I don't want to be too hand-wavy, but this feels like such a "get off my lawn" type of comment that I can't even start to analyze it. So many of the items listed are 100% nostalgia or personal anecdotes generalized to a whole population.
If you're going to bother replying you could at least list a thing or two which are not generalizable. You saying SOMA tent cities are a figment of my imagination, or they existed in the 90s or that air flight is now more easy and pleasant than in the 90s or what?
Mid 30s and I would agree with all of this in one form or another. There is a fine line between being a curmudgeon and a nostalgic connoisseur. Low quality beer and burnt coffee is real!
Disagree with OP about induction cooktops; they are magical.
And yet, I have amazing coffee in my house pretty much at all times, from all over the world -- and every market I visit has 300 different beers in a wide variety of styles (including gross IPA), and not just the four standards like it used to.
Low quality everything exists, and mass-market everything exists -- but niche interesting everything is cheaper and easier to get than ever.
I travel overseas often for work. Over the years, bringing gifts home for people has gotten much harder -- because the "good" versions of absolutely everything from everywhere are available at home for affordable prices already.
Finding something that isn't just a tourism-souvenir (like a shirt with the name of the place) keeps getting harder.
"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed". Existence, availability, and affordability converge differently for different things. I'd also argue that as the number of something increases (beers, for example), it drags the average down and it becomes more difficult to find the diamond in the rough (opportunity cost, paradox of choice, survivorship bias).
Or maybe the type of people who want to think of themselves as connoisseurs just have to become a lot pickier if they want to maintain the same condescending dismissal of easily available products.
It’s perhaps more fun to find a “diamond in the rough” than an “already cut diamond in a jewel store”.
Early 40s — Weird how different I see this. You used to have to be in a city like Seattle to get good beer or good coffee — Now in small-town Kentucky or Indiana you can get both.
Yes, Starbucks sells burnt coffee — Don't go there! Go to the local coffeeshop that roasts their own beans. These exist in just about every city with a population of 100k or a college. I would say that coffee in general has become a lot better. At the high end not much has changed but the low end is much better than it was in the 90s and the average is still a lot better.
Beer — I can get some really good quasi-local beer in just about any grocery store in the country. Yes, lots of hoppy IPAs but there's always a lot more non-hoppy beers to choose from.
Obviously low quality beer and coffee still exist. But these days I can find dozens of craft beers and a wide variety of fair trade, even somewhat recently roasted, coffees at the grocery store.
Cities are comparatively packed these days with higher end coffee shops and pubs/bars with extensive beer collections.
Lamenting tent cities is "old man yelling at cloud" to you? I agree with his points. The Life of an average person is objectively much worse than it was 20-30 years ago. A person with great discipline can have a better life than ever, but it is hard not to feel empathy for the masses, so addicted to fake internet shit that they cannot even distinguish reality.
the rate of homelessness is actually falling slowly in the US, although the absolute number is slowly growing with the overall population. the visibility of homeless people has grown a lot in certain places though, which I think is the real complaint if we're being honest.
