Despite not subscribing to political communities and having a large number of content filters based on keywords, my feed here is still for a large part all negative articles and ragebait. Elon Musk this and Israel that. Microsoft ruining windows, AI ruining internet, right wingers and capitalism ruining the world, police being racist and shooting innocent people, companies demanding workers into offices, privacy being under constant attack from all sides… And all this despite the effort I go thru to block that from my view. I can only imagine what the unfiltered feed is like.
I get that this is all important stuff but holy shit it’s depressing when that’s all I read here every day. Sure, some of it is legitimately news worthy but lets be real here; much of it isn’t. It’s just to get you riled up and engaging with the post. It’s the exact same thing all major social media recommendation algorithms are doing; feeding you content that causes outrage to keep you on the platform for as long as possible. Do we really need to know about every stupid thing Elon says or every police shooting where the victim is black?
It’s no wonder so many people, especially younger ones feel absolutely miserable from day to day. It can’t be healthy to live like this. I feel like this kind of media diet is pretty much equivalent to eating fast food every single day.
Objectively the world is a much better place than it was even 30 years ago. Child mortality rate, global education, life expectancy, extreme poverty and many more are subjects that have seen drastic improvements and will continue to get better. The reality is, apart from a few cases, that the world is much better than it was and it will keep getting better. And unless a new world war comes in, nothing will stop this progress.
Most of those things were built on cheap oil and a stable climate, which means they were borrowed and now the bill is coming due.
We have to pivot to sustainable technologies ASAP – fighting the entrenched business interests all the way, mind you – or all of those advancements will be lost.
Climate change will destroy our civilisation unless we act quickly enough (and some of the damage is already baked in). So it’s simply not a given that society will continue to get better, that’s really up to governments and their people to make it happen.