Europe’s experiencing the longest hot war since World War II. The war in the Gulf seems to be escalating as we speak. Extremism has been on the rise for years now. Is it actually getting worse or is it simply the fact that we can access information from all four corners of the world so easily as never before?
Abundance of news and remember the golden rule. Modern day journalism sacrifices the core principles for more clicks. Doomscrolling makes more money at the end of the day.
“If it bleeds, it leads” is as true as ever
People are conditioned to pay attention to bad news.
It’s a survival mechanism. If you find out there’s lions in the savannah to the left, then you want to know that so you can go to the right, you know?
News organizations profit off of that survival mechanism by constantly telling you that the world is ending so that you keep paying attention to them so that they get ad revenue.
There are bad things going on, but it’s not as bad as it seems.
It’s just the bad gets so much more attention because it is actively being shoved into your face, whether you’re looking for it or not.
It’s the information.
Before, what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you, so, when someone on the other side of the country did something, it would have to be REALLY important for people to talk about it here.
Tv gave us national news, but still, they were limited by broadcast time. Not every little bit of news can fit in a 24 hour day, and they’d have to repeat the important stuff just in case someone wasn’t watching at the exact time it was reported.
Now, there are no limits. Every local drama, every crime committed, every break up and make up, and every plate of food is recorded and immortalized on the Internet.
Statistically, crime is lower than ever, less crimes go unsolved, and more people have more rights than ever before. This world is literally the best it’s ever been, but we’ve also never been exposed to so much injustice before. It’s quite the Faustian Contradiction.
Yes, there was a long period of post WWII stability, though there were still lots of problems including the Cold War that ended by 1990. Then there’s also been a series of slowly escalating Middle East conflicts. I think a lot of people are pointing to that period 1990-2001 or so with no “major” global conflicts happening. But even then, there was genocide in Rwanda. But the information/reporting was less global at the time.
It was always volatile. It’s more volatile lately than 30 years ago, but if you go farther back I don’t think this is unusual.
The shift from paper to digital has caused all news to pass through RAM and CPU registers, thus causing it to become
volatileIt’s multiplied and accelerated, so yeah.
History always had power struggles, empire exploitation, death disasters, etc. but the modern era has significantly expanded on that with the boom in technology and the global population.
Add to the fact that we are digging our own grave in several forthcoming critical problems that the world is already starting to see the effects of.
Abundance. Everything looks smaller in the rear view mirror. As someone who’s been in both decades, it actually feels a lot like the 80s all over again.
I’m unsure but I do know that things seem less bad when I spend less time listening to the news
I think a large part of it is the internet. Like everything else, popularity ruins everything. I grew up with the internet, my family was one of the first I knew with a computer. For a long time, it was fun as fuck, play videos games, post on forums, chat with friends, MySpace, etc…
But over the years it’s become a shell of what it once was. Everything is about engagement, predatory algorithms, ads, fear mongering, censorship, control, bots, etc… Capitalism and greed sunk its teeth into it and ruined it for profit like it does to everything else.
Instead of it being a way to escape and have fun, it’s a place to get depressed, demoralized and preyed upon.
Hol up, I think I’d have heard about a nuclear exchange in Europe
What are you even on about?
I’d imagine the dark ages and the crusades might have been rough. Living thru the black plague too.
I think it seems worse today because everything is so interconnected. And the “base” our world is built on doesn’t seem very stable. So when it rocks back and forth on an unstable base it’s very nerve racking because you honestly don’t know if something will fall over, and take other things down with it.
But honestly, shit like this has always been happening. If humans can find a way to survive in the future, they will. If not, time will keep marching on.
It seems to me that many responses in this thread lean towards oversimplification which in turn garners the most votes.
While these simpler responses contain a grain of truth and that the big picture viewed trough the lens of day to day news might seem elusive; if we look at the evidence it seems we are on the cusp of a demographic collapse in global economy dominated by geriatric capitalist superpowers that lean heavily towards techno feudalism.
Most signs point towards a quite unpleasant next 40 or so years.
If you’d like a data driven analysis with realistic estimates of the likelihood of some things happening in the near future I would recommend intelligence reports, or at least the danish one seems quite well thought out: https://www.fe-ddis.dk/globalassets/fe/dokumenter/2025/-fe-intelligenceoutlook-25-.pdf
Have you considered the possibility it’s both? Yes the world is becoming less stable and less safe, but also, the immediacy of information has also made it all seem much more urgent and close? We don’t live in a closed test environment. Two variables can be moving simultaneously.
Europe’s experiencing the longest hot war since Wordl War II
I believe you that this is true by length of time, but there was a lot of war going on in central and eastern Europe in the 90s.
it’s just the downfall of the west
most of the world is doing better than ever and rising
