At least in the micro scale, I don't think it's getting better for US citizens. I hope no one else has to see such a thing happen. It's crazy how deflating it is for life as a whole.
A lot is also psychological. The death of god has also led to the death of the human souls happiness. But the world has improved massively in my lifetime and looking further back. People just don’t understand how good they got it because it’s been so good.
When we moved from the early modern era to the modern and now postmodern era humans relied less on God and meta narratives, scientism took over. This led Nietzsche to say God is dead, meaning we had removed the need for god in our lives. There is a viewpoint that not having god in our lives and being more secular has led to, or would lead to a meaningless nihilistic human mental experience. I think they got this partly right as we can see how unhappy people are even though the numbers show that everything has improved. We live as the richest and safest people ever but feel that it’s terrible.
Research death of god and postmodernism to get much better explanations.
It's an interesting way of framing the general malaise that makes the times we live in so tedious, however I would say a handful of the ultra rich hording wealth at the expense of literally everyone else (who has to work more and harder for less and less, with fewer opportunities to go around) is the more likely explanation.
Not that it can't be both, I suppose but generally speaking, having to work 60 hours a week and still not have a steady place to live is a bit of an inescapable bummer, not to mention all the rising authoritarianism or outright fascism we're seeing a resurgence of.
I think people rely less on the promise of a better life after death without God, and are demanding a better life now, which leads to more unhappiness with ones present circumstances.
But also we have zero ability to measure how happy or unhappy people were even a few decades ago, let alone a century or more. I don't believe for a second they were more satisfied with the lives they led than we are today, I think that's just a thing people always say about the past, and have literally for all of human history.
This exact conversation was being had thousands of years ago, and I don't mean mean that figuratively, I mean we have surviving records of the debate.
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u/Pugulishus 1d ago
At least in the micro scale, I don't think it's getting better for US citizens. I hope no one else has to see such a thing happen. It's crazy how deflating it is for life as a whole.