Am I just becoming more pessimistic with age, or is quality of life really getting worse?
January 7, 2026
I’m 35M in the US.
Wondering if some of you with longer life experience can weigh in on if I’m just becoming more cynical and jaded with age, or if everything around us seems to be on the verge of disaster.
38 comments
Probably a bit of both. The world is definitely in the shitter atm
In my opinion, quality of life is getting much worse.
40yo man here.
5 years ago I would have told you to touch grass. Now, I dunno.
The vibe is off. These clowns are talking about stealing land *from an ally?*
Quality of life is, I think, quite clearly getting worse for lots of people in ‘normal’ jobs in most developed/western countries.
It is both. I am old, I know this phenomenon.
Things are on the verge of disaster. I don’t want to even envision what life will be like here six months after we invaded Greenland if our government did that. There were companies that went out of business after the Canada boycotts, and others where it hurt them badly enough that they had to fire people. This would be ten times worse.
Capitalism is really trying to squeeze every last possible cent out of consumers. That’s what’s getting worse.
Technology has reached a point where it has enabled the fun to be sucked out of everything possibly imaginable.
The worst parts of capitalism are now hyper efficient. The worst parts about information accessibility are weaponized against us. The worst parts about brain chemistry are hi-jacked for 1/5 of $0.01.
The hippies were right… go to yoga. Buy a guitar. Smoke weed and hit the bongos. Might feel it for a minute atleast.
Things in general in are getting weirder and harder in a lot of ways. Personally, I am doing better career and family-wise, but I attribute a lot of that to luck and connections. I genuinely feel bad for people who didn’t have the same opportunities I did because things aren’t getting better like most of us like we thought they would.
I think it’s just been a really rough decade for most of us.
I don’t think quality of life is getting worse. But I think it’s the lack of hope that’s making it hard.
I just think social media has an effect of setting unrealistic expectations, which can lead to discomfort given the shortcomings of our own realities.
I do think the current political climate is awful though — at least here in the US. There is palpable tension and we have a state that’s actively targeting its own citizens and its allies. I mean, our leaders actively peddle corruption, hate, and discord and not hope. That certainly doesn’t contribute to a whole lot of hopefulness.
It probably is, but versus what? We may be nearing the end of a historic ~50-100 year run, in only certain parts of the world, a literal blip in time. Maybe things will improve, maybe not. Do what you can to help improve things. And then be grateful for living in times and conditions that would make 99.9% of your ancestors extremely envious. Maybe try to unplug a bit and let go of some of that existential dread weighing down your limited time here.
Well the cost of living has increased pretty significantly these last several years. So that in and of itself can lead to a decrease in the quality of life if your wages haven’t kept up. I’m more jaded and pessimistic in the sense that I see this country going in the wrong direction. Financially I am doing better than ever, but I know there is a lot of people who aren’t. The labor market isn’t great right now. The political climate is very tense. So yeah in many ways, I can see how people can come to the conclusion that the quality of life is declining. The way things are going currently, I could see it definitely getting worse.
Nostalgia is strong. It will always feel like things were better in the past. I’ve felt this way my whole life.
I just feel so anxious with everything going on and I’m expecting a recession any day. I’m not in a terrible place financially but I don’t want to see my friends and families lives fall apart if shit hits the fan.
“The world is changed. I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.”
-The Lord of the Rings
While we technically still have creature comforts and nothing today at this moment feels way different, it’s in the air. It’s a feeling and a foreshadowing that shit is going to go from sucky to fucked real quick.
I remember feeling so hopeful and optimistic pre Trump, but from 2016 on (maybe even 2010 and tea party onward) things have felt like a dream that just gets worse and worse. And you think, any second now I’ll wake up but then it just keeps going and getting worse.
America’s soft power world wide has just been eroded so severely in the past few years that I am seriously stunned. Combine that with the worse parts of capitalism seemingly leaching every red cent I have and things feel low right now.
It’s an odd thing to point to but even what’s happened with college football and the millions people are paying kids, plus gambling being legalized… it feels like we sent the canary into the coal mine and it never came back out. I genuinely feel like we’re all in danger even if it isn’t at our door just yet.
This day and age we’ve got it good. Abundance of food, comfort, communication and health compared to the past. The issue in my opinion is the constant flow of bad news we have access to. Too much connection with the world is starting to seem like a bad thing because I feel the same way you do.
It’s definitely getting harder for a lot of people to make ends meet, so quality of life for those people and society as a whole is going down as a result.
Worse, and you ain’t seen nothing yet. 75 here. Find some money and a good place to ride out the next twenty years.
“America is a loving and generous place if you have money, it’s a rapacious, ugly, and violent place if you don’t.”
I stopped drinking *and* listening to the internet telling me the world sucks. Maybe it does but my little part of it is nice.
I’m in my early 40s and I definitely see a downward trend in a number of areas. Things are better in some ways, yes, but we dropped the ball on keeping the basic needs of life affordable in the States. It’s particularly egregious in big cities.
it is objectively getting worse, even if you forget about the internet
all the physical goods are no longer goods. its some cheap ass chinese taobao stuff in walmart
You must be American. Me too.
I’ve been in the US for 23 years. Lived in several states until I settled in NYC. I lived through seven administrations, three reelected.
It is undeniable that politics got worse. The worst elements are now in charge of the discourse. The assholes are getting all the engagement and today’s blue collar workers just fucking cheer them on. Employers do what they want with you. Every single service is getting shittier and shittier. News is owned by the richest and tells you what they want as the message. And fucking AI is the cherry on top delivering anything from bullshit “art” to disinformation.
I had a fucking DoorDasher tell me the other day that he opposed unions, and then he got back on his bike to brave temps in the 20s for a few dollars.
And now I have to read some fucking moron on this thread saying “politics doesn’t matter to me”.
You know what, serves you right.
No skin off my back. I have savings, I had a successful career and have dual citizenship so I can fuck off. But I feel for the good people caught in this mess. Especially those among us most vulnerable who started the year with no healthcare because of the cruelty of these assholes.
So no, you’re not just becoming more pessimistic.
I’ve been out of college and working for 10 years and my pay has increase 50% since then. But I don’t feel much more ahead than I did at the beginning of that time.
Both. Turn off the electronics from time to time, enjoy the world. I’m 36, I spend a lot of time online, I’ve found I feel best when I take breaks and literally touch grass with gardening
it’s all perspective. be mindful of what you put your focus on in your day-to-day. start taking stock of:
your inner dialouge – pay attention to what you are telling yourself about yourself. how much of what you say to yourself is negative? how much is positive or driven by gratitude?
the company you keep – pay attention to the conversations you have with those people and the way you treat each other. Are conversations focused on complaints and tearing other people down? are the people you surround yourself with supportive, dissmissive, or maybe even spiteful toward you when you share lofty goals or aspirations?
the media you consume – pay attention to how much fear-driven rhetoric you expose yourself to when you’re mindlessly doom scrolling or staring at a screen. Fear is the most effective catalyst in the art of persuasion and influence, and it is propagated insidiously in all forms of media we consume. when people are scared, they don’t think critically. they react defensively and seek comfort in conformity or familiarity.
a snake pit can feel safe if you allow your fear to convince you it is.
self-loathing can be comfortable if it’s the only blanket you have to wrap yourself up in.
hopelessness is seductive when its the only thing you focus on.
I’m trying really hard to convince myself that it’s just social media and a 24 hour news cycle, and that the the world isn’t that bad. Especially because I’m really happy with my place in it.
But growing inequality, the proposed AI apocalypse, subscription instead of own, concentration of power with late stage capitalism, growing political polarisation, climate change, madness of world leaders, social media… I dunno
25M here. I have no idea what it used to be like, but I just graduated college and moved to a new state. I had honors in a computer science degree with two minors in both math and computer systems engineering, and I have project experience ranging from backend design of an audio encryption app for iOS, to developing a ML program that can recognize 7 different facial emotions from pictures of people with about 60% accuracy.
I’m also unemployed and depressed because nobody will hire me. I mean, why would you hire somebody you have to train? That other guy just got laid off, he’s experienced and he needs to support his family. We can just underpay him AND we won’t have to train anybody. Oh and also AI will do the entry-level work. Yeah, we haven’t really thought about 20 years from now when all the senior engineers pass away/retire. The future generation will deal with replacing them.
I feel like a wilting plant, basically. How much do I have to just dedicate my life to applying for jobs until I become too discouraged to continue? I signed up for fuckin DoorDash. I didn’t go to school in a tech field for that long to just DoorDash.
Oh yeah also you’ll have to fill your resume with bullshit words from the application each time or you’ll get automatically screened out for not having them. Oh yeah and half the jobs are fake, we’re just testing the market for this job🥴. What a country man.
The mind certainly gets darker with age due to loss of loved ones, awareness in our surroundings and really beginning to understand people’s intentions with a lot of things, even family members.. it can be saddening, but the trick is to find good books to read that help shape many thoughts and really find something purposeful! Makes life a little brighter.
We’re 10 cost of living increases away from a dystopian future. Things are getting worse by far.
Most people work to pay bills without saving. What happens to the workforce when those people cannot work any more?
There are definitely a lot of negatives right now. If I were younger I’d be very worried about how I’d be able to live a middle-class lifestyle since the middle class is continuing to disappear. On the bright side, less people are dying from Covid and TVs keep getting cheaper.
Happiness follows a U-shaped curve vs age generally.
Wait until you’re 50. The pessimism really sets in.
There is a dip in happiness through the middle of life. I think it’s a combination of everything. There is a lot that we (41m) were expecting when we got to this age that just isn’t happening. Our food is shit and you can’t buy anything without a subscription to keep it going.
It’s getting worse because we are not making it better. We have agreed that fear is a motivation for living. We really believe it’s a dog eat dog world and so we’re worried about getting eaten. In fact, we’re crushing ourselves with our own defeat.
However, hope is a real thing, honesty works, charity helps, and love is the answer. Basic decency provides an ever-increasing quality of life for everyone around. Please read more and play video games less everybody.
Quality of life is absolutely plummeting. You are spot on.
38 comments
Probably a bit of both. The world is definitely in the shitter atm
In my opinion, quality of life is getting much worse.
40yo man here.
5 years ago I would have told you to touch grass. Now, I dunno.
The vibe is off. These clowns are talking about stealing land *from an ally?*
Quality of life is, I think, quite clearly getting worse for lots of people in ‘normal’ jobs in most developed/western countries.
It is both. I am old, I know this phenomenon.
Things are on the verge of disaster. I don’t want to even envision what life will be like here six months after we invaded Greenland if our government did that. There were companies that went out of business after the Canada boycotts, and others where it hurt them badly enough that they had to fire people. This would be ten times worse.
Capitalism is really trying to squeeze every last possible cent out of consumers. That’s what’s getting worse.
Technology has reached a point where it has enabled the fun to be sucked out of everything possibly imaginable.
The worst parts of capitalism are now hyper efficient. The worst parts about information accessibility are weaponized against us. The worst parts about brain chemistry are hi-jacked for 1/5 of $0.01.
The hippies were right… go to yoga. Buy a guitar. Smoke weed and hit the bongos. Might feel it for a minute atleast.
Things in general in are getting weirder and harder in a lot of ways. Personally, I am doing better career and family-wise, but I attribute a lot of that to luck and connections. I genuinely feel bad for people who didn’t have the same opportunities I did because things aren’t getting better like most of us like we thought they would.
I think it’s just been a really rough decade for most of us.
I don’t think quality of life is getting worse. But I think it’s the lack of hope that’s making it hard.
I just think social media has an effect of setting unrealistic expectations, which can lead to discomfort given the shortcomings of our own realities.
I do think the current political climate is awful though — at least here in the US. There is palpable tension and we have a state that’s actively targeting its own citizens and its allies. I mean, our leaders actively peddle corruption, hate, and discord and not hope. That certainly doesn’t contribute to a whole lot of hopefulness.
It probably is, but versus what? We may be nearing the end of a historic ~50-100 year run, in only certain parts of the world, a literal blip in time. Maybe things will improve, maybe not. Do what you can to help improve things. And then be grateful for living in times and conditions that would make 99.9% of your ancestors extremely envious. Maybe try to unplug a bit and let go of some of that existential dread weighing down your limited time here.
Well the cost of living has increased pretty significantly these last several years. So that in and of itself can lead to a decrease in the quality of life if your wages haven’t kept up. I’m more jaded and pessimistic in the sense that I see this country going in the wrong direction. Financially I am doing better than ever, but I know there is a lot of people who aren’t. The labor market isn’t great right now. The political climate is very tense. So yeah in many ways, I can see how people can come to the conclusion that the quality of life is declining. The way things are going currently, I could see it definitely getting worse.
Nostalgia is strong. It will always feel like things were better in the past. I’ve felt this way my whole life.
I just feel so anxious with everything going on and I’m expecting a recession any day. I’m not in a terrible place financially but I don’t want to see my friends and families lives fall apart if shit hits the fan.
“The world is changed. I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.”
-The Lord of the Rings
While we technically still have creature comforts and nothing today at this moment feels way different, it’s in the air. It’s a feeling and a foreshadowing that shit is going to go from sucky to fucked real quick.
I remember feeling so hopeful and optimistic pre Trump, but from 2016 on (maybe even 2010 and tea party onward) things have felt like a dream that just gets worse and worse. And you think, any second now I’ll wake up but then it just keeps going and getting worse.
America’s soft power world wide has just been eroded so severely in the past few years that I am seriously stunned. Combine that with the worse parts of capitalism seemingly leaching every red cent I have and things feel low right now.
It’s an odd thing to point to but even what’s happened with college football and the millions people are paying kids, plus gambling being legalized… it feels like we sent the canary into the coal mine and it never came back out. I genuinely feel like we’re all in danger even if it isn’t at our door just yet.
This day and age we’ve got it good. Abundance of food, comfort, communication and health compared to the past. The issue in my opinion is the constant flow of bad news we have access to. Too much connection with the world is starting to seem like a bad thing because I feel the same way you do.
It’s definitely getting harder for a lot of people to make ends meet, so quality of life for those people and society as a whole is going down as a result.
Worse, and you ain’t seen nothing yet. 75 here. Find some money and a good place to ride out the next twenty years.
“America is a loving and generous place if you have money, it’s a rapacious, ugly, and violent place if you don’t.”
https://preview.redd.it/1kzrpzegpubg1.png?width=2816&format=png&auto=webp&s=c43578618669bb412362b7a44ba92cd5a120f12b
I stopped drinking *and* listening to the internet telling me the world sucks. Maybe it does but my little part of it is nice.
I’m in my early 40s and I definitely see a downward trend in a number of areas. Things are better in some ways, yes, but we dropped the ball on keeping the basic needs of life affordable in the States. It’s particularly egregious in big cities.
it is objectively getting worse, even if you forget about the internet
all the physical goods are no longer goods. its some cheap ass chinese taobao stuff in walmart
You must be American. Me too.
I’ve been in the US for 23 years. Lived in several states until I settled in NYC. I lived through seven administrations, three reelected.
It is undeniable that politics got worse. The worst elements are now in charge of the discourse. The assholes are getting all the engagement and today’s blue collar workers just fucking cheer them on. Employers do what they want with you. Every single service is getting shittier and shittier. News is owned by the richest and tells you what they want as the message. And fucking AI is the cherry on top delivering anything from bullshit “art” to disinformation.
I had a fucking DoorDasher tell me the other day that he opposed unions, and then he got back on his bike to brave temps in the 20s for a few dollars.
And now I have to read some fucking moron on this thread saying “politics doesn’t matter to me”.
You know what, serves you right.
No skin off my back. I have savings, I had a successful career and have dual citizenship so I can fuck off. But I feel for the good people caught in this mess. Especially those among us most vulnerable who started the year with no healthcare because of the cruelty of these assholes.
So no, you’re not just becoming more pessimistic.
I’ve been out of college and working for 10 years and my pay has increase 50% since then. But I don’t feel much more ahead than I did at the beginning of that time.
Both. Turn off the electronics from time to time, enjoy the world. I’m 36, I spend a lot of time online, I’ve found I feel best when I take breaks and literally touch grass with gardening
it’s all perspective. be mindful of what you put your focus on in your day-to-day. start taking stock of:
your inner dialouge – pay attention to what you are telling yourself about yourself. how much of what you say to yourself is negative? how much is positive or driven by gratitude?
the company you keep – pay attention to the conversations you have with those people and the way you treat each other. Are conversations focused on complaints and tearing other people down? are the people you surround yourself with supportive, dissmissive, or maybe even spiteful toward you when you share lofty goals or aspirations?
the media you consume – pay attention to how much fear-driven rhetoric you expose yourself to when you’re mindlessly doom scrolling or staring at a screen. Fear is the most effective catalyst in the art of persuasion and influence, and it is propagated insidiously in all forms of media we consume. when people are scared, they don’t think critically. they react defensively and seek comfort in conformity or familiarity.
a snake pit can feel safe if you allow your fear to convince you it is.
self-loathing can be comfortable if it’s the only blanket you have to wrap yourself up in.
hopelessness is seductive when its the only thing you focus on.
I’m trying really hard to convince myself that it’s just social media and a 24 hour news cycle, and that the the world isn’t that bad. Especially because I’m really happy with my place in it.
But growing inequality, the proposed AI apocalypse, subscription instead of own, concentration of power with late stage capitalism, growing political polarisation, climate change, madness of world leaders, social media… I dunno
25M here. I have no idea what it used to be like, but I just graduated college and moved to a new state. I had honors in a computer science degree with two minors in both math and computer systems engineering, and I have project experience ranging from backend design of an audio encryption app for iOS, to developing a ML program that can recognize 7 different facial emotions from pictures of people with about 60% accuracy.
I’m also unemployed and depressed because nobody will hire me. I mean, why would you hire somebody you have to train? That other guy just got laid off, he’s experienced and he needs to support his family. We can just underpay him AND we won’t have to train anybody. Oh and also AI will do the entry-level work. Yeah, we haven’t really thought about 20 years from now when all the senior engineers pass away/retire. The future generation will deal with replacing them.
I feel like a wilting plant, basically. How much do I have to just dedicate my life to applying for jobs until I become too discouraged to continue? I signed up for fuckin DoorDash. I didn’t go to school in a tech field for that long to just DoorDash.
Oh yeah also you’ll have to fill your resume with bullshit words from the application each time or you’ll get automatically screened out for not having them. Oh yeah and half the jobs are fake, we’re just testing the market for this job🥴. What a country man.
The mind certainly gets darker with age due to loss of loved ones, awareness in our surroundings and really beginning to understand people’s intentions with a lot of things, even family members.. it can be saddening, but the trick is to find good books to read that help shape many thoughts and really find something purposeful! Makes life a little brighter.
We’re 10 cost of living increases away from a dystopian future. Things are getting worse by far.
Most people work to pay bills without saving. What happens to the workforce when those people cannot work any more?
There are definitely a lot of negatives right now. If I were younger I’d be very worried about how I’d be able to live a middle-class lifestyle since the middle class is continuing to disappear. On the bright side, less people are dying from Covid and TVs keep getting cheaper.
Happiness follows a U-shaped curve vs age generally.
Wait until you’re 50. The pessimism really sets in.
There is a dip in happiness through the middle of life. I think it’s a combination of everything. There is a lot that we (41m) were expecting when we got to this age that just isn’t happening. Our food is shit and you can’t buy anything without a subscription to keep it going.
It’s getting worse because we are not making it better. We have agreed that fear is a motivation for living. We really believe it’s a dog eat dog world and so we’re worried about getting eaten. In fact, we’re crushing ourselves with our own defeat.
However, hope is a real thing, honesty works, charity helps, and love is the answer. Basic decency provides an ever-increasing quality of life for everyone around. Please read more and play video games less everybody.
Quality of life is absolutely plummeting. You are spot on.