Think of every day as a tiny knife, stabbing you.

(I forgot who said that in their routine and I don’t want to look it up but it’s somebody. Accordion lady? I refuse)

Good time to unplug.

It’s basically impossible to go out and relax or have any kind of good time when you know you’re probably being filmed from 20 different angles throughout the night, and the cost of any kind of faux pas is that you might get video uploaded to make you a laughing-stock… and that was before the millions of AI surveillance cameras that have like a ~2% chance to hallucinate imaginary crimes and file automatic police reports went up.

But yeah, everything is also really fucking expensive now.

im putting groceries on credit. i had a great credit score till this year, i havent even tried making payments on certain things including ER bills. only a matter of time before im bankrupt, and i am also disabled. i have given up on having a future and I’m only 32.

There’s a whole lot of awful going on.

My dad used to rant about how government should be run like a business, no, no dad, it really, really should not. Businesses do not care about people, businesses don’t want anything but money, your money, and they will twist, turn, manipulate, lobby, and flat out steal or harm people to get it.

So the next time you call 311, the non emergency police line, or God forbid 911 remember, your call is very important to us, a representative will be with you shortly. If you’d like to take a brief survey after the call just stay on the line. If you’d like to talk to our chat bot Sally just say, hey Sally!

Bills went up, pay did not keep up.

It’s both: it’s just you and it’s everyone else. In the modern age, people tend to get overwhelmed by change in their later years. But also, things are getting worse for everyone^[1] under late-stage capitalism.

I’m sure many people can relate. I’m not sure how helpful this is. You sound like you’re not from an area currently in a state of war or suffering from famine. So you’re probably somewhere where you could try to talk a therapist.

They like to say we are doing better than ever because the the numbers and technology are great. Yeah, I might not be starving, but what’s the dignity in a rising tide of techno-feudalism and serfdom? And the technology that, in another society, could have freed us from long hours is instead being used by the ruling class to further exploit us.

You’re correct OP. I think the difficulty of modern times is multifaceted. A lot of other comments here speak to various parts of it these days, but I want to add one I’ve noticed related to this issue.

Pre mid-2000’s, technology worked for us. If you look at the hayday of tech (1980 thru early 2000’s), it seemed like every tech innovation was aimed at the consumer. The tech got better and we did too. The tech worked for us.

Nowadays (and I think I can see all this turning course around the time of the 2008 collapse), tech is not for us. The consumer has become the product, and tech is built around working through us instead of for us. Manipulating us instead of helping us. It sucks.

I have no doubt that if the washing machine was invented today instead of like ~100 years ago, they would be the size of car, and only installed in corporate offices. You’d have to go to an office to get your clothes washed. Consumer-level washers wouldn’t be a thing. They’d tie it to work like healthcare. It seems like no one is interested in making quality consumer devices. The consumer devices we do have are designed to become obsolete quickly without any repairability, so you buy another fast (i.e. all modern cars).

So yea, I think when you add this on top of everything else, it help explains what is amiss with life today. My 2c

Technology has enabled drastic increases to efficiency. Capitalism ensures that the gains of which are expropriated away from the working class and into the hands of the capitalists. Instead of reduced hours, increased vacation time, and higher pay, we’re working longer, taking less time off, and earning less.

I think this is due to increased alienation. We’ve become more isolated and distanced from one another and, more importantly, more distanced from our own creative self. This is what happens when production is largely automated but humans are still involved - we turn into small faceless gears in a big mechanism.

I think a lot of it comes down to paperwork burden. It used to be if you were entitled to something there was an office you could sit down in and they had a responsibility to get you want you needed before you left. Now, they send you home with a link to a webpage that doesn’t work and a million online forms that time out that you have to fill in perfectly or they get auto-rejected.

I’m dealing with this with a work friend who’s trying to apply for medical leave with hostile management. If you can’t count on your immediate boss getting you the paperwork you need in a timely manner without throwing a fit because you’re “trying to get out of work”, it just becomes a million times harder to live a normal life. It used to be that there was a chair somewhere you sat in and could reasonably expect your problems to be solved by the time you stood up again.

I feel the same way, so many things are objectively worse. Cost of living up, government services and safety nets going away, taxpayer money funneled to billionaires, scammers, and wars. Technology is getting more expensive and more invasive. Everything is a scam or a trick now even from previously reputable businesses. The environment is being ravaged and natural resources are being used up and none of the big players doing most of the pollution care, they only care about revenue. Ethics and accountability are down, grift and cruelty are up.

All of the things that were supposed to help us by making our lives easier really helped them and now our lives are harder. I don’t see an end to that.