what is your opinion on the world as it is today? i'm more interested in the things you enjoy about the modern world as i've seen enough complaining elsewhere on the net

I certainly enjoy having the entire compendium of human knowledge at my fingertips

The most obvious things would be scientific advancements that not only make life easier but also safer.
For example modern medicine. Seeing how medieval doctors didn't really know much about what they were doing, becoming ill or breaking a bone could be a death sentence.
Today, especially in countries with free healthcare, there's many ailments you don't even worry much about since the doctor will fix it sooner or later.

Technologically we have planes and cars. We can be anywhere in the world we want to in be the span of 2 days maximum whereas before it took not only way longer, it was also more dangerous.

But why are we here? Because cavemen sat around the fire and enjoyed how good everything is? No, they complained, they wanted to make things better. I think only/predominantly seeing the negatives is an evolutionary advantage of our species. That's how we improve us and the world around us (for our needs, at least). That brought us to a point were some just need a five minute bike ride on awesome roads to go into a grocery store and just buy food instead of hunting for it or spending 12 hours on a field per day.
We have something like "free time" nowadays which we use to consume entertainment like movies, video games and theme parks.

Is it perfect now? Some may say yes, but those that don't will be responsible for when it someday is perfect.

It is exciting to see how accessible it is to find knowledge from so many places in the world. It fills me with hope, honestly.

Shorts are comfy and easy to wear. Clothing. Plumbing. Electricity. Have you ever spent time in a forest at night alone? It's scary.

Higher tech, lower life. Accessibility and cheapness of information. People running inside hamster wheels.

Looking beyond the embers of bridges glowing behind us
To a glimpse of how green it was on the other side
Steps taken forwards but sleepwalking back again
Dragged by the force of some inner tide

I enjoy people, and a good book.

I am more or less content with the world I live in, but that is only a small bit of the earth.
I don't have the capacity to form a proper opinion of "The World" as it is simply too big and with too many humans.
What I enjoy most currently is how cheap "old" tech is, for example I can go to the thrift store buy a dvd player and a whole collection of DVD's and CD's for a handful of pennies and often I am pleasantly surprised with the things I find.

I also enjoy how easy it is to learn things thanks to the loads of public information, programming being one of them as I've recently take an interest in understanding and building applications on as low as possible level. Not quite necessary nowadays nor useful but I derive some joy out of the learning process.

>>8

It only works going back so far. Get back to the 90s and shit just skyrockets for some reason. Can’t even get cassette tapes for a decent price.

I like drinking coffee and looking at the way the clouds hang above the university and how I can see the whole city skyline when I'm standing on a bridge over the railyard.

I think we're in an amazing period of history for the arts. In a few hundred years, I believe that people will look back at now the same way we look back at the Renaissance. A big part of it is probably how easy it is to exchange ideas today.

Mostly sucks, sometimes skyrockets to amazing just to depress you even more after it ends.

>>8
Yeah, being into somewhat retro things is awesome, I’m buying a PlayStation 2 that has been refurbished and a hard drive to play almost all the games on for half the price of a modern games console. I would collect physical games and media if I was not afraid of disk rot.

And to answer OPs question, it’s fine I suppose. It is too big to comment on the state of modern society though. It’s both good and bad really depending on how you look at it, and people have become over reliant on technology and very fixated on instant gratification in general but society has always had its issues. The only thing I dislike as a whole is how quickly old technology is phased out, IRC and other protocols are still useful, dammit!

As a united statian, the #1 thing I like about the world is the availability of all sorts goods and services that are inexpensive and accessible even for a commoner like myself. Whether it's the amount and inexpensive foodstuffs at the market to the differents types of available hobbies and pastimes in which to indulge myself in it allows for my leisure time to almost constantly be enjoyable. Though I will say that it may not be 100% for altruistic purposes, no doubt the powers that be appreciate my passivity, I cannot help but enjoy it.

I will admit it sometimes does get tiring and all I really care for is a nice home meal with someone I like talking to which sometimes doesnt' happen as much as I would like. One thing to add to this though is the internet. Without it I would be utterly lost even if I had access to all the tools, components and equipment for various hobbies of mine or at the very least be vastly more inefficient about it. It also gives me a place where I can share my knowledge, particularly in venues where I may be the most experienced user/poster/member of said site/group/chat.

I often wonder if things have actually gotten bad or if I’m just a bitter old fuck that misses being young

I honestly have hated things more each passing year since the year 2005.

>>16
Do you have this feeling about the world around you or what you see online or both?

I feel as though when I look through the rectangle of my screen the world seems to have been enveloped by narcissism, but in my personal life with friends and family, removed from the world, most of the troubles that I see in the digital world disappear.

>>17
Honestly both aspects, but more so with the "real world" around me. At least with the internet we still have some options of control or at least choice of what we do here, what websites we go to. But it seems as if those choices are slowly disappearing. The state of the internet drastically changing more as the realms of the physical world and the digital world start to "blur" in some way with the mass adoption of "smartphones" and devices. It's the opposite in my case. I don't have any friends anymore but what I do about their current lives is that have all adopted the narcissistic traits as you mentioned above, as well as my family. I can't even have a conversation with someone face to face anymore without them scrolling on a phone or being more concerned with posts on Facebook. The average person's attention span is just dead and gone.

One thing that I have recently become aware of is just the absolute vastness of how much free entertainment there is, these days, available completely legally and obtainable with virtually zero effort. Granted, a lot of it might not be of interest, but look in the right places and you're bound to find something that does, in pretty much any format imaginable and usually in excellent quality.

For example, here's the entire Sherlock Holmes bibliography, complete with illustrations:
http://ignisart.com/camdenhouse/main.htm

And here's a massive collection of animated Garfield & Friends segments, in the highest quality possible:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBmgiPm4j50Z9zNTsUmb9Xw/videos

And here are downloads for the most highly-acclaimed retro Macintosh games ever, playable on pretty much any computer:
http://www.fools-errand.com/07-DL/index.htm

Think of how difficult it would be to access these things before the modern Internet. Think of how much time you could spend just enjoying them without paying a single dime.

One of the things that's troublesome about the world these days is that, as media becomes more and more niche, it can be difficult to stumble upon things that you might not have taken an interest in otherwise. That's what I always try to see what my options are for non-paid entertainment - regardless of if it's exactly what I'm looking for, I know the only thing I'm spending is my time.

>>19
Excellent take on that aspect, I also agree. I haven't spent any money on "entertainment" in quite some time outside of a standard internet bill.

I like being connected with people across the world 24/7. I can stay in touch with friends and strangers no matter where I am, so long as I have an internet connection.

I also like having access to so many "free" e-books. It feels like I can learn anything if I wanted to.

It's also kinda nice that everything that happens online stays around for so long. I can go back through archives and see into people's lives. It's a bit poignant sometimes, to wonder where people's lives went after the fact, but it's beautiful to see particular moments preserved in time, seemingly forever.

Maybe in the future, our conception of time will be different--there won't be the same kind of distinction between the past and the present, like something out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

It's doing alright and I'd like it better if people stopped complaining indeed.

I like the fact that people are able to voice their complaints more than ever before.

These complaints are dumb more often than not.

But if you think of it as a Maslow's hierarchy of complaints, being able to freely complain about small dumb things would mean the bigger ones are mostly squared away, right?

Yes. And now people can bully others into submission or suicide over petty things.

>>26
If someone kills themselves over something petty, they probably didn't have the mental fortitude to overcome an actual challenge. Just coasting by on life with everything they needed on a silver platter and the only "challenge" was sucking up to professors and doing homework at college.

>>27
How does one exactly strengthen their mental fortitude to begin with?

27

Oh, these first world problems.

>>2
this, really

>>28
I would say by starting with what you know it right or wrong for YOU. Being able to say no to people if you really see no benefit in doing something, making compromises only when necessary (such as a job and even then, you can find ways to respect yourself with what type of work you do), and just overall treating yourself with respect before you worry about other people. If you can do this, any unexpected and/or tougher challenges will come at you a lot softer than if you're trying to put other people's interests before yours. That's not to say you should never help people, but only when it is TRULY worth your time.

I enjoy modern entertainment but I don't enjoy the modern life.

>>32
This is a heavy realization

>>32

I don't even like modern entertainment. For me, existence is complete and utter shit. If I could sleep through this life, I would.

I don't like a lot of things, modern entertainment, the technological life, it all drives me nuts as I don't want to participate in it but I can't escape it.
But thanks to that, I take immense pleasure in the small things in life and some hobbies seem more enjoyable because of it. The ease of access to information gives me opportunities to grow in fields on my own and to learn skills that might seem out of reach. So even though I desire a more simple life, I find some form of cope within modern life by teaching myself things that I might or might not need.

My perennial obsession is with employment. We've very successfully forgotten that from the 50s to the 70s the economy was run with the specific aim of letting everyone who wants a job get a job. I know all the historical reasons that we blundered into abandoning that approach (oil crisis, stagflation, monetarism, kaboom.), but it drives me insane that at no point has any powerful person gone "Hold on, this is insane isn't it? How did people nearly 70 years ago achieve a quality of life improvement that we can't?".
All of the smartphones and obscure textboards in the world can't make this failure up to me. Each technological achievement is just a further indictment of the fact that in this way, we live worse than our grandparents. First and foremost people need to eat and making them constantly struggle against one another in the faint hope they won't wind up one of the ~4% of people we intentionally maintain in idleness and poverty (while blaming them for it) strikes me as obscene.

Maybe UBI will make the issue redundant soon, but even then we've had nearly 50 years of wasted potential. I suppose that's par for the course if you take a longer view of human history, but in the modern age it strikes me as nothing less than insanity. Mostly because we've not only stopped doing it, but forgotten that we ever did do it. Even if the logistical challenges are too great, you'd think we'd at least be a little bummed out about it.

There were less people 70 years ago, you know.

It's easy to find people with similar interests online and to get information on any hobby you want

>>37
It took us around 30,000 years of modern humans existing to get our first billion in global population and then only about 200 years to get another 6, Closing in to a whole 8 billion humans in a few years.
This worries me, There's far too many of us and all we are doing is being exploited willingly by a system build around maximizing profits over anything else.

>>11
Art has never been as empty and dead as it is today, I'm surprised that anybody would make this claim.

We live in a comfortable slavery. Modern work is wasting the majority of your time to enrich not even your boss, but one of the few inhuman self-sustaining moneymaking entities ruling the planet that give no fucks about anything but money. No savings, no choice to opt out and simply work less for more free time because no matter who you are, you are replaceable so be overworked or starve. If you gamble and open a business it will fail because franchises are the only ones that can take the hit from taxes and all the other bullshit. Everything not strictly necessary to survive has become a luxury, but you still have to get it to function in this perennially indebted society, and if not socially at least mentally. So no matter what you are always over budget. And the shit that is strictly necessary now has 10 tiers of quality to fit how much you value yourself vs. the shit you own or the comforts that keeps you sane. Everyone's obsessed with money and being accepted by the highest number of people so you can't even find someone with a soul anymore, and if they have a life outside of the stupid shit they post on Facebook you will never know because being your real self is a fucking secret now. I would do anything to go back to the 90s and early 2000s that was the high point before this dumpster nosedive.

>>41

Everything not strictly necessary to survive has become a luxury, but you still have to get it to function in this perennially indebted society

Biggest example of this I can think is a car. I do not have the money for a car, for gas, for insurance, so I don't have one. I choose to walk or bus where I need to go. Not perfect but better than bring insanely broke all the time (Which I already almost am). Yet everyone around me tells me I need to get a liscence and drive.

Well fuck you, if cars are so important and mandatory to my living in modern society than the government should just give me one. But no theyre more worried about charging me $90 in one year for a new ID.

I wish I could live from 1985 - 2005 again and just die once January 1st, 2006 rolls around.