i am middle aged man, i experienced life since before even computer and smartphone is a thing like today.
back then, i feel that life is much easier, what i mean easier is more simple life, less competition, less stress, fresh environment, and more happiness despite lack of technology.
but right now, everything is just too complicated despite of power of tech, internet, smartphone, and AI helps, i feel that life is much harder right now, what i mean is like competition is everywhere, stressful everyday, crowded city, and i easily depressed these days.
is it just me or everyone else can relate to what happens right now?
Bills went up, pay did not keep up.
This is true, but It’s not just that. There is friction built into everything, designed to squeeze as much as possible out of us.
Yeah companies used to pretend to please customers and now they don’t even pretend.
The staff are minimum wage and don’t care because it’s a big corporation so you can’t get good service.
The price is high because the shareholders must be kept happy so you pay over the OSA Odds.
Corners were cut in several places making the product to please the shareholders too and the workers manufacturing got minimum wage in the factory wherever it was located and have zero interest in making good products as a result.
Basically capitalism ate itself
here i am still unable to buy a house or car
There’s a whole lot of awful going on.
My dad used to rant about how government should be run like a business, no, no dad, it really, really should not. Businesses do not care about people, businesses don’t want anything but money, your money, and they will twist, turn, manipulate, lobby, and flat out steal or harm people to get it.
So the next time you call 311, the non emergency police line, or God forbid 911 remember, your call is very important to us, a representative will be with you shortly. If you’d like to take a brief survey after the call just stay on the line. If you’d like to talk to our chat bot Sally just say, hey Sally!
My dad used to rant about how government should be run like a business,
Anyone who sincerely believes that is too fucking ignorant and or stupid to be taken seriously. They’re a hazard to themselves and their polity.
He’s dead so you can relax
Sorry for the lol
My dad used to rant about how government should be run like a business, no, no dad,
The last thing you hear: Sorry but your citizen contract has been revoked in order to meet our 3rd quarter profit target. You have been terminated!
“It was in the user agreement.”
guess your dad regrets his rant now, everything is just business now.
He didn’t live to see any of this bullshit. He died bitching about her emails.
Simpler times.
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People who say what you say have fundamental misunderstandings about how governments work and about how private companies (“businesses”) work.
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I have had a few corporate jobs. Businesses are NOT efficient.
Imagine thinking businesses are efficient in big 26
im putting groceries on credit. i had a great credit score till this year, i havent even tried making payments on certain things including ER bills. only a matter of time before im bankrupt, and i am also disabled. i have given up on having a future and I’m only 32.
Mid twenties here, same situation. My bank closed my accounts lol
Thirty-something Norwegian here. I am born into a rich, relatively functioning social democracy with a good welfare state. Buying my own home was a real struggle, even with a good salary. Many of my peers will never own, my younger friends will struggle to ever own, or never.
Unfortunately the welfare state is eroding, prices for everything is increasing heavily, and the private sector is a growing leech on the state.
the real problem is capitalism
May your welfare state never erode enough to remove your Healthcare and turn it into exclusively private!
It’s both: it’s just you and it’s everyone else. In the modern age of relatively fast technological development, people tend to get overwhelmed by change in their later years. But also things are getting worse for almost everyone[1] under late-stage capitalism.
Almost everyone living under capitalism, that is. In China most people’s lives have been getting easier. ↩︎
i am not sure about china but even developed countries such as australia and singapore has their struggles now despite they are one of high income countries.
The United Nations and the World Bank are sure about China.
If you talk to Chinese they have the same complaints though.
Just so we’re clear, China is not a utopia, lol.
Just so we’re clear, no one is saying it is, lol.
You were implying it, so I wanted to clarify.
I wasn’t implying it; you were inferring it.
Just so we’re clear, you may need to retake reading classes lol
You’re correct OP. I think the difficulty of modern times is multifaceted. A lot of other comments here speak to various parts of it these days, but I want to add one I’ve noticed related to this issue.
Pre mid-2000’s, technology worked for us. If you look at the hayday of tech (1980 thru early 2000’s), it seemed like every tech innovation was aimed at the consumer. The tech got better and we did too. The tech worked for us.
Nowadays (and I think I can see all this turning course around the time of the 2008 collapse), tech is not for us. The consumer has become the product, and tech is built around working through us instead of for us. Manipulating us instead of helping us. It sucks.
I have no doubt that if the washing machine was invented today instead of like ~100 years ago, they would be the size of car, and only installed in corporate offices. You’d have to go to an office to get your clothes washed. Consumer-level washers wouldn’t be a thing. They’d tie it to work like healthcare. It seems like no one is interested in making quality consumer devices. The consumer devices we do have are designed to become obsolete quickly without any repairability, so you buy another fast (i.e. all modern cars).
So yea, I think when you add this on top of everything else, it help explains what is amiss with life today. My 2c
you are totally correct, it feels like tech is no longer for us, we are the product and we are forced to buy stuff with planned obsolescence, also they are getting more expensive.
OP, it’s also going to sound like a cliche, but touch grass. The cancer-like tech companies want to replace your sense of community so that they have more power over you. F them, join a local group, and find yourself feeling more powerful when you have a real community behind you.
see also: misery loves company
Yep! Something about staring into the void, yada yada yada
All of the things that were supposed to help us by making our lives easier really helped them and now our lives are harder. I don’t see an end to that.
Every time your life gets harder, some rich persons life gets easier. Welcome to capitalism.
I’m not even sure if the average rich person’s life is actually getting better by hoarding even more wealth. I tend to believe that being really rich is kind of an illness. Like an addiction where you never feel powerful or rich enough because there’s always someone that’s ahead of you. I feel that capitalism, especially in its current stage, is really bad for everyone.
I think about it this way.
In 1995 I could leave the house with nothing in my pocket except $10.00 and have a great day. Ride the bus with cash, get food with cash, buy stuff with cash. If I needed a ride there were free phones to car services in most stores.
Today, if I go out the door I need cash, a credit card, and a phone.
i dont have credit card so its manageable but phone is absolute must, most car services apps and cashless payment use it
Back in the day, it was always keep a quarter in your shoe so you could always make a phone call.
I don’t like the idea of having financial information on the phone. No Apple pay. In my area you need a credit card or metro card to get on a bus, so you have to have the phone and the wallet. And cash in case there’s a power blackout
Yep. The Amish were right.
the socialists are right.
it’s not about technology, it’s about capitalism.
If you scale up the Amish to national sized governance it would be socialism with extra steps. But I was referring to their distrust of technology.
The amish are quite awful if you look into them. Ultimately they’re just another group that exist for the sole purpose of protecting a core of old privileged men who just want to continue diddling kids and beating their wives…
No argument there. Again, how difficult is it to understand it was a joke about their distrust of technology
And sister raping
Is that you, Woody?
It’s basically impossible to go out and relax or have any kind of good time when you know you’re probably being filmed from 20 different angles throughout the night, and the cost of any kind of faux pas is that you might get video uploaded to make you a laughing-stock… and that was before the millions of AI surveillance cameras that have like a ~2% chance to hallucinate imaginary crimes and file automatic police reports went up.
But yeah, everything is also really fucking expensive now.
with smartphone and meta glasses everywhere, it is just impossible to avoid privacy anymore
Good time to unplug.
How do you unplug your rent payments that are due every month?
disconnect your landlord’s internet not yours
Wealth divide is worse. We are also in a time of change geopolitically. Also in a time where powerful actors benefit from creating controversy including media, social medial, political, and geopolitical. We live in interesting times.
Describe a time of geopolitical non-change please.
Well, before smartphones people didn’t get bombarded with bad news all the time. The changes were there but we hardly noticed them. Now they’re being shoved in our schnozes to instill fear and push us all to the far right.
Largely from 1947 to 2020.
The Cold War. Transfer of Hong Kong to China. The collapse of the USSR. Arab/Israeli wars. Vietnam and the Peace Movement. The oil crisis. 9/11. End of Segregation in the US. Womens’ Rights especially after the Pill Gay/Trans Rights The Korean War The Beatles
It’s pretty much constant.
All fairly minor. Now we are leaving the post WW2 era. No one knows what is next.
The Cold War, the threat of “Mutually Assure Destruction” that hung over all of heads for decades until the USSR dissolved, was “fairly minor”???
That has not ended. Russia and China have large supplies of nuclear weapons. Just like WW2, Russia has initiate a war in Europe with China, NK, and Iran as allies. China will invade TW at some point. NK may do the same to SK. All of these allies are nuclear powers except Iran which will be.
I think this is due to increased alienation. We’ve become more isolated and distanced from one another and, more importantly, more distanced from our own creative self. This is what happens when production is largely automated but humans are still involved - we turn into small faceless gears in a big mechanism.
