Confidence.<p>So many young people are terrified.<p>Scared of commitment<p>They are scared to have kids<p>Scared to drive<p>Scared to cook<p>We do not serve enough tools that build confidence. (2020 didn’t make it easier)
We've always done well as a country when there is something that unifies us.<p>We are slowly braking up into groups and we are losing our common beliefs and therefore the ability to move forward as a group. Fighting each other over relatively minor things is becoming the norm but once we break off from the larger group we start of lose trust on the opposing group and it's harder to re-unite. It doesn't help that now everybody has the ability to magnify their views whether it has merit or not. It's not looking good but we have time to change it.
Technology.<p>With all the talk about innovation and disruption, it seems on many fronts solutions are not getting better and/or more diversified, but exactly the opposite.<p>- You used to be able to get really good mp3 players - now the ones you can buy are really poor products in comparisons, because supposedly, smartphones fill the gap, except they're larger and more cumbersome. No runner will tell you they're better off with a smartphone monstrosity tied to their arm.<p>- Just a few years ago, smartphones came in all sorts of sizes. Now, they're all big. It means for most makes you need both your hands to operate them. There's no diversity in sizing.<p>- Instead of uniformity in tech every company is racing to create a different specs so no hardware can ever work with a competitor's. I have an Apple device full of media I can't transfer onto anywhere.<p>- Open Internet vs Walled Gardens. And every major company, as per N-Gate, is at war with its users.<p>- I cannot see how setting up a personal website today is any easier than it was a decade ago. Meanwhile, Google deprecated Blogger, Medium is increasingly walled-off (see above) and in many parts of the world "The Internet" = Facebook.<p>- Obviously, Amazon. When it comes to buying anything where quality actually matters, you go back to trusted shops. Except we've not got many of them on the high street anymore so...tough luck.<p>- Big Silicon Valley "Disruptive Innovation":
WeWork: make an old business model sexy in an effort to rip off pension funds.
Uber/Deliveroo: a two-sided market place where you rip off ALL service providers.<p>- Searching for stuff online today is a WORSE experience than it was ten years ago - on privacy, on search quality, on trustworthy results (vs camouflaged ads).<p>I'm not a luddite and I also get that with advancement you also lose out on some things. I have been enjoying Amazon delivering stuff, phone cameras have been getting better.
But to a great extent a lot of technology out there is essentially the same or worse than what we had just a few years ago. Big Tech has become huge literally through making progressively poorer products.