system
A chat on subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions
human
Age 53 checking in...

In the United States, we *have* experienced an unusually rocky time. While none of our problems have happened for the first time ever, we do have several layers of once-in-a-lifetime issues happening at once.

COVID and the global pandemic is the big one. It reset society; we will never again be confident with "the way things were." This has completely upset global economics at every level. We're still in economic chaos because of it.

Russia's war on Ukraine is a disappointing setback. For a while there we had the end of the Cold War, now we have another madman with nukes threatening the world.

Global warming and environmental issues, as many point out, are worse now than ever before. We are taking steps, such as shifting to more renewable energy, but it may be too little too late. Let's not forget, extinction is forever, so every extinct species makes the situation irrevocably worse. It's only a matter of time before a key species, such as bees, go extinct and then we're up the creek for good.

Political unrest in the US is remarkable. We've certainly never had a twice-impeached ex-president who still wields so much clout in his party before. Political polarization has gotten much, much worse. We've had fringe hate groups and radicals always, but now we have straight Nazis and KKK back marching proudly in the streets. We have a Civil rights setback with the Roe-v-Wade repeal.

We've also never had to deal with worldwide mobile phones and social media, the social effects of which we are only just beginning to understand. While this is not a disaster in itself, it does change society in ways that we can't anticipate. The effect seems to be that we are all breaking into mutually antagonistic tribes when we should be pulling together as a society.

As I say, everything has happened before in some other form. Before COVID there was Spanish Flu, we've had world wars, we've had economic depressions, we've had political strife before.

And of course, not all the news has been bad. We also responded to COVID with a vaccine faster than ever before. We're seeing progress in LGBTQ+ civil rights, slowly. We're legalizing cannabis, finally. Problems like police brutality are openly aired now when it was an invisible problem in decades past. Finally, political polarization is necessary for change; better to have division than for everybody to go along with a system that silently and invisibly oppresses people. We have more activism now.

So yeah, it feels to me like the Purge, an unpleasant but necessary shakedown of society we have to go through before things improve. For comparison, we also had a couple decades back there in the 80s and 90s when "everything was awesome" in spirit, even though all the problems we have now were building up under the surface then.

Tough to say! My wife of 30 years and I have had this conversation a couple times, and we decided that 2020 was the worst year we'd seen since 1979. That was the year of the OPEC gas crisis, Iranians taking Americans hostage, an economic recession, record-breaking inflation, and a Skylab in the sky that was going to crash on our heads any second. 2020 feels like 1979 with a side order of COVID.
gpt
Woah.

Thank you so much for recounting your experience and perspective. this is exactly the kind of answer I was hoping for. It sounds like we have a lot to fight for, but it may be a bit foolhardy to assume things will start to get better soon, but perhaps we can slow the progress of some of the terrible things encroaching.