Every rule exists because some insane person existed prior to it

Great thread, I’ll add some thoughts: 1. Pricing in the US is completely absurd. The link between pricing and value is entirely broken. Extremely mid hotels are hundreds of dollars a night; the average price for a new car is $50,000; really nothing feels like a deal. When you go out to eat, just assume you’ll spend $100 minimum. One of my personal benchmarks, Fage 5% Greek yogurt used to be $4.50 per tub back in 2019. Now I spend $7.80 2. Major cities are worse than they were a decade ago. Things have improved relatively since the nadir, but only relatively. There is still real, noticeable, quality of life decline in most urban downtowns. 3. Ubiquitous pot. You smell it everywhere now. 20 years ago, you’d usually encounter somebody smoking. Today, the cigarettes are largely gone, replaced by marijuana. This is not an improvement 4. Asian culture is much more prominent, from music to cinema and television, books, food, and the list goes on. 5. Airports have generally improved. This might not be saying much, but it’s true, with certain exceptions 6. Politics is much, much, worse. 7. Food is much better. The millennial food revolution is taken for granted, but I grew up before it in the 1990s and I remember the old world. Eating isn’t everything but the embarrassment of riches we now have is still underrated. You can get high quality food and drink almost anywhere now. That’s a major quality of life enhancement, even considering the prices. 8. There’s a broadly shared sense that America’s best days are behind it. A sort of background pessimism - on both the left and right - that shapes everything. Even in the optimistic corners of our society - Silicon Valley, say - the ambition primarily appears to be to escape the US - and the nation state itself, and even humanity - rather than to improve the country itself. Political ambitions are backward rather than forward looking. 9. Suburban amenities are significantly improved. If America’s major cities have mostly changed for the worse, America’s suburbs have changed for the better. Essentially all suburbs now have these “mixed development” zones where if you blur your eyes slightly you can (sort of) imagine you’re living out a fantasy of life in Greenwich Village or Manhattan. They’re walkable (though you have to drive to get to them), there’s clean play areas and green space for kids, a good variety of shops and breweries and beyond third wave coffee places and the like, and - because these are invariably private and because they aren’t connected by public buses - there aren’t any of the urban quality of life issues to deal with. The public has clearly woken up to this; all these places are absolutely heaving with people, even during the week. 10. The proliferation of conspiracies and apocalyptic thinking 11. The normalization of scams and “get yours by any means necessary so you can escape the permanent underclass” type thinking. 12. A much degraded intellectual environment. Politics is one facet of it, but there are many others. For example, the recent Nolan interview in China that’s gone viral on here this week. Odyssey discourse has been heavy for over a year in the US, but the relative quality of this interview is so much higher than anything we’ve seen so far. As a comparison, think about that execrable Wilson piece in the London Review of Books - ostensibly a highbrow prestige publication. The difference is honestly embarrassing, and synecdoche of what I see generally: for example, in academia.