[ActorNightly]

I mean, in a roundabout way you are right in your second sentence, it just wasn't decades of decline, on the opposite, it was a decade of positive growth. The world was pretty good prior to 2016. By all accounts, economy was doing good, tech was happening, cool things were being done.

Most of the actual important issues were solved or on the way of being solved, so people slowly started to make the trivial problems seem way grander than they are. Hedonistic adaptation is part of human nature, and the cycle has been seen in history many times in many civilizations.

Meanwhile, ironically, in societies where there is significant hardship every day, whether its going out and farming or having to work harder for your meal at home, dealing with adverse weather, and other things, you tend to see way more inclusion and coherence between humans, because they really never get a chance to get accustomed to a good life.