I know this point was just thrown out there, but this is a great example of the problem. Fuel economy for cars has almost doubled in the last 50 years, plus cars are a hell of a lot less maintenance intensive than they used to be. Not to mention that air travel is much more affordable today, meaning that people don’t have to drive 2,000 miles to go see the Grand Canyon; they can fly. Gasoline consumption going down (if that’s true) is only a bad thing if you cherry-pick the reasons why it is bad.
Looking at a statistic like the one you proposed and concluding that people must be poorer and unable to travel as in previous years is exactly the problem that the OP is talking about.
This is an inescapable facet of human nature. We will tend toward traditionalism, youth is prefereable to age, we’ll tend to see our own past under good lighting. In reality, life has always been getting better over time in many ways. We started out naked and bashing lizards with rocks to stay alive. Everything has improved since that time, and will continue to, hopefully. But it hasn’t been a smooth upward trajectory the whole time. People who have seen better economic times may focus on the current situation instead of considering the continuing improvements in health care, technology, and other benefits of modern life. A generation raised in this bleak economy may see the future as one of great improvement according to the current metrics, but find themselves battling natural disasters related to climate change. We could have a prolonged period of peace, or war could break out on a new scale. Still, humankind will probably be better off 100 years from now, 1000 years from now, and on into the future. And there will still be people talking about the good old days.
Something I see that I wonder if is good or not is ones ability to maintain a clear sense of identity. New discoveries come harder and fewer of us are attaining a level on technical ability where we are really capable of comming up with something new. It seems it is easier now for children not use their imaginations. Creativeness is somewhat stifled. The playing field is growing larger all the time possibly leaving a larger group feeling less adequate. I think emotionaly we have evolved to cope more in a village like society even though we have adapted well it seems that we are now trying to carve out a niche in a much larger pool.
I would say that whether or not gasoline comsumption has gone down, it’s far easier to travel now than it was decades ago. I mentioned earlier how much better life is now than it was in the 70s. This is an example of that.
In the 70s we lived a few hundred miles from my grandparents. When we visited them we drove or took Greyhound. Flying would have been an incredible extravagence.
Today we live a few hundred miles from my parents. Although we sometimes drive, we fly quite often, especially if we’re just going for the weekend. It’s easily affordable.
This has been an ongoing problem throughout all of human history. Every generation believes it is in the worst possible generation, and it views all previous generations through rose-colored lenses. Check out some of the writings of past generations, anywhere in the world. Everyone complains about how things are going downhill and life wasn’t so bad in the past.
It stands to reason America would become poorer as countries that had been poor become wealthier. This is consistent with the notion that, on a global scale, things are getting better. Things are averaging out. Isn’t it great!
Perhaps it doesn’t stand to reason. In fact, all that we know shows that this isn’t true. The standard of living is improving in the U.S. just as it is improving in poorer countries. Their wealth helps form new markets for exports. A rising tide lifts all boats.
Matt Ridley likes to write about this subject, how things have improved drastically but we really don’t realize or appreciate it.
For one thing in our evolution focusing on the negative supposedly provided an advantage. Someone who ignored the negatives ran more risks, so there is arguably a pessimism strain in us.
Not only that but the things that truly make us happy aren’t material and status oriented like our education or how much gasoline we use. Generally those things are meaningful personal relationships, an authentic life, meaningful work, the chance to learn and grow, self acceptance and self compassion, community, faith, etc. Those things haven’t been getting better, if anything they are arguably worse than in the past (the book bowling alone addresses this, but I haven’t read it).
I would say the reduced gasoline use has a lot more to do with our cars being more efficient than us traveling less. I use much less gas per km than I did 20 years ago and I drive a 6 yr old minivan. Those with truly efficient cars would push the numbers down even further.
Most of us, when we were kids, were less aware of things like crime and unemployment than we are as adults. That makes the time when we were kids seem like it had less of those things, even if it actually didn’t.
Yes. Negative news gets people to watch the news, read online articles, or buy newspapers. Positive news, not so much. Which do you think the media is going to emphasize? Media companies are businesses, and, like all businesses, are interested in getting more people to use their product.
Catering to your audience’s psychological biases, like the one mentioned above, is also a way to get people to watch your news program or read your articles. People like being told they are right.
There is also more awareness now of some hazards than there was in the past.
Take lead paint. We know now that lead paint is dangerous. But there are many people still alive who remember a time when we didn’t know that lead paint was dangerous. Or trans fats. A lot of us remember a time when trans fats were not something we worried about eating. Lead paint and trans fats were dangerous before we knew they were, but we weren’t aware of those dangers, so we didn’t worry about them. That makes the world seem like a more dangerous place than it was. It feels like there’s a new problem to worry about, when in fact what has happened is that we know about a problem that we weren’t aware of before.
I got to see this when I stopped eating fish that are high in mercury when I got pregnant. I heard a lot of “Well, we never worried about that in our day” from older relatives. There was mercury in fish in those days, and it was just as toxic then as it is now, but what there wasn’t was widespread awareness that this could be a problem for pregnant women.
Perhaps not quite what the OP was about, but it made me think of one episode of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica:
It’s after they’ve discovered that “Earth” is an uninhabitable nuclear wasteland. Now they’re hoping they can survive long enough to find anywhere even marginally habitable. They’re eating algae, the ships are breaking down, they barely have air to breath. And several characters flash back to life in the Twelve Colonies, and how their petty personal problems seemed so important at the time. I don’t know if it’s how the writers intended it, but my impression was “they were living in paradise and they didn’t even know it”.
I think that potentially, yes the average first-world citizen is living the dream. As long as they have a job and enough money/sense to pay their bills. Nice house, good car, good job, food in the refrigerator, huge stores full of goods to buy. When food and shelter are covered and you don’t live in fear, anything else above that is just gravy.
Even the USA can be a depressing place, I wouldn’t want to live in a crowded crime-filled urban area, but many people don’t seem to mind it enough to get out. To each his own. And there is so much news that concentrates on the negatives that it would be easy to get depressed about the big picture when what is being reported is really a minor part of overall conditions/events.
But yes, potentially if everything goes right, we are living the dream and there are a lot of us, probably more than any other time in history.