I returned to my home country and home town for the first time after 7 years and the place is barely recognizable.

  • It is more crowded than ever. I hardly saw a traffic jam in the past, but now the main streets are consistently clogged between 4 and 5 pm, and every single car park is full during the day.

  • There is no free parking anymore anywhere. Everywhere I used to park previously there are now parking meters.

  • Many of the shops I used to frequent are either gone or relocated far outside the city, and they are replaced by yet another Chanel boutique or some cookie cutter tourist trap.

  • The all-inclusive unlimited public transport ticket I used to have is being discontinued, and the city’s public transport monopoly now charges based on distance travelled, meaning that cost of public transport doubles for most regular commuters.

  • We also had a chocolate factory nearby that used to do public tours, to which I was looking forward to, but turns out they don’t do that anymore because of “public health concerns”.

  • There used to be exactly one homeless guy in our city, whom everybody knew by name, now there is one at every corner, and there are organized groups of beggars from a different country

I’ve been in North America, Europe and South Asia this year and I can’t shake the feeling that quality of life is gradually deteriorating everywhere.

Please tell me I am wrong. Where have you been lately where things overall are actually getting better rather than worse?

  • rachaeltalcott@alien.top
    BEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    It depends on what you think of as QoL. The population of the planet has approximately doubled in the past 50 years, so if QoL requires stable population density then not many places are going to meet that requirement.

    But when I was a kid the neighbors didn’t have indoor plumbing, and that was just normal back then. I think ~1940 was the point in the US where about half the houses in the US had an indoor bathroom with hot and cold running water. In the 1950s, almost nobody had air conditioning and now it is almost universal in warm climates. Since the mid 1980s, the infant mortality rate in the US has halved. Although the murder rate is higher now than a decade ago, it’s lower than it was in the 1990s.