United??? States of America
First question: Is the US in a worse place, in general, than it was 30 years ago?
This is really an impossibility to determine. It is such a macro question and there are so many different factors that weigh on the answer that it is difficult to come to an educated answer. In light of that I am going to ask a second question that I have been wondering about for a while. To speculate the answer to the second question I am going to assume that the answer to the first question is “Yes”, the US is in a worse place than it was 30 years ago.
Second question: Why are we in a worse place?
The answer is simple and it has to do with the direction that culture has gone since World War 2. Americans are obsessed with competition and separation instead of community and cooperation. Its a simple answer, however, the causes and ramifications of this notion are complicated. There is still an aspect of community in the US but generally it is focused on the appearance of cooperation and unity while in actuality the majority of individuals are looking to personally enrich themselves. This type of attitude perpetuates itself. When one party is greedy it causes others to distrust EVERYONE and act in a self serving manner themselves. We have devolved into a society that looks to screw our neighbor over before they screw us over.
This attitude can be seen in the way that people conduct their careers. People used to start working for a company in their late teens early twenties and retire from the same company 50 years. Job jumping was not something people did and for the most part people’s careers grew as the company grew. Now it is much different. I have been at my company for over 5 years and I am one of the people with the longest tenure in the office. I have moved around to a few different positions and negotiated for more pay/benefits but if not the company tends to keep those people at a steady salary with marginal increases. This leads to new hires getting paid more than existing employees (it pisses me off that this is a standard business practice). I can understand that some companies do this to attract the top talent but it should not come at the expense of current employees. The only reason they would think about paying an existing employee more is if they threaten to leave. That is not a positive relationship. The company looks out for itself and the employee looks out for his or herself. Employees pretend to give a fuck about the company but they don’t and the company does the same. I was actually told by a recruiter that if hiring agents see that you stayed at the same company fro a while it was construed as a negative. That’s fucked up.
Another example is the technology that we use today. Social media sites are billed as expanding community and connecting people. I see it as deluding the “real” community of people around you and isolating people with their technology. If one can connect online with groups of people that have the same interests it lessens the impact of the local community and further isolates the user. I see people on the train everyday banging away at the Facebook app on their phones totally oblivious to the people around them. While these services “connect” people it does so at a very surface level. Knowing what everyone is doing at any specific moment does not connect you anymore to that person. Most of the applications of social media are designed to glorify the ego of the specific user, broadcasting the details of their lives to others that may or may not care (just like a blog… oh sweet irony). This leads to more, yet fewer “deeper” relationships and a decreased focus on the “real” community around the user. This activity actually leads to people who are more detached from the community at large and more likely to disregard the people around them.
I could see a shift happening in my childhood, I wasn’t actually aware of it but looking back I could see a clear path to the mindset of today. This selfish mindset is ancient and has always been a part of human nature but since the Cold War, which was at its core an ideological battle of capitalism vs communism, it has pervaded every part of our society from the public figures we worship to our familial relations. Capitalism won out and created the ”me first” culture we are in today. I am not saying that the capitalist ideology is a failure but rather that some of the values of a more community focused ideology may lead the US to a better future. Recent corporate environmental issues and the late 2000′s economic collapse are two examples of events and catastrophes that resulted in individuals solely focused on maximizing their own gain at the detriment of the community around them.
I certainly don’t have any solutions to this problem but I think it is real and personally I can only see it getting worse. What do you think?
I have been thinking about something similar, but it’s all connected. In every job I’ve ever had, everyone is so selfish and never thinks about how their actions affect the rest of their team/coworkers. For example, if two people go on lunch at the same time, leaving one person on the phone, you kind of fuck over that one person (and that one person is always me.)
And now that I’ve read this, it all makes perfect sense.
But it still pisses me the FUCK off.