Comment by emdash
1 day ago
That pretty much sums up my experience. Everything is more expensive and worse at the same time. And it feels like we're being screwed over from every direction and in new ways every day. People keep talking about this tech is supposed to do so much but everything just gets worse.
What time scales are you using to make this judgement?
Everything isn't getting worse constantly. The data is quite clearly the opposite. How old are you?
Let's look at the past ten years.
Food has gone way up in cost and down in quality.
Private equity bought out the healthcare system where I lived so now it takes months to get an appointment and the quality of care is horrible.
Not that matters since the health insurance I pay hundreds for a month wouldn't cover anything anyways because it's through UHC.
My job keeps getting rid of positions because they want to "do more with less" but it just means I'm doing more work while being paid the same.
If I buy a new car it will spy on me and sell my data. The state DMV already sold my personal info without my permission and now I get constant spam.
Private equity bought out many of the restaurants I liked going to and ruined them.
Third spaces in my city have been mostly destroyed.
The social media sites I used to use were overrun by bots.
I can't upgrade my PC because hardware prices have gone insane.
Gas is like $5 a gallon now so I can't really justify going on any trips anymore.
Private equity bought up most of the rentals where I live and so now I pay much more for rent on top of crazy monthly fees while the building I live in is falling apart because they refuse to fix it. Housing prices have also gone up so much that I have no hope of owning a house.
And more.
AI has fixed none of these issues.
As a middle aged man, thing are indeed getting worse every year.
From another middle aged man, part of that perception is your brain changing and also nostalgia.
It's not true that everything is more expensive. Nominal prices are higher, but incomes have risen faster than inflation. Purchasing power of the average person in 2026 is higher than it was in 2016.
As for things getting worse, I guess it depends on the domain. In hardware, things have gotten a lot better; my desktop computer is orders of magnitude more powerful than I would have expected 10 or 20 years ago. In software, I do see a lot of bloated software being written, but I don't feel that the software that I personally use has gotten worse.
Average, or median? Don’t know the answer offhand, but there are a small number of well-known people who are likely to skew the average quite a bit upward, given how much wealth they accumulated during and since covid
I was using "average person" in the informal sense. Median household income in the U.S., adjusted for inflation, has gone up 13% in the past decade.