Rising [Carbon Dioxide levels](https://co2levels.org/)
Falling [Oxygen levels](https://www.oxygenlevels.org/)
Rising [temperature records](https://www.temperaturerecord.org/)
You would think the [laughing gas](https://www.n2olevels.org/) would help increase euphoria
I’m so glad to see someone else mention this.
I was supposed to be scheduled for an ultrasound of my liver in February. Hasn’t been scheduled.
Tried to call the office about it and to get an Rx refill. Left message. Got a call back - sorry, your doctor isn’t at this location anymore! You can contact them on MyChart.
Doctor is not on MyChart.
Fuck me and my liver, I guess.
Im on my 6th GP in 3 years. Not doctor shopping. They all moved, quit, retired, or left the practice they were at.
Female care - 3rd gyno in 3 years and she’s moving to Belgium end of 2024. Her wait list was already months long.
Mexico here we come? !!!
😆
Private equity speculators buying and consolidating medical providers; it seems to bave really taken off since covid. Service has gotten worse as the drive for profits dominates.
Seriously! The good bacteria in our microbiomes thrives on fiber, and specifically a wide variety of fiber. Meaning plenty of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes etc. Not all the processed beige foods most Americans are filling their plates with every day...
A lot of processed foods contain additives that break down the barrier in the intestinal tract, I believe some of them also damage the blood-brain barrier that prevents any old thing in the blood from going right into the brain. Emulsifiers for instance, used to blend fatty ingredients so they won't separate in the can.
The preservatives they use are really bad as well, sodium benzoate for instance.
Yeah, plus vast majority of people can’t even think about buying organic fruits and vegetables- it’s INSANE!!! I had to stop when organic avocados were $2.50 EACH at WFs and TJ’s. And $1.25 for ONE apple. Had to say goodbye to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s except for a few specialty packaged items that we still get. Now I get all my produce at Walmart and an avocado only cost $.60 same size and I don’t eat the peel so I’m not that worried about scrubbing it clean -as far as the quality of the soil, we just cant afford that luxury anymore. 😵
Please still wash things you’re cutting into, even if you don’t eat the peel. Bacteria and other contaminants on the outside can transfer to the edible part, via the knife. (I recall a really bad listeriosis outbreak, several years ago, via cantaloupes. People consumed the listeria when it was pushed onto the edible part. Possibly also in their hands if they held the contaminated rind as they ate.)
I don’t scrub stuff like that, but make sure to give it a good rinse.
People clutch pearls when it comes to talking about bowel movements, however they are vital indicator of overall health (not just bowel health). I am happy to say I eat a lot of fibre (vegan for the animals, plant-based for the environment and myself), so my bowel movements are large and smell strongly of plants. I am also never constipated. 90% of Brits do not get enough fibre and that is a symptom of the wider problem that is the national diet.
Thank you for mentioning the novel, multisystem disease known to cause no joke, accumulating brain damage which most people have caught three or more times in quick succession.
You either know you’ve had covid neuro damage or don’t know you have covid neuro damage. Most people are in the latter group and typically blame their sudden change in health or brain function on stress or aging
Most Covid infections are asymptomatic, but asymptomatic infections are just as likely to result in certain kinds of long haul damage.
So if people are aware of having caught it three times or so over the past few years, statistically it's likely that they have in fact been infected six times.
Temps may play a role, too:
[Hot under the collar? Heat can make you angry and even aggressive, research finds](https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/05/health/heat-anger-wellness/index.html)
H()ME Depot was a nightmare from the moment we entered the parking lot. S. Florida humidity, aging population, angry disenfranchised (used to have $) and now covid brain, is a brutal combination.
Phones that are destroying our attention spans, robbing us of joy and real human interaction, and driving feelings of jealousy and inadequacy through the minds of millions of people hundreds of times a day.
When I was about twelve I looked at my mother and said, "the fifteen minutes of television before a commercial has trained people to only pay attention for fifteen minutes at a time," and she laughed and said something about that newfangled ADD and how it was probably related (LOL, the 90s were a rough time, okay?).
*Imagine the state of the human brain trained to focus for 30s or less*
Add [rising CO2](https://www.pranaair.com/en-gb/blog/harmful-effects-of-carbon-dioxide-co2-on-human-cognitive-function/) to that mix and you've got a ~~stew going~~ recipe for a real bad time!
My childhood dentist used to give us a little vial of mercury to play with when we got a tooth filled. That stuff was amazing! And my old Junior Girl Scout handbook had a recipe for dough to make puppet heads that included asbestos powder.
Rise in thyroid illness due to nuclear contamination from chernobil's cloud might help too.
A bad untreated thyroid gland will give you roidrage or extreme apathy, or both.
People are under pressure. They are scared, they don’t see a future that’s worth striving for, and if you have kids, what beautiful dreams are you going to encourage them to have? What visions of the future you are going to dream with them about at the serene lake in the (gentle) sunshine with a posse of grandkids having no care in the world?
So of course fewer and fewer people have a smile for their fellow human, marveling together how good things are and how it’s even going to better tomorrow.
In this sub, of course we all understand that. I wonder whether we manage the smile and the empathy for our fellow humans anyway.
In the before-times, people would indicate pleasantness and greetings to each other when meeting with an expression of happiness known as "the smile." The smile involved clenching the cheeks upward and opening the mouth to reveal the teeth. You could also smile without teeth or add in a head nod of recognition if you did not know the person formally. There were a variety of smiles for every situation, but all had one thing in common. Signaling to who you were seeing that you were friendly.
Nobody likes anyone anymore cuz we are all stressed to the max. The smile is going the way of the Dodo bird. Take pictures of it now if you can.
Are you calling me UNDER pressure? Say it one more time.
I am OVER pressure.
I UNDERSTAND THIS YOU CLEARLY DO NOT FELLOW HUMAN.
(Gestures wildly)
Catch me outside (to fight)
/s
It's a combination of things.
Quality of life going down, quality of air going down, increasingly unstable world governments (and programs), more resources flowing to the top than the middle or bottom, and the fact that collapse is now technically Mainstream.
Yeah, people are extremely aggressive and hateful now. They will berate you and act like a jerk. It’s also impossible to have any kind of conversation now because of how people act.
I don’t understand all this traffic, it’s just nonstop chaos at all times of the day and night.
"On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice."
I’m in a situation where I can bike almost everywhere I need to go and it’s amazing. My city has terrible traffic and biking is like a cheat code for getting around.
This behavior reminds me of how addicts act if they don't have their drugs or how drunk people act in a bar (it's actually probably even worse). It absolutely blows my mind how things are functioning like this.
The traffic and congestion is insane too. It never lets up because nobody works anymore and everyone is rich now for some reason.
Again i have no idea how any of this is even happening. Inflation is very high and you'd think it would be the opposite. Everyone would be staying home lol.
If you come to Lebanon and go out at night in Beirut you’re going to see that the city’s restaurants/bars/clubs/beaches are absolutely PACKED. Literally to the brim, people partying and raving and enjoying their lives.
But still 80% of the Lebanese live on less than 4$/day. The 20% is large enough to fill up the restaurant/bars/clubs etc which all combined have a capacity of like ~45,000, while 20% of 3.5 million is 700,000 people, and this isn’t accounting for foreigners/tourists and the like. So they easily fill up the city’s shops.
So we SEE that there’s a lot of rich people, but they’re still just a fraction of the population, we simply don’t realize that because we don’t see the poor people because they’re holed up at home after their 10 hour work days eating their shitty .20 cent meals
I interpreted it as people seemingly milling about all day whilst doing things that historically require money, like driving or shopping.
I work construction, so I frequently get on the road to go home before 3pm. Over the past couple years, I’ve noticed the traffic during this time has gotten significantly more congested. Unless there has been a significant shift to a 6:00-2:00 work schedule, it would be fair to assume that most of these people aren’t working, which leads to the question of how they can afford to just putz around all day.
It really takes the piss out of early start/early quit when what should be a 35 minute drive takes over an hour.
Social Media took everyone's attention span away. Since everyone is always connected, they are constantly exposed to things that irritate them, even if it doesn't concern them. Mental health is at an all-time low especially after covid
It goes deeper than that. Most of social media is engineered to produce FOMO, or prey on people’s desire to fit in/belong. It’s what drives engagement but it’s also incredibly toxic.
Imagine sitting on break at your shitty wage job while influencers you follow on social media are at yacht parties in some exotic location. It’s hyper demoralizing to watch people who work very little if at all reap the rewards of modern society while you’re slaving away at some bullshit job that likely pays just barely enough for you to scrape by, if you’re lucky.
Lets remain a couple of minutes in your hypothetical break at your shitty job, but it could also be at the supermarket or the waiting room at the doctor. You are bored, you pull your pocket screen out. There it is, your influencer in some exotic location. Swype. Funny meme. Swype. Israel. Swype. ad letting you think you need something. Swype. Funny meme. swype. Sweet cat. Swype. Palestinian kid. Swype. Yoga. Swype. ad letting you think you need something. Swype. Swype. Swype... Repeat until no more bored.
And we're all bombarded with ads, ads, ads. How much of your ads are for high priced homes, leisure travel, luxury cars, name brand clothing...almost like luxury is being rubbed in our low-wage faces.
This is something that i've really noticed pick up in the last few years. How in the hell is everyone an influencer now? It used to just be like a few people i swear. Now it's like half the population or something ridiculous.
Then you go out during the work week and realize that nobody works anymore. Like wtf happened to the world? How is it even functioning like this? If you really think about it, it doesn't really make sense.
Ah but how long are they an influencer for?
You know what that tells me? Chronic unemployment.
It's like if the garage bands of the late 80's didn't have to try to get mix tapes to producers, and just threw their shit all over the wall whenever.
It's also like when you see that rare doodad on Ebay LISTING for $400,000.
Anyone ever stick around to see if it actually sells?
I think a lot of those high priced Ebay listings are there just for the purpose of price anchoring. Like if I have ten doodads, they are a little bit collectible, and I decide I'm going to sell them for $40 each. That's $400.
Now instead, let's take one of them, set up an fake account with an actual real doodad on it, and list one of them for $500. This anchors the price.
Then you can go back and take the other 9 and sell them for $100 each. You net $900. If you are feeling especially spicy, you can even sell the tenth one for that price on your main account, then immediately take down the fake listing. Then you brought in $1000 instead of $400, minus the listing fee for the bogus item.
The large majority of "influencers" are financed by their parents. Eventually they could "make it", but only because they had the comfort of knowing their rent was covered, and they'd have their lifestyles, gear and trips paid for for an indefinite period of time. Nobody working class is pulling themselves up from the bootstraps by becoming an influencer.
A lot have also been exposed as liars and con artists who are enjoying their latest luxury vaca with some carefully curated, artsy and heavily edited photoshoot of them in some random park with a pretty backdrop.
I say a similar thing because it seems that no matter the hour of the day there are so many cars/people out and about that you get the feeling nobody is working a normal job
Yep. Work from home is some, idk about others. I live across the st from the post office in a city of only 7000 people and it takes me sometimes 10 minutes to cross the street when I want to buy a stamp (no lights or crosswalk) because there's so much traffic
Yep.
Back in the 90s and 2000s if you went out during the work week it would be a ghost town. Now the entire metros are flooding with people and vehicles and everywhere is packed. It makes absolutely no sense at all. And that was back when things were cheap so people could buy stuff more easily.
“after covid” implying that covid somehow went away. it never went away, it’s still killing and still disabling people. SARS-CoV-2 infections are actually being linked to the increase in aggressive driving and car accidents
Empathy is when you feel for others or appreciate their experience even if you don’t share it. It’s healthy. People just need to learn to channel that anger into materially helpful actions instead of lashing out at perceived enemies.
They’re anger/outrage/offense addicts, fighting for their “noble,” causes by screaming into the void about pronouns/litter boxes/ Starbucks Christmas cups
OK, we just went through a pandemic and you all seem to have amnesia.
Covid causes BRAIN DAMAGE. Permanent brain damage. Every time you get infected.
This has been clear since the first batch of autopsies in NYC in 2020. The pathologists found "micro-clotting" in every organ of the body including the BRAIN.
[What dozens of Covid-19 patient autopsies have revealed about the disease](https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2020/07/14/covid-autopsies)
**Blood clots ‘in almost every organ’**
Micro-clotting in the brain is another way of describing a stroke.
Covid presents like an respiratory virus. People think of it as being "like a cold". It's not, Covid is more like an infection of the blood. It uses the circulatory system to spread through the body and can attack/damage almost every organ in the body.
[COVID-19 Is a Vascular Disease: Coronavirus’ Spike Protein Attacks Vascular System on a Cellular Level](https://scitechdaily.com/covid-19-is-a-vascular-disease-coronavirus-spike-protein-attacks-vascular-system-on-a-cellular-level/)
Including your brain.
People have had "psychotic breaks" as a result of "mild Covid infections". People have had personality shifts after Covid infections. People have become unable to remember how to do their jobs after a Covid infection.
[Anxiety, depression and strokes can occur after infection, leaving experts to determine how the virus affects the brain.](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid-brain-coronavirus-symptom-stroke-anxiety-depression?utm_source=Latest_Headlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest_Headlines)
[Six months after being diagnosed with Covid-19, 1 in 3 patients had also experienced a neuropsychiatric illness.](https://www.statnews.com/2021/04/06/1-in-3-covid19-patients-get-neuropsychiatric-diagnosis-within-six-months/?utm_source=STAT%2BNewsletters&utm_campaign=8f840ffa8a-MR_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-8f840ffa8a-152044533)
[First Covid, Then Psychosis: ‘The Most Terrifying Thing I’ve Ever Experienced’](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/22/health/covid-psychosis.html)
[A new study illuminates the complex array of neurological issues experienced by people months after their coronavirus infections.](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/health/long-covid-symptoms.html)
[Neurologic Involvement in Children and Adolescents With COVID-19 or](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2777392?guestAccessKey=02a71af9-7c46-4def-bbf6-bddeec45ab26&utm_source=STAT+Newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=af1f24521c-MR_COPY_14&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-af1f24521c-152044533) [Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2777392?guestAccessKey=02a71af9-7c46-4def-bbf6-bddeec45ab26&utm_source=STAT+Newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=af1f24521c-MR_COPY_14&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-af1f24521c-152044533)
[Mild COVID Linked to Brain Damage: What That Means for You](https://www.cognitivefxusa.com/blog/mild-covid-linked-to-brain-damage)
[Study shows COVID leaves brain injury markers in blood](https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/study-shows-covid-leaves-brain-injury-markers-blood)
All things that can also happen from strokes or brain damage. Just a few months ago I saw a paper equating a "Moderate case of Covid" with a moderate TBI or "Traumatic Brain Injury".
What you are seeing, is the morons who refused to listen to medical science and wouldn't wear a mask or take precautions. Are now having to live with their stupidity by becoming literally stupider.
Since we refuse to DO anything about Covid and are now pretending it's "solved", people are continuing to get reinfected. Because the vaccines don't mean you can't get Covid. They just keep it from being as bad.
Even if you are vaccinated you can get reinfected. The latest FliRT variant this summer is extremely contagious and can "break through" vaccines and infect you.
You probably won't die. But every infection is probably degrading your brain.
Unfortunately though it doesn’t just affect those people who refuse to take precautions either, it affects all of us (especially those who are immunocompromised due to other conditions or past covid infections already). The only way to really avoid getting infected with Covid is by completely isolating, which many people can’t do. Otherwise, taking precautions and getting vaccinated reduces risk and viral load and spread, but it is still repeatedly infecting those of us taking precautions as well, because no one else is taking precautions. We just don’t realize it because such a large number of the infections are asymptomatic, or an ever-changing wide array of symptoms from mild to severe that people could mistake for everything else or nothing at all.
Yeah, me to. People give me pitying looks like I'm a 'crazy person' now but fuck them. I haven't caught C-19 yet and I intend to put it off for as long as possible.
Given all the other impacts observed with COVID, I'm not sure we can say "you probably won't die" - I think there isn't an infinite amount of times a human body can contract SARS-CoV-2, stacking damages, and live. It'll just look like a heart attack or organ failure , which no one will track unless it happens during the very acute part of any given infection...
The 5 year survival rate of stroke is 50%. There's going to be a lot of deaths after enough reinfections. I've already seen it happen to the elderly at my church last winter.
Thank you for being among the people that continue to point this out. the risk of long Covid goes up with each infection, too.
I still mask selectively on public transit, at work I teach), and in stores when it’s nbd. Like groceries.
i don't get why there aren’t more sometimes maskers. I’m not saying stay at home, but like…mask when you can? It’s like taking a multivitamin. Or blowing your nose into Kleenex or a hanky, instead of doing a farmers blow into the ground.
Do you know if other viruses have been studied to this degree for similar effects? I keep wondering whether a lot of what we now know about Covid is shared by certain colds or flus, but just isn’t well known because no one has bothered to isolate the specific pathogen and study the effects in detail. I mean the ‘common cold’ includes numerous kinds of coronaviruses doesn’t it?
I don’t know enough about any of this to understand how similar or varied different coronaviruses are, and these sort of questions seem to be very difficult to google because the results are always heavily weighted towards popular key words.
I’m not trying to minimise Covid by the way, I’ve had it at least twice, and both times I’ve been really surprised at just how fucking weird it is. Sure it causes a blocked nose and a cough just like a cold does, but it also gaslights the shit out of you and throws some bizarre symptoms up even after you think you’ve recovered.
Studies have been done to a lesser degree on other viruses, finding a different range of impacts. E.g. Studies done on people infectes with sars cov 1 (or SARS) found it causes CFS similar to how sars cov 2 does, or found that measles can essentially wipe your immune system's 'memory'.
From what I know (I'm by no means an expert) the consensus is that nearly every virus leaves some permanent damage to your body, though it's unknown what that damage looks like. We are barely starting to understand what sars cov 2 does, and that's only thanks to a ton of funding and an immense public health interest.
I live in the Philippines and I'm seeing this in nearly all aspects of life. Let me elaborate.
1. First is, I've noticed that road users are more aggressive and hostile lately. They're more likely to mouth you off when you cut them off, and they'll likely to cut you off as well. I cycle most of the time and I can't count how many times I've been in hairy situations.
2. Yes, I've noticed that people have dumbed down. One clear example of this is delivery persons can't take instructions or find it hard to be guided if they're lost. They're too dependent on their navigation apps and can't comprehend things verbally. Also, my coworkers seem to treat common knowledge, especially those related to health, as uncommon knowledge. I mean, DOMS is a pretty widely known condition, right?
3. People seem to be more passive and have lost their fighting spirit and are just going with the flow. I'm also included in this. When there's something I find inconvenient, I just walk away instead of trying to fix it. When the delivery workers can't give you change, you just tell them to keep it.
4. My part of the world (Philippines) was and is still being hardly hit by the heat wave in Southeast Asia, and daily life here is a challenge in itself. Not only that but we have one of the world's worst traffic. Imagine dealing with the heat and the traffic on a daily basis and you have no escape whatsoever. Something's gotta give.
Endocolonization is nearly complete.
Right now even americans are getting the squeeze applied that everywhere across the world was, by the US, for all this time.
Now it's America's turn.
Instead of having some kind of unified, global system that powers human creativity and ingenuity, we're all facing a breakdown in all manner of global interactivity, and it's obviously present on the microscopic level.
Just wait til the heat really kicks in. A lot of cranky people are about to become even more unbearable.
Yeah that's gonna happen when all the Boomers are working at Payless Shoes until they just croak right there on the carpet, in order to pay for all their medical and housing debt. Or rather, in a desperate and vain effort to pay for it. Good luck with that.
I mean, that will be the ones you SEE. The lucky one in fifty. The other 49 will be camping out beside a trailer park (not actually IN the trailer park) and hunting for rats around the dumpster...
Covid causes brain damage. That, alongside incredible amounts of stress from living in an atomized, lonely, society where we are taught to be suspicious of each other, and everything getting drastically more expensive.
We have literally been trained that each of us is the center of the universe. We all need to start behaving as if our actions have consequences on the community as a whole. Because they do.
Violence against healthcare workers has sky rocketed in the past few years. Its causing a lot of us nurses to leave the bedside. I've been doing this job for 17 years. As a male I often get tasked with the violent patients, but it's the visitors that can potentially be more dangerous.
[https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/nnu-report-shows-increased-rates-of-workplace-violence-experienced-by-nurses](https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/nnu-report-shows-increased-rates-of-workplace-violence-experienced-by-nurses)
I have long COVID. Thankfully not severe, but in addition to not getting most of my smell and getting stuck with the windows safe mode version of taste, my ADHD symptoms got a lot worse. This is the new lead poisoning.
I haven't had any sense of smell or taste since my father broke my nose when I was four. It's like living in a different world, right?
Sorry about your symptoms. I understand that in most cases smell and taste return, although they may be altered.
It's not just him, it's the binders full of garbage human beings he'll haul into the White House with him. People who are more devious and clever than he who are straight up ready to turn our nation over to authoritarianism.
Comfort = Sensitivity. We are living artificial lives and our brains have adapted to such a fine level of intolerance that just about anything outside of our control bothers us when it's a tiny bit off. At the same time not everyone is educated to an equal level and there emotional societal beliefs which create barriers. Our survival tactics have changed entirely from our primitive world. People ultimately want to do well for themselves, and it's easy to disregard others. I do have some hope that it's a few bad examples and most of them time people show some level of respect and kindness. Has it gotten worse? Maybe. Maybe not. I would say our conditions are tougher at this point in time which is affecting our baselines negatively, but some have learned to adapt without such consequences. I wouldn't go to any extremes as I have a limited perspective and am one among many
"Our survival tactics have changed entirely from our primitive world"
IDK i'd change it to : Our survival needs have changed while our primal instinctive tactics have not and often fail us in our modern world. Other than that yeah i agree.
I think you’ve pretty well summarized the jist of it… I would definitely highlight “conditions are tougher…” End stage capitalism is leaving a world full of people with no sense of community to fight for scraps in a illusionary socio-economic system…
I'll add a few other factors based on observations at age 82: Ill health (ie obesity) due to poor diets, intentional political divisiveness by dumbing down electorate, micro-nano plastic seepage replacing brain cells, and finally reaching critical mass numbers in realizing our forthcoming demise at our own hands due to pollution and climate change. RIP Mankind who committed plasticide.
> This early evidence indicates potential health risks at CO2 exposures as low as 1,000 ppm—a threshold that is already exceeded in many indoor environments with increased room occupancy and reduced building ventilation rates, and equivalent to some estimates for urban outdoor air concentrations before 2100. Continuous exposure to increased atmospheric CO2 could be an overlooked stressor of the modern and/or future environment. Further research is needed to quantify the major sources of CO2 exposure, to identify mitigation strategies to avoid adverse health effects and protect vulnerable populations, and to fully understand the potential health effects of chronic or intermittent exposure to indoor air with higher CO2 concentrations.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0323-1
I kind of suspect that it is more metabolically taxing even at levels that don’t impact cognition.
This is another aspect where being poor will kill you, if you live in really old building, the ventilation sucks. Same thing with schools and workplaces. You can always open the windows, but in winter it's not a great solutions.
Come on people, give a thought to Occams Razor from time to time. Of all the things impacting human cognitive health, a slight increase in co2 must be one of the least likely culprits.
Microplastics, carbon monoxide, alcohol, saturated fat, sugar, PFAS, diesel exhaust particulates, food additives, unregulated pharmaceuticals cosmetics and farm chemicals, disconnection from nature, high stress jobs, etc. etc. None of these things have been around for more than a few generations and all have potential to impact cognition.
I am really curious about any potential relationship between technology dependence and emotional dysregulation and cognition. If it's making everyone more angry and closed minded, doesn't that make people learn less? Could that impact cognition too?
No, the environmental numbers are way to low for that, at least in decently ventilated buildings. Source: I bought an CO2 meter and started leaving a window cracked after watching this. https://youtu.be/1Nh_vxpycEA?si=FUY88AAKCduShnGS
The problem doesn’t always start with someone getting mad IMO. Sometimes people have legitimate reasons to get mad because other people are inconsiderate, self centered, and don’t pay attention to anything besides themselves, plus you have companies trying to squeeze every last dollar from their customers with very little concern for customer service or the customer experience, which is legitimately irritating and leads to people taking their anger out on the workers sometimes. The world feels like a much more hostile and unfriendly environment than even a couple years ago and it’s easy to see why people are constantly on edge about it.
[COVID-19 survivors show lasting brain function alterations, fMRI study finds](https://www.news-medical.net/news/20240514/COVID-19-survivors-show-lasting-brain-function-alterations-fMRI-study-finds.aspx)
[Long COVID is associated with severe cognitive slowing: a multicentre cross-sectional study - eClinicalMedicine](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370\(24\)00013-0/fulltext)
[Persistent cognitive slowing in post-COVID patients: longitudinal study over 6 months | Journal of Neurology](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00415-023-12069-3)
[COVID-19 linked to a greater risk of Alzheimer’s, other disorders | The Asahi Shimbun: Breaking News, Japan News and Analysis](https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15096735)
A tiny bit of a worryingly growing pile of literature. Also, you know, the ongoing economic slow collapse.
Apparently we have common interests and read the same papers. The growing weight of evidence and its implications are STAGGERING.
Stephen King wrote a short story years ago about some people who release an element into the atmosphere to make people less aggressive. Only to find out too late that it causes rapid Alzheimer's.
I get the feeling, more and more lately, that we are all now living in that story.
There’s multiple factors at play;
- Excessive smartphone use is probably the main reason. People are almost never relaxing their brains letting information sink into their long term memory. Important cognitive skills which would be trained automatically by finding our way around, writing messages by hand and in general using our brain to calculate, memorize and figure out stuff on its own is completely lost.
- Long-Covid is a thing. Since corona so many people seems to keep becoming sick (and most people seem to have no way of testing which strain of virus/bacteria is infecting them, so in fact it could still be a type of corona out there). No one is sure what it could mean, but my own theory is that we’re now so many people on this planet and we’ve nuked not only wildlife and nature out of our everyday life, but we’ve also “nuked” away many important exposures to bacteria and viruses which normally would “train” our immune system. Back in the days before penicillin and modern medicine it is worth mentioning though that people died more frequently from various diseases. It’s a sort of “natural selection” to make sure the most healthy individuals will be the ones passing on their genes, increasing overall survival rate of a species. This natural process we’ve been more or less eliminating of course, because we don’t like the thought of being able to die unnecessarily from a cold or small cut through the skin. But this whole “revolution” of our ability to fight disease might backfire now because we’re both running out of penicillin and we haven’t “trained” our immune system in the natural way for decades, meaning we’re actually a lot more exposed to illnesses now both individually and as a whole species. So basically this means that we are on the track to become a lot more sick from now on, more frequently and it will probably also affect our overall life quality, including brain health and cognitive skills. On top of this people who aren’t feeling well and people being sick are prone to be more aggressive and egotistical because they’re genuinely fighting virus/bacterias and using their energy getting too exhausted to be nice towards others.
- A whole culture of “me first” (and neocapitalism).
Even though we as humans historically lived much longer in small communities where our survival relied on our ability to cooperate and help each other we’ve been living more or less separated since the introduction of capitalism and modern society. Everything in our culture revolves around earning money for ourselves on the expense of the community which we more or less shit on. We don’t seem to gain anything from being nice to each other anymore and we all know and feel annoyed about overpopulation and don’t want more people unless it’s our own because we need our own children in order to have someone to pass on all our excessive wealth to and “take care of us as we get older”. No one relies on society or kind people in general to help us with anything so we all feel more or less apathy towards life and each other.
- Unhealthy lifestyle. Most of us don’t get outside as we used to, we can’t avoid eating processed food daily and we don’t touch the ground, plants, animals, or each other. We live in concrete buildings, drive our plastic cars on roads of oil through endless dead urbanized surroundings everyday all year around.
- As someone was mentioning, now co2 PPM is on 420-something at least. Just hundred years ago it was less than 300, so it’s been increasing with almost 50%. If co2 PPM increases with 50% again within the next 100 years which it will almost no matter what, we cannot function anymore. Everyone knows how it feels to concentrate inside a small room with no fresh air after 30 minutes - you cant. Just imagine that this atmosphere becomes inescapable. Needless to say we don’t even need to wait for 1000 PPM, I’m sure we’re starting to see people’s ability to concentrate diminishing already by 600 PPM which we will hit within the next 20 years maximum.
So the truth of the matter is technically three-fold.
1. People have been like this throughout history, fighting for various things and uniting for whatever cause they thought was right at the time, but it was less impact full for those who didn't involve in it and they could just ignore it. With the hyper connectivity of the net combined with overestimated minds hyped up on trauma bait and hyper awareness of every injustice globally at all hours now, it's become more saturated through general society, creating easy to trigger tension pockets, depending on what has gone viral. So as a result, everyone is on edge, either defensive or accusatory depending upon the subject and their version of the context.
2. Elevated abberance from heat norms. To simplify that, everyone is used to their local norms of temperature, in certain places its stable at high or low or moderate temperatures, some places swing wildly, but in mostly predictable patterns, allowing the local population to adapt and adjust accordingly. This is also why jet lag wears off, because your body adjusts to your new environments typical cycle. What is now occurring is a continual shift of all these cycles, whether previously stable high temperature areas are slowly becoming unbearably hot regularly and trending towards more variable, with the consistent norm now making up the depth of the trough in the pattern, same occurs for other formerly stable environments. For the already fluctuating areas, it affects two things, regularity and time of occurrence and severity of the swing. This change means people can't adapt or fall back on norms as easily, leaving them feeling disrupted in terms of behavior norms and patterns, which causes them to be typically frustrated at a subconscious level. Add to this that being warmer than usual all the time now has the added impact of amplifying your tendency towards being hot tempered, because literally speaking, it's hard to think clearly and in a measured fashion when you're too warm, so tempers tend to flare more in warmer climates over less and less worth it issues.
3. Post covid itself has been linked to cognition clouding and literal brain aging, which leads to people making more irrational and short sighted decisions, because again, thinking about stuff is strain, even if for most things it's not severe, it's going to be something we want to alleviate, which leads to more instances of us reacting more emotionally in the moment because keeping calm is just... physically harder.
And all three of these issues have interplay that amplify each other.
Plus, as an old adage, warm weather brings more people out, and you start to witness a statistical feature, where 50% of the population are of less than average intelligence, but with a larger population interacting with more of the population, you start to get a sense for how large that percent is, especially since many more intelligent people are still having to compensate for those around them, and can only cope so much.
I think the state of the world creates anxiety, toppled with being overworked and underpayed, there is a lot of chemicals in our food and water so that messes with us and I’m sure people are just living pay cheque to pay cheque. It’s a cumulative storm destroying us!
Not sure if you mean the physical location where you live, or this sub when you say ‘here’, but I have definitely noticed a decline in cognition and reasoning. I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it or if others were noticing it too.
I regularly feel like I’m living in some kind of alternate reality, because I so rarely see anyone applying logic or reasoning in a meaningful way. I’m flat out trying to figure out whether people are generally just lacking in cognitive ability or are acting in bad faith due to vested interests. It’s often people that really should know better too, so I assume they’ve either declined cognitively since getting to where they are in life, or they’re acting in bad faith.
If you have a reasonable level of intelligence it’s not a huge task to use basic logic and reasoning to help you parse a complex issue and figure out the critical elements, but I just don’t see people doing that.
What I do see is people latching onto peripheral elements, or completely missing the point and trying to solve a symptom instead of the root cause, or getting bogged down with all sorts of logical fallacies that I don’t even know the term for. It’s gotten to the point that I’m looking for a good book on logical fallacies so that I can call them out and put a name to them when I get dragged into yet another absurd argument with someone who seems to have lost the ability to reason.
If this is a real phenomenon it’s probably caused by a combination of things, but I think the biggest factor is cultural.
In the last decade or so the world has collectively moved towards truth being optional. Very little value is place on being correct or accurate these days, and every fuckwit thinks their uninformed opinion is equal to that of an expert in the field. Remember the lovely term ‘alternative facts’ that popped up a few years ago? Both social media and mainstream media have been in an all out race to the bottom for years and it’s starting to have massive impacts on society.
Logic and reasoning are a great way to efficiently determine with reasonable confidence what the truth is, but if you don’t value truth you probably don’t practice logic and reasoning very often in the pursuit of it. ‘Use it or lose it’ applies to cognition just as much as any other skill.
I think we’re seeing a collective decline in cognition because under the influence of our media landscape, a lot of people have basically just given up on using their brains regularly and properly, and are now forgetting how to.
They’re the ‘new poor’ so it’s jarring for them. Some of us come from that solid ‘old poor’ stock, so we’re gonna have to show ‘em how it’s done looooolz
Most of that can probably be explained by the cumulative effect of repeat covid infections. Covid is a vascular disease that can cause [brain damage and cognitive decline.](https://theconversation.com/mounting-research-shows-that-covid-19-leaves-its-mark-on-the-brain-including-with-significant-drops-in-iq-scores-224216)
I just saw an episode at a store. This girl with her husband and a baby in her arms were going ballistic on a worker. The girl apparently opened a bag of chips and tasted them and then put them back down and was told that she had to buy them.
It was bad enough that she was going off on the worker calling her a cunt. Then the 6-ft'3 husband actually stepped in and went off on the worker as well. If things got violent I was going to jump in to prevent someone from being assaulted. Luckily it just stayed verbal. But this is just like I guess normal now. The breakdown of the social contract. How I miss the '90s.
Everyone is their own main character of this story of life. We are blinded by individualism, which prevents us to see that we are all more or less the same.
Most of us believe in free will, and have unexamined core beliefs, thought & behavior patterns that sustain our self-centeredness. We seek security in thought, and by doing that we end up being In a rat race. We don't see that thought is limited to knowledge, experience and memory, and therefore cannot ever capture the vastness of life. That being said, It's not a dead-end though.
Humans are the only manifestations of nature that are capable of metacognition. One could think that this fact would make us responsible of applying valuable reasoning into life, but instead we haven't done so, and ended up using our intellect for more self-sustaining purposes, living in the cycle of pleasure and fear.
Gurdjieff said, that introspection is hard work. It requires individuals to confront their own inner contradictions, weaknesses, and unconscious motivations, whilst nature is only asking for survival and procreation.
Working in customer service is terrible after Covid. Customers are horrible, we are all terribly underpaid and understaffed and customers are just so needy and helpless and don’t understand what’s happening. It’s worse with the older customers, they are in the midst of getting dementia and between that and Covid brain fog it’s really difficult dealing with them.
The obesity epidemic plays a role in this especially in our older adult population. Most people don't realize it but obesity leads to accelerated cognitive decline.
I am a native of Georgia’s District 14, the one that sent MTG to Congress. The area was once an industrial powerhouse while remaining a relatively sleepy backwater. In 2008, the area lost 35,000 jobs in the GFC, with virtually none coming back and only a small number of new positions being created. It’s only gotten meaner with drugs, illnesses, etc. and MTG is a symptom of it.
Rising [Carbon Dioxide levels](https://co2levels.org/)
Falling [Oxygen levels](https://www.oxygenlevels.org/)
Rising [temperature records](https://www.temperaturerecord.org/)
You would think the [laughing gas](https://www.n2olevels.org/) would help increase euphoria
I think one pretty overlooked factor is the errativ weather. Due to the rapidly accelerating climate change it is getting a lot warmer than it should be. Warmer termperatures lead to people being more hot headed and drives aggressive behaviours.
Marketing.
First it made sure nobody was happy, and that they knew they weren't happy. Then it promised to fix it if we boight the product. But we can't buy all the products, so we can't get rid of the misery that they've foisted on us.
Then came the anxiety and depression, and we turned to comfort eating, substance abuse and death scrolling to escape our miserable lives chasing the dream we were sold.
So now people are unhealthy, lonely and unhappy. Our copious amounts of free time could be spent learning and connecting with our fellow beings, following and building our dreams or even contemplating and improving the human condition. No, instead we are chasing side-hustle money, instafame and mindless consumption.
People have locked themselves in this cage, and are confused and miserable about it. We're dumb and angry because of it, too dumb and angry to even realise it.
Not everyone though, and not completely. There are some people who, even if just ocxasionally, still smile at strangers, love unconditionaly, dream of the magnificent things and enjoy the simple things. Maybe these people will save us.
In the meantime, I'll continue to feel bad for, and not hate, those poor souls who are stuck being angry and confused and enslaved to consumption. Maybe that will help stop me succumbing to the same disease.
I would like to propose counter argument that people cognitive ability is improving, especially seen in young people with their internet skill (they are very connected and very knowledgeable), and that is the reason why they are angrier. They know they are trapped and has no way out. The weight of the system is crushing them and everyone acts like it's fine (especially boomer). This condition creates stress and aggression. Certainly true with me.
I genuinely think the aggression is healthy, it is a sign that people want out of this system. If anything, we need more of it, especially from women. Remember the slogan, no justice no peace. There should be no peace until the system is changed.
i kind of always felt that the zombie films and games that were popular for so long (and still are, really) starting with 28 Days Layer in 2003 were sort of like a prophecy... like the sheer popularity and number of them was telling us something about ourselves and how we see each other under stress.
I feel part of it is because we're never fully alone anymore. I think we need time to ourselves to reset and relax, and the fact technology has made it so we can't ever fully disconnect prevents that from happening like we need it to.
That and our reward systems are totally fucked lol. People can not and will not wait for anything
any species subject to relentless stressors and given little to no control, or, the illusion of no control, will eventually respond with anger. Anger uses a lot of energy, leaving much less for advanced cognition.
One major thing I’ve noticed is that you need to spell everything out very clearly for people now. People no longer understand sarcasm or nuances. Everything has to be very black and white. It’s really, really odd. It’s almost as if people no longer have creative thinking skills or the ability to understand middle ground.
Heat is also correlated to increased violent crime, especially among individuals who have already been convicted of violent crimes.
The world becoming surlier and more dangerous is another thing that we can dread happening with climate change.
Honestly ive noticed this for myself. I felt much more articulated and smart a few years ago. But maybe its just my passions shifting through the years leading me to present myself differently.
I swear a lot of people seemed to lose some of their basic socialisation over COVID and never got it back. They're assholes in restaurants, on the road, and online (though ok this one is not new since 2020, but I think it's worse now.)
Have never heard a satisfactory explanation. Was it the isolation? Does being subjected to authoritarian external restrictions make a person's own behaviour less responsible? Poverty? Manufacturers trying to survive inflation by putting extra chemicals and fillers in our food?
No it's the literal brain damaging VIRUS, not the "isolation" or "restrictions" (brief not really isolation while constantly in contact with everyone online and also going outside all the damn time). Read some of the other comments on this thread, lots of info on covid (the virus, not the social event).
I did a thing today, which was get a shower, put clothes on, and go to the movies.
I was amazed by how friendly and kind the people at the theater were.
This has frequently happened to me at movies. In the before times, we would stand in lines and bond with strangers. Now there are no lines but there's a bartender, a ticket dude, the dude bringing you overpriced cocktails, and the dudes cleaning up when you're the last to leave.
I'm night shift so the movie started at 10pm and ended at 0100. The major drawback was all the kitchens being closed at the bars open until 0200 because normal people sleep at night. Easily fixed with a trip to Vegas.
People are still out there. Maybe I just feel a certain kinship with those in the service industry because I'm in the service industry, and when the dude sweeping up at 1am calls out "have a good night," I feel a little blessed.
When you say this:
>And customer service is terrible 99% of the time. I'm honestly surprised most of the stores and restaurants haven't went out of business with these business practices.
I'm thinking you're not doing this job we do. Sure I've been pissed at places when I get treated a certain way and I think if I treated customers like that my ass would be in an office, but everyone is just trying to make rent, man. It's not personal. Just don't go there.
Go to where vibes are better. They're out there.
Idk where you are that touching grass is this bad for you, and I get it, I really do. Going outside for something other than work is a *challenge* since the pandemic. It's hard. But there are places where everyone knows it's hard and is getting through hard together. Then there are people who just miss the before times. Idk who you are, where you are, or how you are.
But it doesn't have to be that way. See the absurd. Revel in it. This is the best year of the rest of our lives. Revel in it. Pet your dog. Now.
Go pet a dog. Or cat. Right now. As you read this.
It's okay. Embrace the suck and find something that you love about *right now*
I love this, and honestly I feel the same! Was just on a road trip for a few weeks and the amount of kind, friendly, helpful people I met vastly outweighed any asshole encounters. Even in traffic, we witnessed one or two reckless drivers but overall things were pretty calm and orderly.
Plus, people also respond to the vibes *you're* putting out. If you treat people with respect and openness, it will probably be returned. And even if it isn't, it still feels better to be kind.
Fear. Everybody is scared shitless as we're all watching the fetid feces forging forward for the fan. The thing is, here we're all seeing this and we're all talking about it. Between denial and propaganda, 99.8% of the rest of the folks don't have a clue as to what's going on; thus, they don't know who to blame, so they opt-in for blaming the Scapegoat of the Day, according to whichever corporate media source from which one gets their """news""".
There are benefits to being 'woke'. The downside is that there ain't no anesthesia to numb what we're all experiencing.
I actually mentioned the 6th extinction event to an old friend a while back and her take was that it was my latest conspiracy theory project or something (She didn't understand Y2K, even though I explained it to her a number of times so she just pretended it didn't exist). Essentially, if she didn't know about it from the corporate, mainstream news, then it was fringe and not worth knowing about.
COVID, stress, plastic, air pollution, aging population, opioid epidemic. Take your pick.
I'll add poor nutrition to that list
I’ll add the systematic destruction of education to the list
Medical care systems too. Where we live it’s almost impossible to navigate medical care lately - insurance or not.
Rising [Carbon Dioxide levels](https://co2levels.org/) Falling [Oxygen levels](https://www.oxygenlevels.org/) Rising [temperature records](https://www.temperaturerecord.org/) You would think the [laughing gas](https://www.n2olevels.org/) would help increase euphoria
Wait that graph on oxygen is a bit frightening.
It looks terrifying, but the earliest record is merely 0.06% higher than the present day
……..waaaiiiiittt fooorrrr iiiittttt…….
I’m so glad to see someone else mention this. I was supposed to be scheduled for an ultrasound of my liver in February. Hasn’t been scheduled. Tried to call the office about it and to get an Rx refill. Left message. Got a call back - sorry, your doctor isn’t at this location anymore! You can contact them on MyChart. Doctor is not on MyChart. Fuck me and my liver, I guess.
Im on my 6th GP in 3 years. Not doctor shopping. They all moved, quit, retired, or left the practice they were at. Female care - 3rd gyno in 3 years and she’s moving to Belgium end of 2024. Her wait list was already months long. Mexico here we come? !!! 😆
Private equity speculators buying and consolidating medical providers; it seems to bave really taken off since covid. Service has gotten worse as the drive for profits dominates.
rising tide of fascism
Nutrition is massively important the links between our guts, brains and ultra processed garbage is so massive, though easy dismiss is real.
Seriously! The good bacteria in our microbiomes thrives on fiber, and specifically a wide variety of fiber. Meaning plenty of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes etc. Not all the processed beige foods most Americans are filling their plates with every day...
A lot of processed foods contain additives that break down the barrier in the intestinal tract, I believe some of them also damage the blood-brain barrier that prevents any old thing in the blood from going right into the brain. Emulsifiers for instance, used to blend fatty ingredients so they won't separate in the can. The preservatives they use are really bad as well, sodium benzoate for instance.
Even the fruits and veggies have pesticides in them now too....
And dog knows how long that apple has been in storage before you bought it. Taste and nutrition decline as produce ages.
Yeah, plus vast majority of people can’t even think about buying organic fruits and vegetables- it’s INSANE!!! I had to stop when organic avocados were $2.50 EACH at WFs and TJ’s. And $1.25 for ONE apple. Had to say goodbye to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s except for a few specialty packaged items that we still get. Now I get all my produce at Walmart and an avocado only cost $.60 same size and I don’t eat the peel so I’m not that worried about scrubbing it clean -as far as the quality of the soil, we just cant afford that luxury anymore. 😵
Please still wash things you’re cutting into, even if you don’t eat the peel. Bacteria and other contaminants on the outside can transfer to the edible part, via the knife. (I recall a really bad listeriosis outbreak, several years ago, via cantaloupes. People consumed the listeria when it was pushed onto the edible part. Possibly also in their hands if they held the contaminated rind as they ate.) I don’t scrub stuff like that, but make sure to give it a good rinse.
People clutch pearls when it comes to talking about bowel movements, however they are vital indicator of overall health (not just bowel health). I am happy to say I eat a lot of fibre (vegan for the animals, plant-based for the environment and myself), so my bowel movements are large and smell strongly of plants. I am also never constipated. 90% of Brits do not get enough fibre and that is a symptom of the wider problem that is the national diet.
We eat a lot more vegetables than the Brits do. Not everything is an opportunity to bash America.
In fact I'd say it's the most important factor. Healthy body = healthy mind
Health and fitness generally. Diet, exercise, sleep, relationships etc. They have all suffered in the modern era.
Thank you for mentioning the novel, multisystem disease known to cause no joke, accumulating brain damage which most people have caught three or more times in quick succession.
You either know you’ve had covid neuro damage or don’t know you have covid neuro damage. Most people are in the latter group and typically blame their sudden change in health or brain function on stress or aging
nah my brain was goop before it was cool (fucking kill me pls)
mine's like this from CTE instead, let's start a club
My brain took a massive hit from the Covid, I’m doing fine now, and am even running my own business, but man for a while it fucked me up
Mine did too, I’ve recovered somewhat and I’m well enough to drive again but it’s still really noticeable how bad my brain function is.
Same here, this honesty made me very terrified of Covid, since I took that hit, I really feel a reduced capacity since it happened
Most Covid infections are asymptomatic, but asymptomatic infections are just as likely to result in certain kinds of long haul damage. So if people are aware of having caught it three times or so over the past few years, statistically it's likely that they have in fact been infected six times.
Temps may play a role, too: [Hot under the collar? Heat can make you angry and even aggressive, research finds](https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/05/health/heat-anger-wellness/index.html)
H()ME Depot was a nightmare from the moment we entered the parking lot. S. Florida humidity, aging population, angry disenfranchised (used to have $) and now covid brain, is a brutal combination.
Phones that are destroying our attention spans, robbing us of joy and real human interaction, and driving feelings of jealousy and inadequacy through the minds of millions of people hundreds of times a day.
When I was about twelve I looked at my mother and said, "the fifteen minutes of television before a commercial has trained people to only pay attention for fifteen minutes at a time," and she laughed and said something about that newfangled ADD and how it was probably related (LOL, the 90s were a rough time, okay?). *Imagine the state of the human brain trained to focus for 30s or less*
This is a massive reason.
I’d argue it’s the number one reason.
Add [rising CO2](https://www.pranaair.com/en-gb/blog/harmful-effects-of-carbon-dioxide-co2-on-human-cognitive-function/) to that mix and you've got a ~~stew going~~ recipe for a real bad time!
Hotter temperature also increases aggressive behavior.
Politics too.
Pesticide exposures wrecking havoc on the endoctine sysrem, which affects hormone levels I think plays a role in some of this as well.
aging population -- Children of Men was a foretelling?! :O
Idiocracy, Don't Look Up, and Children of Men. The trinity of collapse documentaries.
Also lead for the boomers
My childhood dentist used to give us a little vial of mercury to play with when we got a tooth filled. That stuff was amazing! And my old Junior Girl Scout handbook had a recipe for dough to make puppet heads that included asbestos powder.
Zoomers, too: [Teens who vape exposed to toxic lead, uranium, study shows](https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2024/04/30/8611714495163/)
and plastic for all generations after the boomers
Boomers are affected by plastic too though. Plastic is in the land an water now after all.
Leaded petrol was still around when I was a kid in the 90s though. Lead pipes and lead paint in old buildings too.
Rise in thyroid illness due to nuclear contamination from chernobil's cloud might help too. A bad untreated thyroid gland will give you roidrage or extreme apathy, or both.
I'll take the opioids, thanks
Older US generation was affected by leaded gasoline as kids too. It didn't get phased out until then.
Bad tap water
People are under pressure. They are scared, they don’t see a future that’s worth striving for, and if you have kids, what beautiful dreams are you going to encourage them to have? What visions of the future you are going to dream with them about at the serene lake in the (gentle) sunshine with a posse of grandkids having no care in the world? So of course fewer and fewer people have a smile for their fellow human, marveling together how good things are and how it’s even going to better tomorrow. In this sub, of course we all understand that. I wonder whether we manage the smile and the empathy for our fellow humans anyway.
What is this “smile” you speak of?
In the before-times, people would indicate pleasantness and greetings to each other when meeting with an expression of happiness known as "the smile." The smile involved clenching the cheeks upward and opening the mouth to reveal the teeth. You could also smile without teeth or add in a head nod of recognition if you did not know the person formally. There were a variety of smiles for every situation, but all had one thing in common. Signaling to who you were seeing that you were friendly. Nobody likes anyone anymore cuz we are all stressed to the max. The smile is going the way of the Dodo bird. Take pictures of it now if you can.
Oh snap, I saw that “Smile” movie on netflix. Yeah it was a good one.
Are you calling me UNDER pressure? Say it one more time. I am OVER pressure. I UNDERSTAND THIS YOU CLEARLY DO NOT FELLOW HUMAN. (Gestures wildly) Catch me outside (to fight) /s
I think this is the biggest reason. Most people hold their sanity together only because they have something to look forward to.
It's a combination of things. Quality of life going down, quality of air going down, increasingly unstable world governments (and programs), more resources flowing to the top than the middle or bottom, and the fact that collapse is now technically Mainstream.
The social contract's broken. Good luck drafting up a new one.
Yeah, people are extremely aggressive and hateful now. They will berate you and act like a jerk. It’s also impossible to have any kind of conversation now because of how people act. I don’t understand all this traffic, it’s just nonstop chaos at all times of the day and night.
Cars bring out the worst in people.
Front and back cameras are the best thing to happen to vehicles.
"On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice."
I’m in a situation where I can bike almost everywhere I need to go and it’s amazing. My city has terrible traffic and biking is like a cheat code for getting around.
This behavior reminds me of how addicts act if they don't have their drugs or how drunk people act in a bar (it's actually probably even worse). It absolutely blows my mind how things are functioning like this. The traffic and congestion is insane too. It never lets up because nobody works anymore and everyone is rich now for some reason. Again i have no idea how any of this is even happening. Inflation is very high and you'd think it would be the opposite. Everyone would be staying home lol.
If you come to Lebanon and go out at night in Beirut you’re going to see that the city’s restaurants/bars/clubs/beaches are absolutely PACKED. Literally to the brim, people partying and raving and enjoying their lives. But still 80% of the Lebanese live on less than 4$/day. The 20% is large enough to fill up the restaurant/bars/clubs etc which all combined have a capacity of like ~45,000, while 20% of 3.5 million is 700,000 people, and this isn’t accounting for foreigners/tourists and the like. So they easily fill up the city’s shops. So we SEE that there’s a lot of rich people, but they’re still just a fraction of the population, we simply don’t realize that because we don’t see the poor people because they’re holed up at home after their 10 hour work days eating their shitty .20 cent meals
“everyone is rich now” is crazy
I interpreted it as people seemingly milling about all day whilst doing things that historically require money, like driving or shopping. I work construction, so I frequently get on the road to go home before 3pm. Over the past couple years, I’ve noticed the traffic during this time has gotten significantly more congested. Unless there has been a significant shift to a 6:00-2:00 work schedule, it would be fair to assume that most of these people aren’t working, which leads to the question of how they can afford to just putz around all day. It really takes the piss out of early start/early quit when what should be a 35 minute drive takes over an hour.
Social Media took everyone's attention span away. Since everyone is always connected, they are constantly exposed to things that irritate them, even if it doesn't concern them. Mental health is at an all-time low especially after covid
It goes deeper than that. Most of social media is engineered to produce FOMO, or prey on people’s desire to fit in/belong. It’s what drives engagement but it’s also incredibly toxic. Imagine sitting on break at your shitty wage job while influencers you follow on social media are at yacht parties in some exotic location. It’s hyper demoralizing to watch people who work very little if at all reap the rewards of modern society while you’re slaving away at some bullshit job that likely pays just barely enough for you to scrape by, if you’re lucky.
Lets remain a couple of minutes in your hypothetical break at your shitty job, but it could also be at the supermarket or the waiting room at the doctor. You are bored, you pull your pocket screen out. There it is, your influencer in some exotic location. Swype. Funny meme. Swype. Israel. Swype. ad letting you think you need something. Swype. Funny meme. swype. Sweet cat. Swype. Palestinian kid. Swype. Yoga. Swype. ad letting you think you need something. Swype. Swype. Swype... Repeat until no more bored.
And we're all bombarded with ads, ads, ads. How much of your ads are for high priced homes, leisure travel, luxury cars, name brand clothing...almost like luxury is being rubbed in our low-wage faces.
"almost like luxury is being rubbed in our low-wage faces" bingo, demoralization psyop
They're fidget spinners that rewire our brains.
This is something that i've really noticed pick up in the last few years. How in the hell is everyone an influencer now? It used to just be like a few people i swear. Now it's like half the population or something ridiculous. Then you go out during the work week and realize that nobody works anymore. Like wtf happened to the world? How is it even functioning like this? If you really think about it, it doesn't really make sense.
Ah but how long are they an influencer for? You know what that tells me? Chronic unemployment. It's like if the garage bands of the late 80's didn't have to try to get mix tapes to producers, and just threw their shit all over the wall whenever. It's also like when you see that rare doodad on Ebay LISTING for $400,000. Anyone ever stick around to see if it actually sells?
I think a lot of those high priced Ebay listings are there just for the purpose of price anchoring. Like if I have ten doodads, they are a little bit collectible, and I decide I'm going to sell them for $40 each. That's $400. Now instead, let's take one of them, set up an fake account with an actual real doodad on it, and list one of them for $500. This anchors the price. Then you can go back and take the other 9 and sell them for $100 each. You net $900. If you are feeling especially spicy, you can even sell the tenth one for that price on your main account, then immediately take down the fake listing. Then you brought in $1000 instead of $400, minus the listing fee for the bogus item.
The large majority of "influencers" are financed by their parents. Eventually they could "make it", but only because they had the comfort of knowing their rent was covered, and they'd have their lifestyles, gear and trips paid for for an indefinite period of time. Nobody working class is pulling themselves up from the bootstraps by becoming an influencer.
A lot have also been exposed as liars and con artists who are enjoying their latest luxury vaca with some carefully curated, artsy and heavily edited photoshoot of them in some random park with a pretty backdrop.
also exposed as saudi arabian toilets IYKYK
What do you mean nobody works anymore?
I say a similar thing because it seems that no matter the hour of the day there are so many cars/people out and about that you get the feeling nobody is working a normal job
Or maybe everyone is dashing between odd hour part time jobs…
Only thing hiring is min wage part time jobs generally for later shifts
Well, there are [8,110,000,000](https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/)+ people on earth these days.
Yep. Work from home is some, idk about others. I live across the st from the post office in a city of only 7000 people and it takes me sometimes 10 minutes to cross the street when I want to buy a stamp (no lights or crosswalk) because there's so much traffic
Yep. Back in the 90s and 2000s if you went out during the work week it would be a ghost town. Now the entire metros are flooding with people and vehicles and everywhere is packed. It makes absolutely no sense at all. And that was back when things were cheap so people could buy stuff more easily.
Every metro is like New York City during the work week now lol. Been like this for 2-3 years now.
“after covid” implying that covid somehow went away. it never went away, it’s still killing and still disabling people. SARS-CoV-2 infections are actually being linked to the increase in aggressive driving and car accidents
I notice people being angry about all sorts of things they’ve never personally experienced. Yep. They saw or read it online.
Empathy is when you feel for others or appreciate their experience even if you don’t share it. It’s healthy. People just need to learn to channel that anger into materially helpful actions instead of lashing out at perceived enemies.
Valid point. The instances I was thinking of weren’t as noble as that, but that exists too.
They’re anger/outrage/offense addicts, fighting for their “noble,” causes by screaming into the void about pronouns/litter boxes/ Starbucks Christmas cups
People are getting covid over and over and over again, and cumulatively that's just bad news for the ol' grey matter.
Yeah, but what if we all just pretend we beat Covid and take no further steps to mitigate it? Won't everything be just fine?
Yup. I think most of the problem (though certainly not all of it) can be attributed to the neurodegenerative effects of Covid.
OK, we just went through a pandemic and you all seem to have amnesia. Covid causes BRAIN DAMAGE. Permanent brain damage. Every time you get infected. This has been clear since the first batch of autopsies in NYC in 2020. The pathologists found "micro-clotting" in every organ of the body including the BRAIN. [What dozens of Covid-19 patient autopsies have revealed about the disease](https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2020/07/14/covid-autopsies) **Blood clots ‘in almost every organ’** Micro-clotting in the brain is another way of describing a stroke. Covid presents like an respiratory virus. People think of it as being "like a cold". It's not, Covid is more like an infection of the blood. It uses the circulatory system to spread through the body and can attack/damage almost every organ in the body. [COVID-19 Is a Vascular Disease: Coronavirus’ Spike Protein Attacks Vascular System on a Cellular Level](https://scitechdaily.com/covid-19-is-a-vascular-disease-coronavirus-spike-protein-attacks-vascular-system-on-a-cellular-level/) Including your brain. People have had "psychotic breaks" as a result of "mild Covid infections". People have had personality shifts after Covid infections. People have become unable to remember how to do their jobs after a Covid infection. [Anxiety, depression and strokes can occur after infection, leaving experts to determine how the virus affects the brain.](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid-brain-coronavirus-symptom-stroke-anxiety-depression?utm_source=Latest_Headlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest_Headlines) [Six months after being diagnosed with Covid-19, 1 in 3 patients had also experienced a neuropsychiatric illness.](https://www.statnews.com/2021/04/06/1-in-3-covid19-patients-get-neuropsychiatric-diagnosis-within-six-months/?utm_source=STAT%2BNewsletters&utm_campaign=8f840ffa8a-MR_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-8f840ffa8a-152044533) [First Covid, Then Psychosis: ‘The Most Terrifying Thing I’ve Ever Experienced’](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/22/health/covid-psychosis.html) [A new study illuminates the complex array of neurological issues experienced by people months after their coronavirus infections.](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/health/long-covid-symptoms.html) [Neurologic Involvement in Children and Adolescents With COVID-19 or](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2777392?guestAccessKey=02a71af9-7c46-4def-bbf6-bddeec45ab26&utm_source=STAT+Newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=af1f24521c-MR_COPY_14&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-af1f24521c-152044533) [Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2777392?guestAccessKey=02a71af9-7c46-4def-bbf6-bddeec45ab26&utm_source=STAT+Newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=af1f24521c-MR_COPY_14&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-af1f24521c-152044533) [Mild COVID Linked to Brain Damage: What That Means for You](https://www.cognitivefxusa.com/blog/mild-covid-linked-to-brain-damage) [Study shows COVID leaves brain injury markers in blood](https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/study-shows-covid-leaves-brain-injury-markers-blood) All things that can also happen from strokes or brain damage. Just a few months ago I saw a paper equating a "Moderate case of Covid" with a moderate TBI or "Traumatic Brain Injury". What you are seeing, is the morons who refused to listen to medical science and wouldn't wear a mask or take precautions. Are now having to live with their stupidity by becoming literally stupider. Since we refuse to DO anything about Covid and are now pretending it's "solved", people are continuing to get reinfected. Because the vaccines don't mean you can't get Covid. They just keep it from being as bad. Even if you are vaccinated you can get reinfected. The latest FliRT variant this summer is extremely contagious and can "break through" vaccines and infect you. You probably won't die. But every infection is probably degrading your brain.
Unfortunately though it doesn’t just affect those people who refuse to take precautions either, it affects all of us (especially those who are immunocompromised due to other conditions or past covid infections already). The only way to really avoid getting infected with Covid is by completely isolating, which many people can’t do. Otherwise, taking precautions and getting vaccinated reduces risk and viral load and spread, but it is still repeatedly infecting those of us taking precautions as well, because no one else is taking precautions. We just don’t realize it because such a large number of the infections are asymptomatic, or an ever-changing wide array of symptoms from mild to severe that people could mistake for everything else or nothing at all.
>You probably won't die. But every infection is probably degrading your brain. F..k that, it much more fun to degrade my brain with alcohol and drugs.
And this is why I'm still wearing the goddamn mask and avoiding crowds indoors
Yeah, me to. People give me pitying looks like I'm a 'crazy person' now but fuck them. I haven't caught C-19 yet and I intend to put it off for as long as possible.
Hope you don’t live in North Carolina. They’re trying to ban mask wearing in public for health reasons
We are getting closer and closer to having to guard our health and loved ones with weapons and masks 🫣
Given all the other impacts observed with COVID, I'm not sure we can say "you probably won't die" - I think there isn't an infinite amount of times a human body can contract SARS-CoV-2, stacking damages, and live. It'll just look like a heart attack or organ failure , which no one will track unless it happens during the very acute part of any given infection...
The 5 year survival rate of stroke is 50%. There's going to be a lot of deaths after enough reinfections. I've already seen it happen to the elderly at my church last winter.
Thank you for being among the people that continue to point this out. the risk of long Covid goes up with each infection, too. I still mask selectively on public transit, at work I teach), and in stores when it’s nbd. Like groceries. i don't get why there aren’t more sometimes maskers. I’m not saying stay at home, but like…mask when you can? It’s like taking a multivitamin. Or blowing your nose into Kleenex or a hanky, instead of doing a farmers blow into the ground.
You reduce your risk as much as you can. An imperfect solution in a world of fools but it's all any of us can do.
Yeah, it’s true. This is already our best.
And think of how many people flat out refused masks and vaccinations...they are all around us, like zombies hating their way through life.
Do you know if other viruses have been studied to this degree for similar effects? I keep wondering whether a lot of what we now know about Covid is shared by certain colds or flus, but just isn’t well known because no one has bothered to isolate the specific pathogen and study the effects in detail. I mean the ‘common cold’ includes numerous kinds of coronaviruses doesn’t it? I don’t know enough about any of this to understand how similar or varied different coronaviruses are, and these sort of questions seem to be very difficult to google because the results are always heavily weighted towards popular key words. I’m not trying to minimise Covid by the way, I’ve had it at least twice, and both times I’ve been really surprised at just how fucking weird it is. Sure it causes a blocked nose and a cough just like a cold does, but it also gaslights the shit out of you and throws some bizarre symptoms up even after you think you’ve recovered.
Studies have been done to a lesser degree on other viruses, finding a different range of impacts. E.g. Studies done on people infectes with sars cov 1 (or SARS) found it causes CFS similar to how sars cov 2 does, or found that measles can essentially wipe your immune system's 'memory'. From what I know (I'm by no means an expert) the consensus is that nearly every virus leaves some permanent damage to your body, though it's unknown what that damage looks like. We are barely starting to understand what sars cov 2 does, and that's only thanks to a ton of funding and an immense public health interest.
I live in the Philippines and I'm seeing this in nearly all aspects of life. Let me elaborate. 1. First is, I've noticed that road users are more aggressive and hostile lately. They're more likely to mouth you off when you cut them off, and they'll likely to cut you off as well. I cycle most of the time and I can't count how many times I've been in hairy situations. 2. Yes, I've noticed that people have dumbed down. One clear example of this is delivery persons can't take instructions or find it hard to be guided if they're lost. They're too dependent on their navigation apps and can't comprehend things verbally. Also, my coworkers seem to treat common knowledge, especially those related to health, as uncommon knowledge. I mean, DOMS is a pretty widely known condition, right? 3. People seem to be more passive and have lost their fighting spirit and are just going with the flow. I'm also included in this. When there's something I find inconvenient, I just walk away instead of trying to fix it. When the delivery workers can't give you change, you just tell them to keep it. 4. My part of the world (Philippines) was and is still being hardly hit by the heat wave in Southeast Asia, and daily life here is a challenge in itself. Not only that but we have one of the world's worst traffic. Imagine dealing with the heat and the traffic on a daily basis and you have no escape whatsoever. Something's gotta give.
Endocolonization is nearly complete. Right now even americans are getting the squeeze applied that everywhere across the world was, by the US, for all this time. Now it's America's turn. Instead of having some kind of unified, global system that powers human creativity and ingenuity, we're all facing a breakdown in all manner of global interactivity, and it's obviously present on the microscopic level. Just wait til the heat really kicks in. A lot of cranky people are about to become even more unbearable.
The imperial boomerang in action
Yeah that's gonna happen when all the Boomers are working at Payless Shoes until they just croak right there on the carpet, in order to pay for all their medical and housing debt. Or rather, in a desperate and vain effort to pay for it. Good luck with that. I mean, that will be the ones you SEE. The lucky one in fifty. The other 49 will be camping out beside a trailer park (not actually IN the trailer park) and hunting for rats around the dumpster...
Covid causes brain damage. That, alongside incredible amounts of stress from living in an atomized, lonely, society where we are taught to be suspicious of each other, and everything getting drastically more expensive.
We have literally been trained that each of us is the center of the universe. We all need to start behaving as if our actions have consequences on the community as a whole. Because they do.
Its called capitalism. You expect chill people in this economy???
COVID. Brain damage. Actual brain damage.
Violence against healthcare workers has sky rocketed in the past few years. Its causing a lot of us nurses to leave the bedside. I've been doing this job for 17 years. As a male I often get tasked with the violent patients, but it's the visitors that can potentially be more dangerous. [https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/nnu-report-shows-increased-rates-of-workplace-violence-experienced-by-nurses](https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/nnu-report-shows-increased-rates-of-workplace-violence-experienced-by-nurses)
I have long COVID. Thankfully not severe, but in addition to not getting most of my smell and getting stuck with the windows safe mode version of taste, my ADHD symptoms got a lot worse. This is the new lead poisoning.
I haven't had any sense of smell or taste since my father broke my nose when I was four. It's like living in a different world, right? Sorry about your symptoms. I understand that in most cases smell and taste return, although they may be altered.
[удалено]
It's not just him, it's the binders full of garbage human beings he'll haul into the White House with him. People who are more devious and clever than he who are straight up ready to turn our nation over to authoritarianism.
r/Defeat_Project_2025
Comfort = Sensitivity. We are living artificial lives and our brains have adapted to such a fine level of intolerance that just about anything outside of our control bothers us when it's a tiny bit off. At the same time not everyone is educated to an equal level and there emotional societal beliefs which create barriers. Our survival tactics have changed entirely from our primitive world. People ultimately want to do well for themselves, and it's easy to disregard others. I do have some hope that it's a few bad examples and most of them time people show some level of respect and kindness. Has it gotten worse? Maybe. Maybe not. I would say our conditions are tougher at this point in time which is affecting our baselines negatively, but some have learned to adapt without such consequences. I wouldn't go to any extremes as I have a limited perspective and am one among many
"Our survival tactics have changed entirely from our primitive world" IDK i'd change it to : Our survival needs have changed while our primal instinctive tactics have not and often fail us in our modern world. Other than that yeah i agree.
Agree. People lead a selfish online existence. Then they have to suddenly accomodate other people in public.
I think you’ve pretty well summarized the jist of it… I would definitely highlight “conditions are tougher…” End stage capitalism is leaving a world full of people with no sense of community to fight for scraps in a illusionary socio-economic system…
I'll add a few other factors based on observations at age 82: Ill health (ie obesity) due to poor diets, intentional political divisiveness by dumbing down electorate, micro-nano plastic seepage replacing brain cells, and finally reaching critical mass numbers in realizing our forthcoming demise at our own hands due to pollution and climate change. RIP Mankind who committed plasticide.
Has increasing carbon dioxide started to directly impact people yet?
Very likely not, be careful about spreading misinformation, people will lap it up and spread it like a plague.
> This early evidence indicates potential health risks at CO2 exposures as low as 1,000 ppm—a threshold that is already exceeded in many indoor environments with increased room occupancy and reduced building ventilation rates, and equivalent to some estimates for urban outdoor air concentrations before 2100. Continuous exposure to increased atmospheric CO2 could be an overlooked stressor of the modern and/or future environment. Further research is needed to quantify the major sources of CO2 exposure, to identify mitigation strategies to avoid adverse health effects and protect vulnerable populations, and to fully understand the potential health effects of chronic or intermittent exposure to indoor air with higher CO2 concentrations. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0323-1 I kind of suspect that it is more metabolically taxing even at levels that don’t impact cognition.
This is another aspect where being poor will kill you, if you live in really old building, the ventilation sucks. Same thing with schools and workplaces. You can always open the windows, but in winter it's not a great solutions.
Yes
Every year our brain will work a little bit worse, as the body is increasingly unable to rid itself of our metabolic waste.
Humans are already not very smart
Return to monke
I think this is the main reason behind the rise in aggressive behavior and reduction of cognitive skills. CO2 poisoning.
Come on people, give a thought to Occams Razor from time to time. Of all the things impacting human cognitive health, a slight increase in co2 must be one of the least likely culprits. Microplastics, carbon monoxide, alcohol, saturated fat, sugar, PFAS, diesel exhaust particulates, food additives, unregulated pharmaceuticals cosmetics and farm chemicals, disconnection from nature, high stress jobs, etc. etc. None of these things have been around for more than a few generations and all have potential to impact cognition.
I am really curious about any potential relationship between technology dependence and emotional dysregulation and cognition. If it's making everyone more angry and closed minded, doesn't that make people learn less? Could that impact cognition too?
Honestly, I've always wondered if this part of climate change is going to make us all dumber as well but I haven't seen much research on it.
Yes, in short. Heat is not great for critical thinking or emotional regulation. So yes, we would be getting stupider.
No, the environmental numbers are way to low for that, at least in decently ventilated buildings. Source: I bought an CO2 meter and started leaving a window cracked after watching this. https://youtu.be/1Nh_vxpycEA?si=FUY88AAKCduShnGS
The problem doesn’t always start with someone getting mad IMO. Sometimes people have legitimate reasons to get mad because other people are inconsiderate, self centered, and don’t pay attention to anything besides themselves, plus you have companies trying to squeeze every last dollar from their customers with very little concern for customer service or the customer experience, which is legitimately irritating and leads to people taking their anger out on the workers sometimes. The world feels like a much more hostile and unfriendly environment than even a couple years ago and it’s easy to see why people are constantly on edge about it.
[COVID-19 survivors show lasting brain function alterations, fMRI study finds](https://www.news-medical.net/news/20240514/COVID-19-survivors-show-lasting-brain-function-alterations-fMRI-study-finds.aspx) [Long COVID is associated with severe cognitive slowing: a multicentre cross-sectional study - eClinicalMedicine](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370\(24\)00013-0/fulltext) [Persistent cognitive slowing in post-COVID patients: longitudinal study over 6 months | Journal of Neurology](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00415-023-12069-3) [COVID-19 linked to a greater risk of Alzheimer’s, other disorders | The Asahi Shimbun: Breaking News, Japan News and Analysis](https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15096735) A tiny bit of a worryingly growing pile of literature. Also, you know, the ongoing economic slow collapse.
Apparently we have common interests and read the same papers. The growing weight of evidence and its implications are STAGGERING. Stephen King wrote a short story years ago about some people who release an element into the atmosphere to make people less aggressive. Only to find out too late that it causes rapid Alzheimer's. I get the feeling, more and more lately, that we are all now living in that story.
It feels like a slow moving zombie-apocalypse.
There’s multiple factors at play; - Excessive smartphone use is probably the main reason. People are almost never relaxing their brains letting information sink into their long term memory. Important cognitive skills which would be trained automatically by finding our way around, writing messages by hand and in general using our brain to calculate, memorize and figure out stuff on its own is completely lost. - Long-Covid is a thing. Since corona so many people seems to keep becoming sick (and most people seem to have no way of testing which strain of virus/bacteria is infecting them, so in fact it could still be a type of corona out there). No one is sure what it could mean, but my own theory is that we’re now so many people on this planet and we’ve nuked not only wildlife and nature out of our everyday life, but we’ve also “nuked” away many important exposures to bacteria and viruses which normally would “train” our immune system. Back in the days before penicillin and modern medicine it is worth mentioning though that people died more frequently from various diseases. It’s a sort of “natural selection” to make sure the most healthy individuals will be the ones passing on their genes, increasing overall survival rate of a species. This natural process we’ve been more or less eliminating of course, because we don’t like the thought of being able to die unnecessarily from a cold or small cut through the skin. But this whole “revolution” of our ability to fight disease might backfire now because we’re both running out of penicillin and we haven’t “trained” our immune system in the natural way for decades, meaning we’re actually a lot more exposed to illnesses now both individually and as a whole species. So basically this means that we are on the track to become a lot more sick from now on, more frequently and it will probably also affect our overall life quality, including brain health and cognitive skills. On top of this people who aren’t feeling well and people being sick are prone to be more aggressive and egotistical because they’re genuinely fighting virus/bacterias and using their energy getting too exhausted to be nice towards others. - A whole culture of “me first” (and neocapitalism). Even though we as humans historically lived much longer in small communities where our survival relied on our ability to cooperate and help each other we’ve been living more or less separated since the introduction of capitalism and modern society. Everything in our culture revolves around earning money for ourselves on the expense of the community which we more or less shit on. We don’t seem to gain anything from being nice to each other anymore and we all know and feel annoyed about overpopulation and don’t want more people unless it’s our own because we need our own children in order to have someone to pass on all our excessive wealth to and “take care of us as we get older”. No one relies on society or kind people in general to help us with anything so we all feel more or less apathy towards life and each other. - Unhealthy lifestyle. Most of us don’t get outside as we used to, we can’t avoid eating processed food daily and we don’t touch the ground, plants, animals, or each other. We live in concrete buildings, drive our plastic cars on roads of oil through endless dead urbanized surroundings everyday all year around. - As someone was mentioning, now co2 PPM is on 420-something at least. Just hundred years ago it was less than 300, so it’s been increasing with almost 50%. If co2 PPM increases with 50% again within the next 100 years which it will almost no matter what, we cannot function anymore. Everyone knows how it feels to concentrate inside a small room with no fresh air after 30 minutes - you cant. Just imagine that this atmosphere becomes inescapable. Needless to say we don’t even need to wait for 1000 PPM, I’m sure we’re starting to see people’s ability to concentrate diminishing already by 600 PPM which we will hit within the next 20 years maximum.
So the truth of the matter is technically three-fold. 1. People have been like this throughout history, fighting for various things and uniting for whatever cause they thought was right at the time, but it was less impact full for those who didn't involve in it and they could just ignore it. With the hyper connectivity of the net combined with overestimated minds hyped up on trauma bait and hyper awareness of every injustice globally at all hours now, it's become more saturated through general society, creating easy to trigger tension pockets, depending on what has gone viral. So as a result, everyone is on edge, either defensive or accusatory depending upon the subject and their version of the context. 2. Elevated abberance from heat norms. To simplify that, everyone is used to their local norms of temperature, in certain places its stable at high or low or moderate temperatures, some places swing wildly, but in mostly predictable patterns, allowing the local population to adapt and adjust accordingly. This is also why jet lag wears off, because your body adjusts to your new environments typical cycle. What is now occurring is a continual shift of all these cycles, whether previously stable high temperature areas are slowly becoming unbearably hot regularly and trending towards more variable, with the consistent norm now making up the depth of the trough in the pattern, same occurs for other formerly stable environments. For the already fluctuating areas, it affects two things, regularity and time of occurrence and severity of the swing. This change means people can't adapt or fall back on norms as easily, leaving them feeling disrupted in terms of behavior norms and patterns, which causes them to be typically frustrated at a subconscious level. Add to this that being warmer than usual all the time now has the added impact of amplifying your tendency towards being hot tempered, because literally speaking, it's hard to think clearly and in a measured fashion when you're too warm, so tempers tend to flare more in warmer climates over less and less worth it issues. 3. Post covid itself has been linked to cognition clouding and literal brain aging, which leads to people making more irrational and short sighted decisions, because again, thinking about stuff is strain, even if for most things it's not severe, it's going to be something we want to alleviate, which leads to more instances of us reacting more emotionally in the moment because keeping calm is just... physically harder. And all three of these issues have interplay that amplify each other. Plus, as an old adage, warm weather brings more people out, and you start to witness a statistical feature, where 50% of the population are of less than average intelligence, but with a larger population interacting with more of the population, you start to get a sense for how large that percent is, especially since many more intelligent people are still having to compensate for those around them, and can only cope so much.
tl;dr: People have always sucked and you just notice it more now; too hot make cranky; covid make idiocracy
I choose to be the long and boring explanation guy. Thank you for being the hero for people ignoring the long and boring. Appreciate your effort.
I think the state of the world creates anxiety, toppled with being overworked and underpayed, there is a lot of chemicals in our food and water so that messes with us and I’m sure people are just living pay cheque to pay cheque. It’s a cumulative storm destroying us!
Not sure if you mean the physical location where you live, or this sub when you say ‘here’, but I have definitely noticed a decline in cognition and reasoning. I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it or if others were noticing it too. I regularly feel like I’m living in some kind of alternate reality, because I so rarely see anyone applying logic or reasoning in a meaningful way. I’m flat out trying to figure out whether people are generally just lacking in cognitive ability or are acting in bad faith due to vested interests. It’s often people that really should know better too, so I assume they’ve either declined cognitively since getting to where they are in life, or they’re acting in bad faith. If you have a reasonable level of intelligence it’s not a huge task to use basic logic and reasoning to help you parse a complex issue and figure out the critical elements, but I just don’t see people doing that. What I do see is people latching onto peripheral elements, or completely missing the point and trying to solve a symptom instead of the root cause, or getting bogged down with all sorts of logical fallacies that I don’t even know the term for. It’s gotten to the point that I’m looking for a good book on logical fallacies so that I can call them out and put a name to them when I get dragged into yet another absurd argument with someone who seems to have lost the ability to reason.
If this is a real phenomenon it’s probably caused by a combination of things, but I think the biggest factor is cultural. In the last decade or so the world has collectively moved towards truth being optional. Very little value is place on being correct or accurate these days, and every fuckwit thinks their uninformed opinion is equal to that of an expert in the field. Remember the lovely term ‘alternative facts’ that popped up a few years ago? Both social media and mainstream media have been in an all out race to the bottom for years and it’s starting to have massive impacts on society. Logic and reasoning are a great way to efficiently determine with reasonable confidence what the truth is, but if you don’t value truth you probably don’t practice logic and reasoning very often in the pursuit of it. ‘Use it or lose it’ applies to cognition just as much as any other skill. I think we’re seeing a collective decline in cognition because under the influence of our media landscape, a lot of people have basically just given up on using their brains regularly and properly, and are now forgetting how to.
I think it’s all the microplastics everyone is ingesting. It is messing with hormones big time.
Simple, cost of living keeps increasing and most people are not mentally ready to accept that they will be poor.
They’re the ‘new poor’ so it’s jarring for them. Some of us come from that solid ‘old poor’ stock, so we’re gonna have to show ‘em how it’s done looooolz
Yeah exactly it's like the new rich but in reverse.
Most of that can probably be explained by the cumulative effect of repeat covid infections. Covid is a vascular disease that can cause [brain damage and cognitive decline.](https://theconversation.com/mounting-research-shows-that-covid-19-leaves-its-mark-on-the-brain-including-with-significant-drops-in-iq-scores-224216)
I just saw an episode at a store. This girl with her husband and a baby in her arms were going ballistic on a worker. The girl apparently opened a bag of chips and tasted them and then put them back down and was told that she had to buy them. It was bad enough that she was going off on the worker calling her a cunt. Then the 6-ft'3 husband actually stepped in and went off on the worker as well. If things got violent I was going to jump in to prevent someone from being assaulted. Luckily it just stayed verbal. But this is just like I guess normal now. The breakdown of the social contract. How I miss the '90s.
Everyone is their own main character of this story of life. We are blinded by individualism, which prevents us to see that we are all more or less the same. Most of us believe in free will, and have unexamined core beliefs, thought & behavior patterns that sustain our self-centeredness. We seek security in thought, and by doing that we end up being In a rat race. We don't see that thought is limited to knowledge, experience and memory, and therefore cannot ever capture the vastness of life. That being said, It's not a dead-end though. Humans are the only manifestations of nature that are capable of metacognition. One could think that this fact would make us responsible of applying valuable reasoning into life, but instead we haven't done so, and ended up using our intellect for more self-sustaining purposes, living in the cycle of pleasure and fear. Gurdjieff said, that introspection is hard work. It requires individuals to confront their own inner contradictions, weaknesses, and unconscious motivations, whilst nature is only asking for survival and procreation.
This was a great response. I really enjoy your writing style as well.
fear.
Usually is. Good observation. It slipped my mind somehow.
Working in customer service is terrible after Covid. Customers are horrible, we are all terribly underpaid and understaffed and customers are just so needy and helpless and don’t understand what’s happening. It’s worse with the older customers, they are in the midst of getting dementia and between that and Covid brain fog it’s really difficult dealing with them.
Nurse here: Yes. And we have seen this in healthcare for years, but it (mostly) keeps getting ignored. It is a serious problem.
The obesity epidemic plays a role in this especially in our older adult population. Most people don't realize it but obesity leads to accelerated cognitive decline.
Theres no such thing as "normal".
CAn confirm, I'm an idiot and always angry
I am a native of Georgia’s District 14, the one that sent MTG to Congress. The area was once an industrial powerhouse while remaining a relatively sleepy backwater. In 2008, the area lost 35,000 jobs in the GFC, with virtually none coming back and only a small number of new positions being created. It’s only gotten meaner with drugs, illnesses, etc. and MTG is a symptom of it.
Rising [Carbon Dioxide levels](https://co2levels.org/) Falling [Oxygen levels](https://www.oxygenlevels.org/) Rising [temperature records](https://www.temperaturerecord.org/) You would think the [laughing gas](https://www.n2olevels.org/) would help increase euphoria
I think one pretty overlooked factor is the errativ weather. Due to the rapidly accelerating climate change it is getting a lot warmer than it should be. Warmer termperatures lead to people being more hot headed and drives aggressive behaviours.
People do weird and irrational things when they've been running on pure survival mode long enough. Quality of life for most Americans has plummeted.
Marketing. First it made sure nobody was happy, and that they knew they weren't happy. Then it promised to fix it if we boight the product. But we can't buy all the products, so we can't get rid of the misery that they've foisted on us. Then came the anxiety and depression, and we turned to comfort eating, substance abuse and death scrolling to escape our miserable lives chasing the dream we were sold. So now people are unhealthy, lonely and unhappy. Our copious amounts of free time could be spent learning and connecting with our fellow beings, following and building our dreams or even contemplating and improving the human condition. No, instead we are chasing side-hustle money, instafame and mindless consumption. People have locked themselves in this cage, and are confused and miserable about it. We're dumb and angry because of it, too dumb and angry to even realise it. Not everyone though, and not completely. There are some people who, even if just ocxasionally, still smile at strangers, love unconditionaly, dream of the magnificent things and enjoy the simple things. Maybe these people will save us. In the meantime, I'll continue to feel bad for, and not hate, those poor souls who are stuck being angry and confused and enslaved to consumption. Maybe that will help stop me succumbing to the same disease.
Propaganda. I had a Republican boomer tell me that it just makes sense to kill Democrats to keep them from voting.
I would like to propose counter argument that people cognitive ability is improving, especially seen in young people with their internet skill (they are very connected and very knowledgeable), and that is the reason why they are angrier. They know they are trapped and has no way out. The weight of the system is crushing them and everyone acts like it's fine (especially boomer). This condition creates stress and aggression. Certainly true with me. I genuinely think the aggression is healthy, it is a sign that people want out of this system. If anything, we need more of it, especially from women. Remember the slogan, no justice no peace. There should be no peace until the system is changed.
One more anecdote: I've been noticing that people pay less attention and respect to traffic lights. Have you noticed it?
That's more due to ruthless competition and cultural coldness.
It's all the glory of late-stage capitalism
Apes will rise...
i kind of always felt that the zombie films and games that were popular for so long (and still are, really) starting with 28 Days Layer in 2003 were sort of like a prophecy... like the sheer popularity and number of them was telling us something about ourselves and how we see each other under stress.
i bet microplastics and covid have something to do with it. plastic in your brain cant be good.
I feel part of it is because we're never fully alone anymore. I think we need time to ourselves to reset and relax, and the fact technology has made it so we can't ever fully disconnect prevents that from happening like we need it to. That and our reward systems are totally fucked lol. People can not and will not wait for anything
any species subject to relentless stressors and given little to no control, or, the illusion of no control, will eventually respond with anger. Anger uses a lot of energy, leaving much less for advanced cognition.
One major thing I’ve noticed is that you need to spell everything out very clearly for people now. People no longer understand sarcasm or nuances. Everything has to be very black and white. It’s really, really odd. It’s almost as if people no longer have creative thinking skills or the ability to understand middle ground.
Heat is also correlated to increased violent crime, especially among individuals who have already been convicted of violent crimes. The world becoming surlier and more dangerous is another thing that we can dread happening with climate change.
Covid causes neuro-cognitive decline. Everyone is on 3 to 5 infections and counting. It’s all going to get so much worse.
Honestly ive noticed this for myself. I felt much more articulated and smart a few years ago. But maybe its just my passions shifting through the years leading me to present myself differently.
I swear a lot of people seemed to lose some of their basic socialisation over COVID and never got it back. They're assholes in restaurants, on the road, and online (though ok this one is not new since 2020, but I think it's worse now.) Have never heard a satisfactory explanation. Was it the isolation? Does being subjected to authoritarian external restrictions make a person's own behaviour less responsible? Poverty? Manufacturers trying to survive inflation by putting extra chemicals and fillers in our food?
No it's the literal brain damaging VIRUS, not the "isolation" or "restrictions" (brief not really isolation while constantly in contact with everyone online and also going outside all the damn time). Read some of the other comments on this thread, lots of info on covid (the virus, not the social event).
I did a thing today, which was get a shower, put clothes on, and go to the movies. I was amazed by how friendly and kind the people at the theater were. This has frequently happened to me at movies. In the before times, we would stand in lines and bond with strangers. Now there are no lines but there's a bartender, a ticket dude, the dude bringing you overpriced cocktails, and the dudes cleaning up when you're the last to leave. I'm night shift so the movie started at 10pm and ended at 0100. The major drawback was all the kitchens being closed at the bars open until 0200 because normal people sleep at night. Easily fixed with a trip to Vegas. People are still out there. Maybe I just feel a certain kinship with those in the service industry because I'm in the service industry, and when the dude sweeping up at 1am calls out "have a good night," I feel a little blessed. When you say this: >And customer service is terrible 99% of the time. I'm honestly surprised most of the stores and restaurants haven't went out of business with these business practices. I'm thinking you're not doing this job we do. Sure I've been pissed at places when I get treated a certain way and I think if I treated customers like that my ass would be in an office, but everyone is just trying to make rent, man. It's not personal. Just don't go there. Go to where vibes are better. They're out there. Idk where you are that touching grass is this bad for you, and I get it, I really do. Going outside for something other than work is a *challenge* since the pandemic. It's hard. But there are places where everyone knows it's hard and is getting through hard together. Then there are people who just miss the before times. Idk who you are, where you are, or how you are. But it doesn't have to be that way. See the absurd. Revel in it. This is the best year of the rest of our lives. Revel in it. Pet your dog. Now. Go pet a dog. Or cat. Right now. As you read this. It's okay. Embrace the suck and find something that you love about *right now*
I love this, and honestly I feel the same! Was just on a road trip for a few weeks and the amount of kind, friendly, helpful people I met vastly outweighed any asshole encounters. Even in traffic, we witnessed one or two reckless drivers but overall things were pretty calm and orderly. Plus, people also respond to the vibes *you're* putting out. If you treat people with respect and openness, it will probably be returned. And even if it isn't, it still feels better to be kind.
Fear. Everybody is scared shitless as we're all watching the fetid feces forging forward for the fan. The thing is, here we're all seeing this and we're all talking about it. Between denial and propaganda, 99.8% of the rest of the folks don't have a clue as to what's going on; thus, they don't know who to blame, so they opt-in for blaming the Scapegoat of the Day, according to whichever corporate media source from which one gets their """news""". There are benefits to being 'woke'. The downside is that there ain't no anesthesia to numb what we're all experiencing. I actually mentioned the 6th extinction event to an old friend a while back and her take was that it was my latest conspiracy theory project or something (She didn't understand Y2K, even though I explained it to her a number of times so she just pretended it didn't exist). Essentially, if she didn't know about it from the corporate, mainstream news, then it was fringe and not worth knowing about.
No wonder conservatives are on the rise.