Thank heavens young Americans can look forward to a $63k/year median income when they are employed full-time.
This is no reason for abject pessimism at 18 years old.
I would think something like Gini combined with HDI and GDP per capita, on which the US only fares well on the latter. I found out there is something called Global Social Mobility Index, done by the WEF, and it places the US in 27th.
Of course the US has less of a social safety net than Norway, a petrostate with trillions of dollars in a national oil endowment, and ~half of their GDP is from fossil fuels. I don't know that I'd want to move to Norway for the kind of "social mobility" that I'm after.
And this is borne out in emigration patterns and visa applications...
It feels like we expect to be #1 in every category and we're unable to recognize that the US has it pretty damn good in a lot of important ways. Envy is the thief of happiness.
Is pessimism a consciouss choice?
One can develop pessimism about pessimism without a conscious choice, but once you become aware of how negative your outlook on pessimism is, it's a conscious choice to not try to figure out the different meanings of that word and how important it is for the proper functioning of democracy.
Maybe read Orwell for a glimpse of mandatory optimism:
"The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one... Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen.
I am much more pessimistic generally than I was 20 years ago. But that's something I work on, not something I accept passively as a fact of life.
Life is bleak if you perceive it to be bleak.
- easy access to clean water
- sufficient calories
- safe shelter
- education (presumably they can read and write if they’re on Reddit)
- internet access
- free time (can’t be writing nasty comments on Reddit if you’re swinging a pick axe in a coal mine)
Many of these things can’t be claimed by millions in the world.
And yet, it’s one of the most cynical, negative places on the internet.
Everything you listed are reasons NOT to be so cynical
There are many other factors you could evaluate it on, though, and many of them are harder to quantify. Stuff like personal agency, status, leisure time, social life, community cohesion, etc.
TRUTH.
The problem reddit has is the celebration of it's doomerism, even in the small hobby subs the vibe is still present. The highest upvoted comments are so nauseatingly repetitive and formulaic, ridden with whatever the contemporary dogma of reddit is, substantiated by snowballs of echo-chamber fallacy with pebbles of truth in the middle.
Ironically, the above comment scored 99.9% negativity.
Now in the last couple years, both my sisters have discovered reddit, and hanging out with them is like the god damn /r/all comments sections all over again. So insidious.
Which is to say, the feelings of doom are quite widespread. There's a good argument to be made that it underlies the rise of trumpism: people in the sticks feeling abandonment, resentment, and doom, and expressing it at the ballot box.
But that's not what I'm saying, so there's that.
Anyway, everybody (barring the global ultra-poor) is obviously aware that their standard of living is much higher than that of most of history. This is not novel, not hard to realise, and certainly not a discussion-terminating point.
In the Western world every single generation since WWII has roughly speaking lived better than their parents. For people currently in their 20s, this is on track not to be the case. The "democratic normalcy" is under attack. Wealth inequality was reaching literal Gilded Age levels... and has now barreled past that with no sign of stopping. And yes, algorithmic social media running anger-maximisation machines on a planetary scale. Shall I go on? The point being that "medieval peasants didn't have microwaves" is immaterial to the discussion.
Young people protested Gaza, climate change, racism, massive wealth disparity and they just don't see the results. Governments, economic systems and societies just keep the status quo.
As for environment degradation in general, just because prior predictions were wrong doesn't mean the biosphere isn't still headed in the wrong direction for sustainability. Maybe we have the right governance and economics to adapt in time, but that's not a guarantee.
Being positive about everything seems like a really privileged position. It also maintains the status quo. If you're Ukrainian, how positive would you feel about your country's future? How positive is Europe about NATO and it's future with the US right about now. How are Canadians feeling about their neighbor to the South? Are they confident future US elections will self-correct?
Maybe over the long term it all works itself out and human progress continues to the stars or whatever. Or maybe we're going to be part of a Great Filter intelligent species face because of short sightedness and powerful technologies they unleash. Or maybe we'll just muddle along with some gains and then losses. Civilizations rise and fall, we really don't know how positive the future will be.
There have always been wars and skirmishes around the world. Ukraine and Gaza are today's. There will be others tomorrow. Different tribes of humans just don't get along, never have.
If you think the environment is bad now, you should have seen it in the 1970s. Chemicals dumped everywhere, rivers on fire, cities choked in smog.
But the long term trend is always positive. Things are better now for more people than they ever have been.
We really don't know that democracy will always prevail, that capitalism is sustainable in the long term, and that our current global civilization is immune to collapse. We don't know there will never be a nuclear war or that climate change won't hit the wrong tipping point. We don't know that humanity's future will continue to be better off indefinitely.
Right. We don't. And we never did. What I was saying is that when I was young, there was plenty of reason to believe everything would go to hell soon... and we were wrong, things got a lot better. There's just no way to know.
The last Romans living in the Roman Empire in 400AD may have also concluded that their problems would eventually be solved and they would continue thriving, just like they had for a thousand years. But they would be wrong. Just go back to 100AD and they would be mostly right: they still had a good 300 years in front of them (so they would never see a collapse, nor their children and grandchildren).
So yeah, eventually things will undoubtedly take a very negative turn. The question really is, will that be in 10, 100 or 1000 years? You don't know, I don't know. But given the above , I think it's fair to conclude that by being positive you're almost always correct.
Getting older what I have realized is that the enthusiasm of the youth is born from the lack of experience, lack of responsibility, lack of anything to lose, and a position to really only gain from any changes. When you are young you are largely a spectator to the game, and just like any other game, your views will change when you become a player instead of an armchair expert.
15 years ago there were nice discussions happening on reddit, now all the comments are one liner stupid jokes from people who never even bothered to read the article and people calling you a bootlicker if you don't agree with every nonsense against Trump/Musk/some billionaire.
Also, more and more of them are bots which are trained to regurgitate themes that get a lot of engagement.
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