Comment by nostrademons

All living things are constantly dying.

One way to think about it is that for a new idea/site/community/business/government/etc to gain adoption, it must be significantly better than what came before. It comes in far above the mean, because every new idea etc that doesn't come in way above the mean dies out and never gains adoption. The rest of its life is just long, slow regression to the mean. For the most part, it continually gets worse, simply because statistically, when you are much better than average the only way to go is down. Eventually, it drops below the mean and some other better replacement takes over from it.

So people can absolutely be right when they say that everything is always getting worse! The fact of existence in the first place means that they started off much better than average - after all, the vast majority of potential configurations of atoms/molecules/cells/DNA/ideas/firms/people do not exist, and we happen to have the particular arrangement that was selected for. And then constituent parts move around in random motion, entropy takes its toll, and we read this as things decaying. Somewhat literally, this is what it means to decay.

The way to avoid this is to be constantly swapping out subsystems that aren't working for you with subsystems that are.