Outside the people on HN etc, aren’t people objectively worse off payment wise than in the 80s? Cannot buy houses and having to live with their parents? Sure we live longer and healthier (well, this is also mostly the well off people) and we have tremendous tech advancements, but isn’t everything owned by a few people? I have to pay monthly for my car seat warmer. Movies and music that I bought are removed without me having anything to say about it. Everything is becoming rented and can be remotely terminated.

Even our mental space is occupied by a handful of billion$ companies (and their billion$ owners).

Then AI is changing the outlook for 100s of millions ‘knowledge workers’ and artists as they see what they were educated for or educated themselves with, rapidly become obsolete. Of course many here say that it will make more jobs as it always did; are those better? Will they pay more and have a better work/life balance, or, more likely when looking at the past, will they pay, generally far less and will the companies rich enough to run the AI be the only ones that benefit from that particular revolution, as they do now?

You can deny climate change and pollution as many do, but that is a problem as well which the coming generations can look forward to reap the pain from through disasters and famine. Not you or your kids or friends, but the masses ‘elsewhere’ who are already suffering now from these things.

So when you are young you look forward to having no possessions (everything shall be rented), a burning planet and no or crappy jobs. Throw in a war here and there and the bleak future arrived already for many. Except for a few, like now and many of those are in the HN echo chamber.

And all of this and more is causing a clearly visible mental health crisis all around the globe.

Which parts are distorted?