Not asking who or what you attribute it to, just curious.<p>I’d say mine is worse, but far up from the darkest times of the last 4 years. And while I don’t know what the future holds, I have a vague optimism that it’ll be better than
today (something I certainly didn’t 4 years ago)
It's difficult to give a blanket statement over it. Some ways are better and some are worse. I wonder if you look at specific parts of your life and compare it to the 'before' whether you'd see some things as better and some as worse?
Worse. The planetary-scale catastrophe is coming towards us. We are far from prepared and aren't taking anywhere near enough action, both in reducing greenhouse emissions and in increasing infrastructure resilience.<p>Effectively every rich person has demonstrated conclusively that don't care for democracy or the well-being of others, while we give them yet more power.<p>The tech field - I started in the personal computing era of the 1980s - has been effectively taken over by three OS companies, all based in the US. National and state governments are walking into a golden trap of Microsoft services. My options of living without a smartphone are increasingly curtailed. Ad-tech and automated surveillance systems are fucking everywhere, and the former is 100% focused on getting us to buy more. "Voluntary" user agreements and permission fatigue are the bane of the modern digital era.<p>Local clubs (both bars and activity-oriented) have mostly disappeared as people stay home glue to their phones, so community bonds have faded away. The shift to apps, and the decontextualizing of labor, mean the only thing people get to decide on is sales price, not quality, nor environmental impact, nor the well-being of the employees.<p>Four years ago was the dark time of COVID, but the first vaccines were on the way, offering a light. We are now even less prepared for future pandemics, COVID or otherwise, as anti-masking has been entrenched as a moral right for some. Furthermore, the pandemic showed our health systems are underfunded and ill-equipped for black swan events, which the recent mpox outbreak reminds us are likely not as rare in the future as we've planned for.