cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/30211126
Author is: Cities By Diana. There are some urbanism themes.
Video description:
We are in a recession. The indicators are everywhere. Bad vibes, rage bait, AI generated slop content filling our for you feeds. Some may debate whether or not we are actually in financial recession, but there’s more to this recession than economic indicators. We are in a romance recession, an empathy recession, a creativity recession, a sincerity recession, a friendship recession, a vibes recession.
There’s this feeling that you can’t say or do the things you used to without being censored, or worse being called CRINGE. Everyone around you is busy, stressed, overwhelmed or generally disengaged from life. The quality of everything has reduced - products break sooner, food tastes worse. Every app has enshittified and become flooded with advertisements and negativity. entry-level jobs requiring years of experience, multiple rounds of interviews that if you even get through it all you get a lowball offer.
Dating apps have killed the traditional ways to find love and romance, and those have enshittified to the point where they are unusable, any alternatives like meeting people in the real world now seem more difficult than ever with the loss of third spaces and car-centric design of cities in the west, places where people do gather requiting a substantial purchase simply to exist in public life. Any time you leave the house it feels like you spend a hundred dollars or more.
We’ve been told for the past couple of years that the economy is booming, unemployment is at an all time low, we have the entire sum of everything ever known in the palm of our hands.
Yet we are all tired, lonely, broke, afraid or unable to do anything. Comments sections online are full of arguments, even on morally or politically neutral topics. We misunderstand each other, often deliberately. Some of us spend more time talking to ChatGPT than we do our own friends and family members. We are the most comfortable, most technologically advanced and most well educated generation in human history - yet we are miserable, lonely and stuck in a recession deeper than just economic. We are in a recession of the heart and mind.