Why does it feel like society is becoming ever more grim and joyless?

In My Humble Opinion
61

Yeah, I’ve been in a new town on assignment since October, and I was talking to one of my friends today and said, “I don’t really need to make friends here…” One of my best friends is my roommate in Chicago (I have an apartment with her there), my gf and I live in Indianapolis, and one of my other best friends I talk to every day on WhatsApp is from and lives in Buenos Aires. Now I’ve spent and continue to spend time with this “crew” IRL, but they pretty much satisfy my ongoing friendship needs even though they are not with me in my current location. Nevertheless, my gf is not with me here, so I am lonely for daily companionship.

Upside: I can survive without making new friends here. Downside: No need to build a network here means I don’t reap those benefits. (I am open to meeting people here, to be sure, and I have at work, but I am not pushed to do so…)

62

I’ll just address the barns. First, a barn is no longer a useful outbuilding on the modern farm, so most have fallen in to disuse. Second, the barn has a huge amount of roof area. The cost of re-roofing a barn can approach $50k. Rather than invest money in a useless building, they just let it collapse.

63

The wooden beams in barns can be repurposed for other purposes and can command high prices if they are in good condition. If you have a barn, do not just let it fall into disrepair. Contact an architectural salvageman and see if you can’t make some money by selling parts of it.

64

I think that’s often true when people get carried away (to me anyway) with gloom and doom. Also as to particular places that are supposedly grim the Bronx in 1970’s was mentioned, but NY (the city) as a whole, movies based on a dystopian NY back then were a sub genre. That’s changed pretty dramatically. Of course people have happy/sad lives in NY and there are particular social and economic issues to be addressed, as always and everywhere but not only various hard facts (violent crime down on the order of 80-90% from the 90’s when it got higher than 70’s) as well as just not being the predominant easy, lazy kind of story to write anymore.

The way ‘forsaken flyover towns’ has become. Again there are hard facts in particular places*, and also hard national facts like rising rate of ‘deaths of despair’ in certain demographics. But…there’s also IMO a good deal of pile-on writing of easy lazy stories and oversimplifications. For example opioid abuse isn’t just about bleak places, but also irresponsible marketing of the drugs to doctors and just bad practice of medicine.

And plenty of rural places are very nice places. I’m from NY multi-generation, but my daughter has lived in two rural towns one in Midwest and now in upstate NY (what people from the City consider ‘upstate’ anyway). The first had some symptoms of the rural malaise and backlash that’s become a standard story (in MN, county with very high % Trump win in 2016, like the vast majority of the geographic area of MN, which went for Clinton fairly narrowly mainly based on the vote in the Minneapolis area). But basically a nice place, reasonably prosperous. The second fits even less well into that story. That area, Hudson Valley, has had poverty in the wake of deindustrialization for a long time, it wasn’t new in 1970. But that’s not really the predominant thing going on now.

As for partisan politics, ‘politics is downstream of culture’. Public policies cumulatively over a long time help form or change the culture, but whoever is in office at a particular time is very likely much more a symptom than a cause of whatever the underlying problems are.

*I watched docuseries on the Flint MI police dept on Netflix, a so-so production overall but one telling stat was semi-accurately quoted: the real version being that median household income there was on order of 80k in 2019 's around 30 yrs ago, but is now it’s in the mid $20’s k. That’s a real change you’d expect to have profound ramifications to the quality of life, and a reason the PD has get by with around 1/3 as many officers with only a slight decline in population (though I believe it’s one of biggest household income drops anywhere in the US).

65

These are good arguments but some things have legitimately gotten worse.

Suicide rates in the US are up. The opiate epidemic is killing far more people than it did in the past (opiates kill more than car wrecks now). Health care is becoming more and more unaffordable. The % of jobs in the economy which are low paying or permatemp jobs keeps going up.

Authoritarianism is on the rise all over the world. Fascism is coming back in Islamic nations, western and eastern European nations. Xi and Putin are cementing their rules. Venezuela, Brazil, etc. We went through a period of democratization and liberalization in the 1980s, then levels of democracy kind of stabilized according to freedom house, now we are going backwards in many ways.

Climate change keeps getting worse. Renewables keep getting cheaper which is good, but they are still a small fraction of energy sources.

As far as cratering birth rates in the west, that seems to be a problem even in western nations with a lot of programs to help out parents. Nations with universal health care, free tertiary education and subsidized daycare are seeing low birth rates too, so I don’t know how much economics plays into it.

I wonder what role 9/11 played, at least in the US. We’ve been at perpetual war for 20 years, and society has become very polarized.

66

I couldn’t agree more. My post describes the subjective reaction of a European to an American reality: the fact that houses worth hundreds of thousand dollars are entirely made of wood, with relatively thin and hollow exterior and interior walls. This is an aspect of the American physical existence that I have become aware of by means of reality TV, which certain posters here claim can never be counted on for showing the truth. My point was that even though one is entitled to doubt the stories, certain images (such as those showing what houses are made of) can be taken for granted.

As soon as I started posting in this thread I stated the fact that I don’t know how the US is really doing and added my guess that its economy must be doing fine while people may have lost their faith in the American dream. My comments focus on what the American mood seems to be like from the limited and fragmentary pictures that I have had access to. These are feelings, and people’s sentiments may or may not reflect reality. For instance, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the US economy was thriving and its military brawn was unparalleled, many working class males and even middle-class youth adhered to the greaser subculture, which was characterized by disappointment about and rebellion against the state of affairs in America.

So this is what I think this thread is all about: mass psychology in the midst of the current American social developments, where there is a possibility that people should experience those “tremendous unnecessary suffering” and “apocalyptic religion and tribalism” you yourself mention.

67

We build our houses differently than you. And for what it’s worth, your brick houses wouldn’t fare too well against a tornado either. Our brick buildings certainly didn’t.

68

First off the exterior walls of stick built homes aren’t hollow. Interior walls typically are but there is very little reason for them not to be hollow. Exterior walls are typically filled with insulation in fact a stick built home with proper insulation will be much warmer than a brick or concrete home. Take a look at some of the nordic nations moving to stick built homes particularly staggered 4" construction methods.

I’ve worked on homes built from the 1950 to modern homes and there is nothing I hate more than working on homes built before building codes were developed. The myth of things being built better is the past is pure crap. The average american home has improved substantially in the last 50 years and from what I can tell anything from the post war boom to the 70s is close to utter garbage. Homes have gotten much better.

Secondly, I’ve been a sidekick on an American reality show on the biggest cable network. What you see is nearly 100% fake. We filmed a driving scene where our producer went around town and paid people to take down their christmas decorations so that the episode would appear to take place in the fall or the spring. We bought out bars and restaurants so we could have private talks in public places. When there are people in the shot they all have to sign releases so their faces can be shown. If you see it on TV there is a very good chance everything is being structured for your entertainment.

69

No? Then again, I’m not super prone to being over-dramatic and thinking every little thing that sucks is the end of the world :rolleyes:

70

Sorry, wanted to edit my post but it timed out. Just wanted to add that, yes, I live in the Midwest, and I have so my entire life. Like always, some people are depressed and struggle, while others are successful and happy, and countless more are in-between. It’s beyond ridiculous to say that the Midwest is more “real” than other areas of the country, or that everyone here is struggling and depressed. Some of us are minorly successful and depressed :smiley: Although it’s something I’ve always struggled with, and I’m not blaming society or the economy or anything else for it.

71

Paradoxically, major depression is more common in high-income countries than lower-income ones. No doubt much of that is due to greater access to medical care, and thus more diagnoses, but I imagine some of it is due to the fact that people in lower-income countries don’t have time or the opportunity to be depressed - they have to work to survive whether they feel depressed or not.

Regards,
Shodan

72

The Trump campaign did something pretty brilliant around where I live. They’d put up large MAGA signs on dilapidated buildings. He really played up to this sentiment. Of course, I doubt that will be a good look this time around, since those buildings are all still there. :smiley:

73

Perfect! All that Dems need to do is add a question mark at the end.

74

Historically low-income folks have had cultural resources that have provided some protection against depression. Religion is a big one, but so is family. Poor folks tend to have close-knit families out of necessity. The downside is that the burden of bad choices tends to be inherited and shared. But the upside is you always have someone to look after you if should need help. All that rugged individualism goes out the window. So does much of the judginess and stigma over failure and low achievement.

Psychologically, it is easier to be low man on the socioeconomic totem pole when everyone you know is right there with you. There is no shame in getting food stamps when everyone you know is standing in the food stamp line with you. You can’t find a job after being laid off or fired? Well, no one in your family is going to lecture you on the poor choices you must have made, since everyone in the family has likely made the same choices you have made. Plus, everyone you know is cynical about financial success anyway. From an early age, you have been taught that the system is rigged against you because of where you come from/what you look like. So when you don’t have much success within the system, you arent’t the least bit disappointed.

Middle-class people can’t fail without enduring a lot of guilt and shame. Some of that is internally imposed, but most of it comes from friends and family in subtle and not so subtle ways.

Sent from my moto x4 using Tapatalk

75

“Ignorance is bliss.” Before the storm of social media and news sites that are looking for as many hits as possible by trumpeting anything and everything grossly spectacular, we simply weren’t bombarded 24/7 by so much negative stuff. In a very real sense, what we didn’t know didn’t hurt us psychologically. Now, if you watch the news 5 hours a day for a week, you’re ready for antidepressants.

76

A strong tornado can easily rip apart brick and concrete buildings. And earthquakes hit brick and concrete buildings harder than wood, their brittleness and mass makes them easier to break. Even a relatively mild earthquake can cause brick walls and facades to just fall apart.

Wood and steel flex under stress; they can withstand stresses that will shatter brick and concrete. Thus wooden and steel frame buildings are often more durable.

77

I know you meant this post to be sarcastic but it is the truth. Yes these are all bad things, but there always have been and always will be bad things. To your list I could counter:

The Civil War, the great depression, slavery, lynching, terrible medicine, appalling conformity, child labor, unsafe food, unsafe travel, Vietnam, and I’m just going to stop here.

Would you rather be a black person now, or in the 50s? Would you rather have surgery now, or in the 50s? Would you rather fly now, or in the 50s?

I’m not a “Techno-utopian” to use your phrase. Mainly because I don’t think that there will ever be a utopia, at least not for many lifetimes. I just don’t see this time as being particularly worse than any other time in American history.

78

This seems to be a lot of rose-colored glasses and selective viewing. To go back in time, there were a ton of decaying buildings back in the 1970s, and a lot more trash on the streets to boot (this was before the major anti-littering and anti-pollution campaigns). The Cuyahoga River fire (in 1969 but that’s close enough) certainly wasn’t a sign of happy, well-put together towns. There was plenty of protesting and rioting, things like the Kent State shootings certainly hit the “grim and joyless” marker for me.

As far as ‘censurious’ nature and people getting arrest, that seems much better to me. Gay bars don’t get raided by police, women who live on their own and have careers don’t get nearly as much lecturing, couples who live together without marriage don’t get the same disapproval, interracial and gay couple can get married without disapproval or arrest, and minorities get arrested for being in ‘white areas’ a lot less than they used to. Getting a job as a man with long hair, a black person without highly treated hair, a woman at all, or anyone with visible tattoos or non-ear piercings is certainly easier now than in the old days. Oh, and pot arrests are way down since a number of states have legalized it or made it fine-only.

While people may not be golfing and bowling as much, the fall off of particular leisure activities isn’t a sign of a decline in society. There are rock climbing places, breweries with games and other events, axe throwing bars, zipline courses, escape rooms, and other newer activities taking over some of that. And my experience is that technology makes connecting with people for social activities vastly easier than in the old days - I can organize a spontaneous get-together with friends through texting that would just not be possible in the old days, and things like meetup and facebook groups make finding activities with shared interests much easier than the old ‘maybe it’s in the classifieds’ days.

What era was this where someone who realized they were gay could consistently count on their network of family, neighbors, and congregation to not abandon them as soon as they came out of the closet? Or is this only for certain demographics?

79

As far as the “European perspective”, I’d like a cite for the claim that it’s common to see heavy activity in restaurants and parks in all towns under 100k people at all hours of the day that don’t have major tourist attractions nearby. My experience in the US (going back to the 1970s) is that (outside of really big cities and tourist attracktions), on weekdays during the school year parks tend to see little activity until school lets out. Restaurants tend to have a lot of people at lunch and dinner time, but if you come in mid-morning or mid-afternoon there will be few people. This isn’t some sign of some kind of malaise but a sign that people have things to do.

And the idea that Euorpean buildings shrug off tornadoes is just silly. I mean, provide a cite if you can, but brick and concrete don’t stand up to direct hits from a tornado, and while there may be some pieces of structure so that you can say ‘the building wasn’t completely destroyed’, you’re still going to have lost your posessions and have to rebuild most of the interior and all of the roof and windows of the house in addition to repairing the outer walls. If you’re having do spend as much to fix a house as you would to just replace it, it’s a total loss either way and there’s no practical difference.

80

There was an multiple threads discussing this topic. I find it amusing that Europeans are so shocked by the ubiquity of wooden-framed homes and have a tendency to assume they are all cheap and flimsy because of it :). Not the case, needless to say. Masonry and brick isn’t necessarily superior - certainly not out here in earthquake country.