You see it all started when some dumb motherfuckers decided to leave the relatively plentiful African Savannah for the dead-land that was the desert. Then they had to invent agriculture and it was all downhill from there.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

My take: the result of decades of incompetent leadership, at all levels from the government to individual households, that ultimately lead to a society that mainly uses dilatory tactics instead of finding solutions to its issues.

What happens when the economy crashes? We push the goalposts back a few yards so that it’s actually better now and will become a problem later instead. Notice how the frequency of market crashes is increasing? It was every 50 years or so, then it was every 10, now we’ve had 3 in 5 years, yes I’m fucking counting COVID you had literally over 60 years to prepare for a worldwide pandemic and you sat on your asses.

What happened with education? Well let’s see. Why do we pay for education in the first place? To increase our knowledge and push the boundaries of human civilization, or to put it bluntly: we don’t wanna live in a world filled with idiots. But like why do we need education? Cuz like jobs or something…Ever wonder why you MUST have a degree for a job? That’s a legal requirement, if something is on the job posting as a requirement then it’s a fucking requirement. Suddenly everyone needs a higher education, because the job posting is a legal requirement that must be met, else ye suffer the consequences of immediate disqualification. Fortunately the law miraculously doesn’t really care which degree you have, the companies get to choose how narrow the scope is and if they don’t do that well that’s on them lol xD! So we need a degree, but let’s say we don’t wanna put in the effort to learn all that hard shit. Besides, we just need survivabile minimum wage, so let’s aim for that. It sure is convenient that all these now impacted universities made up all these new bullshit degrees so they could pretend to deal with the influx of morons that are getting intimidated and bribed into their schools via their parents. This sounds like a game to me, and I love games. Wait wait wait wait. We said that we want education because we want people to be smart, but like technically we only need education to get a job. Suddenly education is like this super fun game where you get sorted into a socio economic class in a fun and interesting way. And then people realized they could influence that as early as elementary school, and well gee fuckin golly! They get to vote and control the public education because that’s how public school works. And if we loosen up the restrictions on what our kids need to get good grades, their chances of getting into college get better. Guess what? Money also works too, if we have money we can avoid the tiring scramble of public education and just pay to win baybee!!!

Why does the everything suck? Because it’s owned and operated by investment firms and run by people who are the result of decades of systemic degradation. And who’s to blame? The worse generation in human history. The only generation in United States history to have a losing record when it comes to war lose, while simultaneously being the single generation to have started and sustain the most wars! The same fucking generation that didn’t die off at 55 because their children didn’t huff lead gasoline like they did for Christmas and actually got bothered to learn medical science - as much as I shit on the education system as a whole, there are always some tryhards that slip through. The same generation that still controls 60% of the political offices in this country, while at the same time being composed of the top 1% of mentally unstable weak and decrepit elderly part of the population. The same generation that voted to fuck over retirement pensions from the previous generation back in the 70s or whenever it was, and then now in past decades have undone all of that to secure retirement protections for them suddenly now as they reach their sunset years. The same generation that still currently in the current fucking year of two thousand twenty-four are the two frontrunners for Presidential candidacy.

And you know what the funniest thing about it is? It’s not just the United States. How’s Japan looking over across the Pacific? A problem with a top heavy elderly population? Wow who could’ve guessed. What about the boys across the pond? What does the British parliament look like? Who are still the leaders of China, Russia, North Korea? What families are still in power in the Middle East?

Our ancestors have failed us. They have failed their brothers and sisters. They have failed our entire goddamned species. I am embarrassed and ashamed for all intelligent beings anywhere and everywhere in any reality where intelligence is possible that we are capable of such idiocy.

I take great solace in the fact that they will not be around long enough to etch their final memory into the stones of history. And we will.

Despite all of that it feels to me less like things are getting worse and more like a loud death rattle from a bloated creature - the final shout before the eternal void. I see the same feelings as mine in both my cohorts and in the future generations. I have hopes for the future and strongly believe that the world is just now entering the upswing. It’s painful and awkward right now while the old skin sheds, but I am confident we will emerge from our chrysalis transformed into something greater. Maybe that guy who brought up the 12 year delay on the Mayan calendar shit earlier in this thread was on to something; the timing is just too coincidental.

It was those damned churches staying open during COVID

People elect Conservatives. Don’t elect Conservatives. They want to make the world shit.

Chronic disease and general poor-functioning has been skyrocketing and the vast majority of people just ignore it like it’s no big deal.

Obviously it’s a big deal when the intelligence and competence of a majority of people has been severely diminished. We’re now living in Idiocracy. And it’s why for two elections in a row we’ve ended up with the choice of two senile old white men.

Shallow consideration, multiplied by technology and laziness.

Anybody who disrupts capitalism should be punished. We’ve done it before and we gotta do it again.

The whole point of capitalism is self determination. Not to dominate the world, we’re not anarchists. But these criminals are pulling massive amounts of money out of the economy and that’s not acceptable.

I think the enshitification of the Internet was sort of just what happens to everything once it gets monetized. It was already happening before COVID.

On the other hand - when I was growing up, my city was rough. So much violent crime, bands would not come here, it was notorious. Now? No. Violet crime has decreased sharply, my kids grew up in a different world than I did.

Jobs haven’t become less secure, or at least not in my experience, that change happened in the 1980s, and it’s been about the same since.

Everyone is broke because of Ronald Reagan, for lack of a better way to explain it. Deregulation. Workers have gotten ever more productive without getting their cut of that increase in productivity and this is the endgame of that trend.

People keep electing conservative fascists like morons

Healthy food costs more than unhealthy food…

Edit: mb, not really an answer to your question, but it sucks nonetheless…

The powers that be realised that a non-stop feed of bad news for you to Doom scroll makes people apathetic and apethic people don’t protest, or revolt, or even vote against you. They go through life scrolling on their phone and just accept whatever life gives them.

So, before I say “capitalism” like everyone else id like to argue many of the monetary/economic policy can be used by either authoritarian state capitalists or free capitalists alike.

https://42macro.com/education

This can be useful^ it’s a brief read. Also I love Adam Taggart, he’s a really good person to follow on YouTube for economics.

Things were getting bad for a while, and we kick the can down the road until an exponentially worse problem arrives, then repeat. Let’s look at COVID for now tho instead of going back decades

COVID happens, society has to adapt, and now there’s growth issues with the economy (growth domestic product or gross domestic income)

First, government gives a shit ton of stimulus checks to the consumer market. A market is a collection of buyers and sellers. The consumer market is a collection of buyers and sellers who spend their money on one thing and don’t retain that value. So most of the stimmy money went from consumers to corporations. To give you an idea, over the last 3 years we’ve seen 35% of inflation that is never going away, it will forever weigh on the consumer market (and that’s the market that needs to be well off for an economy to be anything more than the stock/financial market)

Second, Fed sees an incoming recession so they lower interest rates to make banking loans cheaper to encourage investment to increase growth again. This means people who are not suffering from the economy can easily afford another house since they’re basically not paying any interest on it, then rent it out to Airbnb or whatever.

All these things cause growth in the short term, while making inflation a much worse problem in the long term.

FED starts raising interest rates slowly over the last year or 2. Now they’re about to lower them again which is a sign we’re in for another recession, but let’s look at what raising interest rates did:

Banks operate on a very tight margin and raising interest rates hurts banks in the short term and takes a while for markets to react to (which is part of the reason why we saw so many bank closures like silicon valley bank)

But raising interest rates also makes it more expensive for people to afford mortgage payments.

H.O.P.E: housing , orders, profits, employment

When mortgage payments got more expensive housing got expensive. When housing gets expensive orders go down and/or credit card usage goes up (which is another separate problem / indicator). When orders go down profits go down, and when profits go down employment goes down.

It should be worth noting the one thing J Powell did right was creating slack in job openings to prevent a complete crash in the labor market, but that’s the last thing to crash in a recession so we’re still just kicking the can down the road.

That’s the best analysis I can do with respect to COVID, but some other interesting things:

The average boomer is 2 years into retirement. The labor force is going to continue shrinking for the next 7 years. It won’t be this bad in America, but in south east asian countries, there’s going to reach a point where there are more old people than young people, and when that happens there’s not enough people to care for the elderly and support the rest of the economy, so both tend to suffer. America will feel this pain as well, but our population “pyramid” is more of an hourglass, where south east asian is an upside down pyramid

Also, geopolitical tensions are likely going to get worse over the next few years. China manufactures everything consumers like that don’t have to do with defense, so things like smartphones are going to get much more expensive , and tech stocks are likely to suffer.

Also, there’s tons of shadow banks with stealth liquidity where there’s no information how much money they have. So however bad inflation was the last few years and will continue to get with the Fed cutting rates, it can get MUCH worse once those banks start releasing their liquidity.

So, things are bad and they’re going to get worse before there’s a chance things get better. I really recommend listening to Adam Taggart and the people he interviews to help form your decision making

Shareholder value. Companies are cutting everything they can to increase stakeholder value: wages, quality, support, ownership, etc.

Have you read Cory Doctorow’s book on enshitification? I think he focuses more on the Internet but might help answer your question.