> In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery
Have people always thought this (e.g. "the youth of today are lazy") or is it measurably true?
I feel like it's obviously true.
Have people always thought this (e.g. "the youth of today are lazy") or is it measurably true?
I feel like it's obviously true.
So, I wouldn't say its like "we always thought that". Its more like we had a good short phase and now its back to normal. Or maybe the good phase is the normal and the pendulum swings back?
If terrorists didn't kill thousands of Americans on 9/11, those wars don't happen, so you'd have to say 9/11 started it. Ironically, the world had less combat deaths worldwide than ever during those two wars (although this does a terrible job of capturing deaths caused by war, but not directly from combat): https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace
The 90s were relatively peaceful compared to the previous few decades, but we still had the Yugoslav Wars, Israeli-Palestine at times, the Gulf war, Rwanda.
The narrative to push the war on Iraq largely also revolved around "WMDs" while the legality of the war still remains debatable.
> Ironically, the world had less combat deaths worldwide than ever during those two wars
I wouldn't measure peace just by number of deaths, but even if we were to do so, it is also worth taking into account the increased security measures and the less freedom we have to prevent deaths.
sounds like the war shouldn't have happened, and the correct solution was not to do that
It's entirely possible that people have always been complaining about X and also that X is more prevalent today than it used to be.
But you then argue with the metric. Maybe curse words aren't a good measure of hostility. Maybe the admin was overzealous, or underzealous and then corrected. That's what makes it hard to come to a consensus.
Anectodally, on the internet, I would agree. I feel post 2016 saw an uptick in hostility, and then the pandemic years of 2021/2022 saw another uptick.
My pet half-serious theory is that we currently talk a lot about the dastardly millennials and boomers because senior media staff are largely genX; note that we don't hear much about genX these days. This will start to change in a few years as genX starts to age out, and suddenly everyone will be complaining about genX and genZ. Whole new stereotypes will have to be forged (the old genX stereotypes from the 80s are very youth-of-today oriented and won't work for moaning about old people), and no-one will ever mention avocados again.
Likewise, most of our prominent entrepreneurs are all Gen X try-hards who found fortune because of the consumption patterns that millennials adopted and were in the right place at the right time to capitalize on it. Millennial consumption patterns of course having been heavily influenced by gen xers and boomers by proxy, the few that got that good job and kept it forever are quite happy to upgrade their iPhone every year, buy TVs and cars for no reason, and move to the boonies not realizing that Gen Xers mistakenly gave up their sense of community to follow in the boomers' footsteps; they'll borrow and pay anything possible for the privilege.
Anyway, I'm already working on my Gen X material.
can't find "un office of generation labels" please advise