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Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:29:35 [Preview] No. 6325
Do you feel the "Collapse of the West" sentiment, le decadent anons?

Steven Pinker praises Our World In Data and tells us it's the best time to be alive. In the meantime, highly developed countries have skyrocketing depression and anxiety rates, addictive technologies make people miserable and socially isolated, sense of meaning is being replaced with jaded nihilism, tribes are more tribal, and genders hate each other. This is not necessarily contradictory: the world may be improving as a whole, but individual experiences of Westerners may get worse.

Having said this, I still think I'm missing something important to understand the complexity of the problem and adjust my expectations. Enlighten me.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:29:54 [Preview] No.6326 del
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>tribes are more tribal
Are they?
My smallish country used to have three or four almost explicitly enumerated tribes: protestant, catholic, socialist and (classical) liberal.
There's a neat table on Wikipedia. Each tribe had its own political parties, its own broadcasting services, its own unions, and so on. My grandpa was considered weird for going to a protestant barber despite being catholic.
They're gone now. The rough shapes remain, but I wouldn't have known it was anywhere near this intense without anecdotes from family and history lessons.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation)
The US is not the same. Maybe tribes are getting more tribal there. But that might very well be contingent, orthogonal to anything happening to "the West" in general.

Possibly you're overfitting to the US and/or the internet.



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