I feel the same. It is to the point where I’m disassociating with a lot of what is happening in the world because focusing on it is so dire. Stoicism and mindfulness are my lifelines these days.
I hear this all the time, and it always confuses me. I mean honestly - when would you rather have lived?
My grandparents grew up with one pushbike in the village for all the kids to share, and the tyres had no rubber because of the war. They were malnourished. My grandfather didn't go to school for most of his childhood, because the schoolhouse was a pile of bombed-out rubble. My grandmother never really learned to read and write. That wasn't at all unusual. Today it is.
We never had polio or smallpox or grew up with anyone who did. We take that for granted, but we shouldn't. No humans other than us ever have.
We hear about every shitty thing that happens in the world, but we NEVER hear that the last 30 years have seen by far the greatest exodus from poverty in human history. Or that the hole in the ozone layer has been addressed thanks to international co-operation in banning CFCs. Or that we are far less likely to die as a result of war or starvation or infant mortality than any human generation ever born before.
The great majority of people have always lived in crushing poverty under brutal tyrants. Illiterate and with no human rights, and much worse if you're a woman.
The world's always looked like it's on the verge of disaster. Look at the last century. The two world wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the oil crisis in the '70s, influenza, the Great Leap Forward, the Iron Curtain...... when's it not looked like shit? And I'm just a random peasant, and yet I live like a king compared to any relative of mine who's come before me, ever. ?
??
