Both. I asked my father this in 2008. He said he thought things were worse than ever. I asked if maybe it’d always been this bad but technology made us more aware of how terrible things are. He was taken aback by that thought experiment.

Some years later, it’s absolutely worse. Trump (in USA) showed that no one has to play by any rules to remain successful / powerful. Now repubs are mask-off terrible. But I’d also argue that their party had sanity in the past. Nixon gave us the EPA. That’d never happen now. From Reagan on they’ve been shit. Clinton was also shit. Obama didn’t care, but he was eloquent. Dems sabotaged Bernie in 2020. There’s no hope. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be a downer.

And ads everywhere! It wasn’t like this before. It’s measurably worse even if it was already terrible.

Yes

Probably the latter. Almost nothing that sucked today sucked less 20, 40, 60, 80 etc… years ago. They almost universally sucked more. We’re just more aware.

For example, cops have always been beating black people; but that wasn’t common knowledge for most until recently.

Tl;dr: who knows?

This is an interesting question. I’m sure someone will say yes and use data. My thoughts are I don’t know and we can’t truly know.

If we’re more aware of the shittiness, then how can we be sure it wasn’t just as shitty before or less shitty than now? Data relies on documentation and documentation has been, and continues to be, reported sporadically or things are unsolved and thus omitted.

Things are shittier right now than they were 10-20 years ago, but they’re a lot better than they were 50+ years ago.

You wrote this on what even to recent ancestors of yours would be classified as Clarke Tech, AKA “Indistinguishable From Magic”

We have some new problems, some old problems, some problems that are getting better and some that are getting worse, that’s just how history works most of the time.

The significant change vs 20 or 30 years ago is the increased attention focus on those bad things because literally every form of media has at least some form of perverse incentive to fixate on those bad things “if it bleeds it leads”, an idea so old it’s how the western world knows about Vlad the Impaler some also ran count of part of Romania that spent more time as a hostage than he did as a ruler, but who ruled with a hand so bloody that it inspired the creation of one of the three quintessential gothic horrors of English literature.

If I can use a floor cleaning metaphor:

The floor was pretty filthy in the 20th century, but a lot of it was swept under the rug so it looked pretty clean at casual glance.

Thusfar in the 21st century, we threw out the rug and bought a smaller one, did a modest job at cleaning up some of the dirt under it, and there’s a small number of people who deliberately shit on the rug because being decent human beings isn’t a thing they can do.

And I think that brings us to 2024.

Here’s a brief snapshot of US history between 1962-1974, when my parents were school age.

• Soviet submarine B-59 comes terrifyingly close to starting a nuclear war with the United States (1962). This event was unknown at the time but the threat of nuclear war was very real.
• The Vietnam War begins (1962).
• President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas(1963).
• Alabama governor George Wallace makes the now famous declaration in his innaugeral address, “…segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” (1963).
• The Harlem [race] riot marks the first of numerous violent race riots across the country (1964).
• Malcolm X is assassinated in New York City (1965).
• Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee (1968).
• Bobby Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles, California after winning the California democratic presidential primary (1968).
• 4 College students are killed and 9 more wounded after being fired upon by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University.
• Richard Nixon becomes the first and only US President to resign after the Watergate scandal (1974).

And those are just some of the major highlights. Things have been plenty shitty in the past.

Some things are slightly shittier, some things are way shittier, and a lot of things are a lot better. What do you mean specifically?

Politics and the Supreme Court have gotten a lot shittier since 2016 (like a steep decline, rather than the slight decline before).

The wealth gap has been getting shittier since the 70s. Wages haven’t kept up with productivity, while living expenses have only increased.

The housing market is shitty if you’re young or don’t have generational wealth.

Technology and medicine have gotten way better over the last ~100 years.

General consumer safety has gotten way better since the 50s.

Literacy levels and the rate of high school graduation have gotten way better.

Climate change is killing the planet. Deregulation is making climate change worse. Green energy isn’t coming fast enough.

Capitalism and specifically the notion that corporations have a duty to the shareholders has made companies and products shittier, but TVs are really cheap, and computers are really fast.

Robotics has gotten incredibly advanced, as has AI. Whether that’s shitty is pretty much up to opinion. I’d say it’s neutral, and depends on how they’re used.

Speaking of which, war was already horrifying, and now robots have made it vastly more horrifying. I don’t see any way that’s going to stop.

Food has become either really nutrient dense and amazing or really calorie dense and horrible, depending on how much money you have.

Speaking of money, there are a handful of people who have like half of the money. Maybe the guillotine went out of style too soon.

Video games and movies basically just look indistinguishable from reality now. And deep fakes are about to make it a lot easier to create that kind of realism.

For the most part, high speed internet access has slowly been getting better and better, both in speed and availability. Surprisingly, it’s stayed about the same percentage of the median income while doing so.

Streaming services have gotten so shitty it’s unbelievable that they’re still in business. But piracy has been making a comeback, and self hosting pirated content has gotten a lot easier. Physical media is also making a comeback.

Bigotry has gotten worse as a problem, but not worse in terms of percentage of people who are discriminatory. It’s just that the extreme bigots have basically taken over one of the political parties. (I mean, it basically was the party of bigotry before, but they had the decency to be subtle about it.) The younger generation can hopefully fix that problem as they enter voting age.

That’s all I can think of for now.

I don’t know if we’re more aware or just more sensitive to it.

People tend to be more educated and more empathetic. Violent crime is significantly down to the lowest levels ever, especially compared to the 70s.

What sucks is that some people are becoming irrelevant: old age, certain political beliefs, certain religious beliefs, etc. They are burning down the house on the way out. Also the house of cards that is the economy that was always going to collapse one day is now collapsing.

Socially we’re better off. Economically we’re worse off. I suspect that we go back to a mainly urban and more sustainable form of living like prior to the baby boom.

How do you define “things”?

On a global scale and on average, life for humans is getting significantly better than, say, a century ago. The number of people dying from preventable diseases, war, natural disasters has been steadily going down for a while now.

Of course there are many more people on earth than there were 100 years ago, so accumulatively there is a lot more suffering now.

Also, the lives of individual people, the state of certain countries and areas are certainly getting worse.

As for non-human animals… For most of them the world is getting increasingly less habitable and for those who are raised in an industrial setting for human consumption, living conditions are largely atrocious.

I think your question is too broad for a single answer. But you might be interested in this now 17 year old (!) TED talk by the late Hans Rosling, which at least partially answers your question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w

Definitely the latter. If I can recommend a book please read it despite it’s title: “Everything is Fucked” by Mark Manson.

The title is supposed to be a joke as when things get better we still will find even the smallest of problems, everything isn’t fucked it’s our perception. This is human nature. There’s other really interesting observations in the book that I really enjoyed, but that’s the main theme.

Why not both?

I grew up in a realm where there was no internet, or cell phones. I don’t use social media at all and continue to try very hard to tell the people that I care about that it’s bad for you. It’s like trying to convince a smoker to stop smoking (I am an ex-smoker of 30 years). I decry the need for always on always connected, right here, right now, listen to me. We’re not evolved for that. We’re apes, very complex, occasionally fun apes. We need that social and interpersonal and personal interaction.

As we stray further from the way our ancestors lived, we stray further from who we are as a species. There is a great argument to be made for cooperation but it takes a lot of strenuous effort to happen over distance and time that we struggle with.

I have lost my train of thought and with great trepidation at your misinterpretation, I bid you adieu good reader.