this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
672 points (95.2% liked)
Greentext
6524 readers
978 users here now
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm hard pressed to point to any ten-year period in which some number of Doomers did not insist The World Is Ending.
Like, take your pick of any ten-year span during the Cold War. That butted right up against the OG World Wars, with a Great Depression breather. Before that you had plagues, famines, and economic crashes that shat all over '08 and COVID.
Westoids live in the wealthiest, easiest, most affluent era of human history. Then someone points out "hey, eating burger every day isn't sustainable" and they conclude the world is over.
decades ago, houses were affordable, college was cheap, Americans weren't crushed under mountains of dischargeable student debt, wealth disparity and effective wages were far better, and we had a far more functional political system.
I can't think of much that hasn't gone downhill since 2016. the world isn't ending, but it's ahistoric to claim that history is the steady march of progress. dark ages happen. empires decline. democracies wither.
America is in decline, yes, but all of those things that america is losing, other countries are gaining. Most countries in the world got better and are still getting better. The first world/america is getting worse, but, as you said, it is just part of the cycle. The world is not ending because US is going downhill.
I agree with the sentiment as to the futility of the doomer/nihilist mindset, being a reformed (or rather, being in the process of reforming) doomer nihilist myself, I know the call of the void all to well. However...
It's not just the USA declining - it's really everywhere. Call it whatever you want, late-stage capitalism, the rise of the techbroligarchy and fascism-adjacent currents, etc...
But there's stuff going on. It's harder to get a job, harder to get an education, harder to earn a living wage, harder to get ahead in general. And it's everywhere.
Yes, these are troubling times for many places since these fascists seem to wal together whenever they show up. But I see a much sharper decline in freedom in the last 10 years. Even so, let's look at other numbers I'll use Brazil as an example: poverty reduce from 68% in 1970 to 10%. There were 450.000 thousand university students in 1970, now 8.4 million. 28% of houses had access to sanitation in 1970, now it is almost 80%.
This improvement happened and is still happening all around the world. We save so many kids lives that we overpopulated the world. We just have to be careful now to not let the assholes undo this