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Comment by swozey | Hacker News Reader

I'm around the service industry daily/nightly, used to bartend, lots of my friends still bartend. Apart from the social aspect of actually enjoying working with your coworkers, cool regulars, general night life fun, etc, the world has collectively lost it's mind since 2020 and there is not a chance I would ever do industry again.

The amount of drama, fights, and just people in general being rude assholes since 2020 is astronomically higher than it was when I bartended around 2005-2010 and way higher post 2020.

I used to bartend on dirty 6th in austin a decade ago and I won't even walk down that street today. Society has lost its mind.

I live in a busy bar neighborhood here in denver and we just had a door guy get shot and killed 2-3 weeks ago, literally on my street at a restaurant I go to every few weeks 4 blocks away in broad daylight on a Sunday. A 14-15 year old (iirc) running around on a scooter harassing people shot him in a scuffle.

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> the world has collectively lost it's mind since 2020

Covid causes brain damage. The common symptom of "loss of smell" was found to actually be due to covid infection of the neurons in brain & cranial nerves. Obviously "brain fog" (or memory issues, fatigue, lack of focus, however people articulated it) is due to damage to brain.

I wonder how society moves forward. We didn't get the movie-horror-story virus that turns people into zombies, but we did get a virus that leaves many people with diminished emotional regulation, attention span and ability to reason.

> I wonder how society moves forward.

I'm nervous about this generation of kids who had to grow up locked in a house.

The Kids Aren’t Alright.

Covid did none of that. Our idiotic, hysterical reaction to a respiratory virus caused 99% of the fallout. Hysterically blaming the dreaded Covid is part of why things are so fucked. Every single Covid mitigation was exactly the opposite of what a rational society would have done.

Good lord. It amazes me that people still buy into the hysterical Covid narrative painted by a bunch of media appointed, politically motivated “experts”.

You were lied to and manipulated for others gain. It takes an extreme amount of privilege and a very sheltered world view to keep buying into the 2020 covid narrative. Snap out of it.

Have you ever given any serious consideration to the possibility that the podcasters and youtubers you've been listening to are in fact lying and manipulating their listeners for profit?

When I get invested in a certain belief, I find it useful to ask myself "What would it take for me to change my mind?". It's a helpful tool to catch situations where I've been discounting or ignoring evidence that goes against my belief. If you ask yourself that, and the answer is that nothing would change your mind, then you're not making evidence-based decisions, you're making decisions based on faith or (potentially mis-placed) trust in a person, group or identity.

Are you arguing that the publicly available, state sponsored data is a lie? Or just that all the “experts” we were told to listen chose ti ignore that data. Because I’m not following podcasts or fox or whatever trope covidians tell themselves people like me follow. I looked at the data and science. And it looks absolutely nothing like what the idiotic “expert class” told you.

I still live in denver but in the very outer burbs. I moved from market st about a year ago and it is so much better out here. Denver needs to gets its downtown under control. I used to love nightlife and going out to bars but after 2023 when places were all open again I never went out again as it didn’t feel safe after 9pm.

Really hoping they turn it around.

This isn't a $XCityBad thing. It's happened to drunk crowds everywhere and is completely irrelevant to location or whether you're even downtown. I guarantee the two step bars in the burbs are filled with drunk drama too nowadays. I was in Austin, Tampa, Dallas, Houston and Denver over the last decade and go to a few of them yearly. Denver is far away the safest out of those and I'm glad to be here. I live in 5 points, which I'm sure you think is a big scary place.

I will happily trade seeing a person living in a tent and being able to go out and do an incredible amount of various things literally every single day without driving to living in the suburbs, but glad you like it. Cities are scary.

Can't walk home after 9pm.. lmao.

I'm more afraid of sitting at the airport nowadays than walking around downtown. That's where the real psychos are nowadays. Or hotel bars when traveling. Awful, rude impatient people who act like they've never left the house before. 2020 really did a number on peoples aggression/patience levels and industry people are taking the brunt of it.

Hell, if you look at the /r/boomersbeingfools subreddit it's all of the people living in the burbs being harassed by old angry grandparents constantly. I rarely see that crowd out here.

I live in one of the cities you mentioned. I think part of the problem is that many of the “fun” areas have become expensive and bring a different crowd, or people feel entitled to a certain experience because of the prices they’re paying.

The bars that still have $2-3 drinks (yes, these exist!) still have a wonderful, self-policing crowd. I also used to bartend in the same time range as you, at the equivalent of a 6th street bar.

The people who aren't from my neighborhood are absolutely the problem. Half of my neighbors are industry or just cool young people who go out all the time. I live in a gritty neighborhood that used to be the "Harlem of the West", not sure which city you're in but it'd be like Ybor (tampa), Deep Ellum (Dallas), I guess east6th austin but graffitti/hiphop not honkytonk vibes. Austin doesn't have a blues/jazz/hiphop neighborhood really and its unfortunate White Elephant or whatever is all they've got. Like you said, we get a lot of suburban tourists, groups of people who come in for their friday/sat night to the "cool" part of town and don't know how to handle their liquor or nowadays are just looking for drama, hate being asked for their drivers license (a law here to check for expireds) get in arguments with their partners, other people, try to fight the door guys.

Post 2020 is wild, I all but guarantee my local dive next door deals with a fight almost every fri-saturday. They definitely have to kick someone out every fri/sat at a minimum. Never used to be that bad. I can't explain how many people have tried to start something with me since 2021 (once bars opened) just going out and seeing shows and dancing and what not. If I go out to the busier areas after midnight it's almost a definite thing some dude(s) will go alpha bro mode over nothing or just stare people down. Last saturday a group a randoms at a table was enunciating loudly hoping I'd hear it that I don't belong at my own home bar. That I looked stupid and had stupid tattoos. Dudes had probably never walked into it before and were definitely not from my neighborhood. I just ignored them because who cares. Weird stuff like that. People are just weird now. I've seen so many people 86d.

We had a dollar beer night up till at least 2016-2018 in Austin off Guad at The Local but it looks like that closed down. I can't imagine dollar beers today. The $1 Coors Banquets they sold sell for I think $6.50ish here today. I'm paying $6-8 for single well (Concierge) vodka talls nowadays..

I think its just a huge burden that certain states are putting on people along with dramatically increased cost of living due to insane govt spending. People are really hurting right now and tempers are short.

- Housing has gone up 50-60% in the past 3 years.

- Groceries have also gone up 30-40% along with restaurant prices.

- Despite the job market for professionals being the worst its been since 2008 you have the media gaslighting everyone talking about a "vibecession" and saying the economy is the strongest its ever been.

- Crime and lawlessness has been out of control, we are approaching 90's levels of crime in a few short years.

- Interest rates are the highest they have been in 30+ years, all loans etc are now very expensive(see housing costs as house prices have shot up).

- Arsonists running wild in California/Oregon/Washington causing record wildfires and releasing tons of CO2 into the air.

- Homelessness hit record high (up 12% from 2022 to 2023)

- All these things are causing a huge drop in quality of life and pushing people to the brink. So many people in my circle of friends - engineers, scientists and mgmt that are out of work I have never seen anything like this.

The economy *is* running great. It's just that trickle down doesn't work and that means all the gains from the economic upturn go to the top 0.1% and that's why regular people feel like the economy is failing. Because it's failing them.

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