienced was insane. My grandfather was ship-wrecked in the South Pacific by a kamikaze pilot and survived on driftwood for 6 weeks by drinking fish blood. I don't even want to imagine what those kinds of lives were like. Did it make it better that they didn't realize they were depressed and just thought that was what it meant to be a man?

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