American life expectancy is now at its lowest in nearly two decades
npr.org
npr.org
Not entirely surprising wrt COVID. The drug overdose deaths are a sad situation. I remember first hearing about the epidemic of ODs a couple of years back.
There is a bit of a common theme between this article and the other current article about the planned obsolence and inherent crappiness of most modern products. (This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092749).
I have noticed this gloomy attitude from many people my age, a sort of existential despair and belief that we sit somewhere near the end of the world as we know it. I don't personally share this belief (maybe just out of stubborn naivete and optimism), but I do understand why people feel it. The modern media seems to love these kinds of stories, and there's always some crisis being pushed between global warming, economic woes, and the rise of some fairly troubling and extreme candidates in American politics.
Not sure what my point is here, but there's definitely a contingent of young folks (late millenial to gen-z seems to be the main demographic) who seem to have lost hope in the future. I hope we can find our way to a more hopeful collective spirit.
One last comment on this already rambling post: when I recently watched Apollo 11 I was quite moved by the spirit pervading the whole enterprise - this idea that we sent people to the moon with hopes for the whole world. That everyone was watching, hoping, praying for the success of the mission. That is a sort of unity that is awfully hard to find today.
We sacrificed that sort of unity -- for exactly what I still don't understand, but sacrificed it nonetheless. For a misguided sense of diversity, perhaps? American society can no longer even agree that working hard and being punctual are virtues, with a not-insignificant minority describing those characteristics as white supremacist.
More broadly, as Kemi Badenoch of England put it eloquently, there is a loss of epistemic authority in the modern West, maybe especially in the Anglosphere. When people no longer believe that anything can be true, there can be no rallying cause around which we form a sense of unity.
Disclaimer: I don't mean to imply that all the ideas under the umbrella of "wokeness" are nonsense, there's good and bad stuff in that category - but this particular example is, to my eye, pretty damn silly.
``` The United States considers itself a monochronic society. This perception came about during the Industrial Revolution. Many Americans think of time as a precious resource not to be wasted or taken lightly.[5] As a communication scholar Edward T. Hall wrote regarding the American's viewpoint of time in the business world, "the schedule is sacred." Hall says that for monochronic cultures, such as the American culture, "time is tangible" and viewed as a commodity where "time is money" or "time is wasted." John Ivers, a professor of cultural paradigms, agrees with Edward Hall by stating, "In the market sense, monochronic people consume time."[6] The result of this perspective is that monochronic cultures place a paramount value on schedules, tasks, and "getting the job done."[full citation needed]
Monochronic time orientation is very prominent in North European cultures, Italy, Greece, Spain, England, and the Scandinavian countries.[7] For example, a businessperson from the USA has a meeting scheduled, they then grow frustrated because they are waiting an hour for their partner to arrive. This is an example of a monochronic time oriented individual running in with a polychronic time oriented individual.[8] The interesting thing is that even though America is seen as one of the most monochronic countries it "has subcultures that may lean more to one side or the other of the monochronic-polychronic divide" within the states themselves. One can see this as they compare the southern states to the northern ones. John Ivers points this out with comparing waiters in the northern and southern restaurants. The waiters from the north are "to the point": they will "engage in little" and there is usually "no small talk." They are trying to be as efficient as possible, while those in the south will work towards "establishing a nice, friendly, micro-relationship" with the customer. They are still considerate of time, but it is not the most important goal in the south.[6]
The culture of African Americans might also be seen as polychronic (see CP Time) ```
``` A polychronic time system is a system where several things can be done at once, and wider view of time is exhibited and time is perceived in large fluid sections.[4]
Examples of polychronic cultures are: Latin American, African, Arab, South Asian, and Native American cultures. These cultures' view on time can be connected to "natural rhythms, the earth, and the seasons". These analogies can be understood and compared because natural events can occur spontaneously and sporadically, just like polychronic time oriented people and polychronic time oriented cultures.[9] A scenario would be an Inuit working in a factory in Alaska, the superiors blow a whistle to alert for break times, etc. The Inuit are not fond of that method because they determine their times by the sea tides. How long it takes place and how long it lasts. In polychronic cultures, "time spent with others" is considered a "task" and of importance to one's daily regimen.[8]
Polychronic cultures are much less focused on the preciseness of accounting for time. Polychronic cultures are more focused on tradition and relationships rather than on tasks. Polychronic societies have no problem being late for an appointment if they are deeply focused on some work or in a meeting that ran past schedule, because the concept of time is fluid and can easily expand or contract as need be. As a result, polychronic cultures have a much less formal perception of time. They are not ruled by precise calendars and schedules.[5] ```
That's one example, but step into any nonprofit's office these days and you'll find plenty.
The whole thing felt like a parody of itself.
Past generations faced their own challenges, and many solutions were born from discontent and not from naive optimism.
For example look at real estate. It used to be that a young person could get out of school, find a job, and save enough to buy a home within a year.
But now many of those same formerly young people are holding on to their many homes and only renting them out or putting them on airbnb if they are lazier. (or even just letting them sit vacant). Anything to keep supply down and price up to the detriment of the current generation.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/08/homeownership...
or perhaps this one going back to boomers born in 1940.
https://www.prb.org/resources/u-s-homeownership-rates-fall-a...
I do see a slow decline for young people, but no golden times of free houses. I suspect it might also have something to do with the factors of house size and urbanization. See:
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/todays-new-homes-are-1000-squ...
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...
Houses have all been of comparable size and in similar areas. Rent and food are also an increasingly large portion of income.
I don't disagree that things have gotten more expensive, but I dont think it is accurate to treat it as binary switch, or act as if the price change happened in a bubble without other factors in the world changing.
So you agree things are objectively more expensive. Now the distinction is... that it's not entirely the Boomer's fault?
Sure, there are likely a few other factors involved but that doesn't mean Boomers hands are clean.
Boomers had a good run despite the challenges of their era, benefited much from policies they rolled back, and remain largely in control of government and wealth in the US to this day.
They oppose changes needed for the new generations to come into their own: NIMBYism, longer careers, owning multiple homes, denying voting initiatives like ranked choice or same day primaries, deregulated industries, rolled back most estate taxes, opposed unions, teaching fantasy economics and berating the kids who find it's not working.
Regarding the economy, I think that boomers generally rode a wave of global growth and benefited greatly. I dont think it is so much that the pulled up the ladder, but failed to build new rungs as the tide went out.
Those at the top of the hierarchy -- people in positions of power and influence at Fortune 500 companies and venerable institutions -- are the same, either believing in these ideas, parroting them because they feel they have to, or using them as a cudgel to knock others down. Again, in a decade or two all of that will flow downstream.
Already, those who grew up in authoritarian countries and are now university professors are noticing how the adherence to the DEI party line is indistinguishable from adherence to the despot's party line 50 years ago; some true believers and many who mouth the words because they dare not.
I'm not sure this is historically accurate. The Moon landing was the culmination of the nationalistic Cold War Space Race.
"While most Americans were proud of their nation's achievements in space exploration, only once during the late 1960s did the Gallup Poll indicate that a majority of Americans favored "doing more" in space as opposed to "doing less". By 1973, 59 percent of those polled favored cutting spending on space exploration. The Space Race had been won, and Cold War tensions were easing as the US and Soviet Union entered the era of détente." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11#Cultural_significanc...
See also:
"Why Civil Rights Activists Protested the Moon Landing" https://www.history.com/news/apollo-11-moon-landing-launch-p...
"Not Everyone Wanted a Man on the Moon" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/opinion/apollo-11-nasa-wo...
But I still think there's something to it that couldn't exist today. If you watch the doc you'll see an absolute gaggle of people who turned out to watch the launch and there really does seem to be an overriding air of excitement and hopefulness.
In the spirit of optimistic naivete I mentioned in my OP, I will choose to believe that, by the time the mission was in progress, for a all-too-brief moment, we as a country _really were_ all rooting for the same thing in 1969 - that the mission would be a success, that the astronauts would come home safely, and that the scientific achievement represented hope for a better future for everyone.
I don't speak for everyone in my cohort, but from my experience, I lost my hope when orange guy took the chair. Him and the people who follow him seem to have a penchant for "fsck you, got mine" and because it was never corrected early on that attitude became the beating drum of the nation for 4 years. For 4 years the worst behaviors of people went unchecked out in the open and now those same people yell and scream censorship when you try and correct it.
Our generation has been the punching bag for everything and finally we've just had enough. Our outlook for the future has never been worse. We were told growing up to always hope for "a better year" but that "better year" was more often than not better for everyone else but us. We're on track to be worse off than our parents in both generational wealth and opportunities [1] and people are just finally done blindly hoping for things to get better. Most people in my generation have stopped planning for the future because this country was too concerned about giving money and tax breaks to the already obscenely rich.
Elon's purchase of Twitter and subsequent actions have only dampened my hopes of anything getting better. When billionaires can piss away 44 billion dollars and cause all sorts of chaos just because they feel like it, meanwhile people in my generation are forced to work two jobs just to barely make a living wage, yeah I don't have much hope left for a better future if this is what the new normal looks like...
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/11/politics/millennials-income-s...
My Dad worked 2 jobs when I was growing up in the 80's so we could live in a tiny house. His parents lived through the depression. All had a more positive personal outlook than the average today. You only get this one trip.
Seeing that political + moneyed corruption and feeling the dread of your victimization is just a part of getting older.
Buckle up; it only gets worse.
If politics affect you so deeply, I am wondering what you have done to get involved in politics. Do you go to county Democrat monthly meeting? Did you join a campaign as a volunteer and make phone calls for a candidate?
If one has to work that hard just to keep utter stupidity at bay, what hope is there of actually making anything better? Whether they manage to be 51% of the vote or 49% of the vote, it's still an enormous drain on optimism.
Optimism should be for solving hard problems, not trivial ones, like "let's not elect conspiracy theorists". When we can't even solve the trivial problems reliably, what point is there in thinking about ones that would actually be satisfying?
That is what those monthly county meetings should be about. There are genuine challenges over genuine differences of opinion between parties about how to best resolve the issues. Instead, you go to that meeting demoralized about the question of getting around the fact that half the country thinks that you voted for a child abuser and have been taken in by numerous vast hoaxes.
Either I have been taken in by vast hoaxes, or they have. It doesn't matter which one it is. That situation is extremely dangerous and demoralizing, and I see no way to fix it, even if I put forth enormous effort into barely defeating it.
One area that I think is productive, and not particularly exhausting, is moving away from binary thinking. For example, I am confident that people on both sides of the isle have been taken in by vast hoaxes. As an independent, I am sure I have as well.
More understanding and less binary thinking is a path forward, with the added benefit that it can be enjoyable and reassuring.
There was an interesting EconTalk episode[1] with Monica Guzman who works to reduce political polarization[2]. She told a story about how following the election of the Orange Man, they took a bus full of Democrats from Seattle to one of the most republican cities in Oregon to talk and learn about their opinions. They learned that the most important considerations for them were issues that they were simply unaware of, and that they actually had a lot of common ground.
Another area I am pretty exited about is the increased interest in rank choice voting. I think this has a lot of potential to improve political outcomes in this country.
Last but not least, I think it is helpful to cultivate more local and less federal interest. If my focus is on injustices or policies happening in some distant state, not only do I have low impact, I am also neglecting problems in my own back yard where I have a lot more power to help!
https://www.econtalk.org/monica-guzman-on-curiosity-and-conv...
https://braverangels.org/our-story/#problem
"Politics is tough. It always has been. American politics is competitive, thrilling, frustrating – and infuriating. The stakes are high. Issues are important. Outcomes matter. This is why we care, and should care, about our politics.
But do our politics have to be demonizing? Does it have to bring out the worst in us? Do our politics have to destroy the goodwill of our society? Is the dehumanizing of our fellow Americans something we should accept?"
Do Republicans ever take a bus to Seattle to learn about Democrats' concerns?
Assuming republicans never "take the bus", so what? The point isn't to do the republicans a favor by talking. The point is to personally grow, learn, and improve.
There is no reason to be afraid of leaning unless you prioritize personal bias and hate over understanding.
My understanding them won't change that they want to interfere with my rights, a lot, for reasons that are not merely incorrect but delusional -- at least as expressed through the politicians that they vote for, who turn those delusions into policies that affect my life.
I don't care what they do outside the voting booth. I take an idle interest as fellow human beings, and would rather their lives be good rather than bad. But politically, my actions are spent 100% trying to fend off them making my life much, much worse -- and I frequently fail at that.
You might find this to be crazy, but it is fundamental to politics. Even if some people are legitimately delusional, it is extremely possible that you have something can offer others that you dont value, and they do, and thereby buy their support.
Both humans and politics have multiple interests and agendas.
Do you interact with many of the "other" 49-51%? I know many people who voted for one candidate or the other in both 2016 and 2020 who are intelligent, thoughtful, reasonable, loving people. That you can lump half the country in one bucket and call them objectively wrong speaks more about you than them.
You can't avoid the fact that they called me objectively wrong. They said so very clearly by voting for somebody who did not even begin to disguise his contempt for me. They might even be correct, but you cannot avoid the fact that the "lumping of half the country in one bucket" is something they did.
> Our outlook for the future has never been worse.
Similarly to the other commenter, my parents' generation ate tree bark to survive famines, and their parents' generation lived through people wanting to exterminate them wholesale. Whatever doom and gloom lies ahead of us is more likely than not easier than this.
> When billionaires can piss away 44 billion dollars and cause all sorts of chaos just because they feel like it
The combined net worth of all billionaires in this country is around $4T. If you confiscated all of their wealth (even ignoring the fact that you cannot liquidate all of it at once and hope to get even half of that amount), it would pay for less than eight month's worth of Federal spending alone, let alone state and local government spending. It would pay for three, maybe four years of Social Security, or five years of Medicare.
Elon being worth $150B or whatever (which again, is not real) is really not that much money in the national scheme, and he doesn't have any power over your life or the lives of your descendants.
> people in my generation are forced to work two jobs just to barely make a living wage
I live in an area where my barber, with no college education or wealthy relatives to inherit from, owns ten acres of land and is saving to build a house on it while living in a mobile home with his wife and children. The catch, of course, is that it's an area of the country that is anathema to college-educated millennial/gen-Z types, with more Walmarts than Whole Foods and state politics that they don't dare affiliate themselves with.
My point being, there's opportunities for a good life out there if you broaden your horizons.
This is about $25,000 of tax per person, or $32,000 if you only count adults.
BTW, I'm a Gen-X'er and my kids are Gen-Z, so with that perspective in mind, here's my take on the situation.
The millennials have "lost hope" in the future because they're the first generation in American history who will fair worse than their parents did. Of course there are exceptions, many of us here on HN being those exceptions. But overall, the generation is fairing worse. They were sold a pipe dream and are now realizing they're screwed. I don't think we've scratched the surface of understanding what the impacts that realization will bring to the society at large.
Gen-Z, by watching the Millennials, have learned much earlier on that they're screwed. So they've adopted a "fsck this sh1t!" attitude and are looking to be an extremely disruptive generation because, well, what have they got to lose? They largely blame the Boomers for the majority of the problems we have today.
Gen-Z looks warily on Gen-X. I don't think they realize how apathetic this generation is. The Boomers have been the dominant force throughout our lives and we always knew there would be a day of reckoning. It was obvious to us back in the 80's that an aging Boomer generation would be a problem, we just underestimated how big of a problem it would be.
Anyway, I see Gen-Z giving the Millennials the kick in the pants they need to get to work to right this ship. The work will get significantly easier as the Boomers die out.
I am concerned that some negative cultural feedback loops have been engaged.
Not saying this as a way to blame, they are after all, a product of their cultural environment, but not all stories have happy endings, ours included.
To be honest, it reminds me a lot of personal depression, where the natural response for most people exacerbates the problem. Once the feedback loops kick in, is very difficult to halt the progression
We weren't voting in the 1970s and 80s that really set the pattern for what we see today, but we did benefit from it and acquiesce to it. Our numbers made it harder to take the reins when it was our turn, but there are still an awful lot of Gen X-ers in Congress failing to fix anything.
Maybe as the Boomers die off, we'll do something (like finally get a chance for a Gen X President). But we should not disclaim responsibility and point fingers at the Boomers, because we're complicit.
Too much bad food and bad media would be a start. When you look at American culture, it would be shocking if we were not unhealthy and depressed.
But then, how do you do this without authoritarian measures.
Don't we? Almost every aspect of our lives has been captured by corporate interests, wealth inequality in many nations is approaching a critical point you'd dub "wage slavery", the internet turned from a place of discovery and joy into a dead space filled with ads, ghostwritten garbage, and increasingly addictive social media walled gardens.
Year by year people are lonelier and more addicted to electronics, by design. Media/news outlets are for the most part very obviously aligned with gov/corporate interests while social media are algorithmically amplifying radicalisation and outrage in order to commodify and sell what should be our private data.
It's also clear that, globally, profit margins take precedence over addressing global warming, constantly declining mental and physical health, systemic issues in our society, or with COVID, even their lives- we're going to be seeing dozens of millions of people disabled by long COVID a year for who knows how long now.
I think it's simply becoming very obvious to everyone that the entities that have power- governments, corporations- are guided by inhuman incentives misaligned and often directly contrary to our collective wellbeing, incentives constantly empowered by technological advancement that only they can afford to develop and deploy.
It might not seem like it because it's happening so gradually and our immediate surroundings don't change as fast, but we're already basically living in a cyberpunk dystopia.
If you take drug overdoses, suicide and maybe homicide out then things don't look that bad.
This isn't any of the things that people complain about when they say healthcare is too expensive.
No doctor is going to convince me not to like getting high so much that I'll take a chance on dying for it or that when I say I could just kill a man I'm not singing along with Rage Against The Machine. Anti-depressive drugs are in theory wonderful but I'm unconvinced (and please someone, convince me I am wrong) that the suicide rate wouldn't be up if more people were taking them.
Is this a surprise when a novel corona virus runs through town?
Suicide was the second leading cause of death for people ages 10-14 and 25-34
Say you make a cop mad and he plants 51g on you. Dead? That’s cool?
that itself is another problem. if the system can make it extremely risky to sell such deadly drugs, its price will have to go up significantly, forcing many many people to stop abusing it.
you won't see that many fentanyl deaths if it costs say $10k per gram on the street. sadly, it is dirt cheap now, at only $100-200 per gram, people are dying.
The penalties are already pretty big for selling just a few lethal doses.. having 50g+ is enough to blight an entire region.
> Oh, well then you're just as naive as these guys who think that capital punishment is going to be a deterrent for drug kingpins. As if drug kingpins didn't live their day-to-day lives under the possibility of execution
Where is 50g of fentanyl even being sold? That’s a huge amount. Would this be a deterrent for sellers in China or other countries outside of the US?
the question is how to make sure all sellers, not just kingpins, would be living under the possibility of execution.
> Would this be a deterrent for sellers in China or other countries outside of the US?
yes. that worked pretty well.
Did it? If so, where is the fentanyl in the US being manufactured and sold into the US from?
https://republicans-energycommerce.house.gov/news/blog/the-f...
rather than blaming others for all these problems, maybe it is time to clean up the mess from within.
Either way, something tells me this will be a moot point for the foreseeable future. We're still laboring under the stupidity of marijuana prohibition in almost half the country.
I think the parent's idea of the death penalty is (Sorry parent) dumb but I don't think that means we should act like there's nothing wrong here.
I mean there are already people selling ethanol to junkies. So why would changing it to fentanyl make any difference.
If you don't have a choice then you do things that will hurt you (assume you have some empathy) because you don't have a choice.
Who wants that job though? Who wants to see other people in a job that requires them to hurt people? I'm not saying there aren't people who make their living doing that but either they have, their ignorant of the harm they do or they don't care about hurting people; in any of those cases I feel sorry for them.
By all accounts, fentanyl is more addictive and potent drug than opium. The conclusion is obvious: the price for America to kick its fentanyl habit will be even higher. It's a matter of time. :(
1.) How many Americans STILL don't have access to healthcare? 2.) How many Americans who have access to healthcare underutilize because of cost? 3.) How many Americans working physical jobs are having their bodies destroyed because of lack of workplace protections? 4.) How many Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and have to make hard decisions every month about food? 5.) How many Americans live in isolation because our economy encourages a nomadic existence even (especially?) for high income workers? 6.) How many American children are raised without supervision because their parents are trying to scratch out an existence at low-wage jobs? 7.) How many American children are separated from a parent by incarceration?
I could go on and on... Most Americans don't understand what they're living through because most Americans have no lived experience outside of our country.
No country is perfect, and it's hard to compare the USA to other nations, but there are many countries (mostly in northern Europe) where the average person is much happier and much healthier than the typical American.
Your other points may be tangentially related at best, and likely unrelated.