Every generation feels this.

I believe the reason that each generation feels this way is the different ways that each generation is exposed to information about current events, wars, etc. and now more than ever with the internet, it's hard to escape. The internet also makes echo chambers worse than before because not only are they easier to get into, they're much louder and have more influence.

As for products, companies are focused on user/subscriber growth more than ever instead of having a good product. The idea is essentially “why have a good product people pay for when you can half ass it and get people to pay”.

It's always been in shit, just in diffrent ways. For example, between 1950s and 1999, people were worried about government tyranny due to Ruby ridge and the Waco seige, but they were also worried about killers like the unabomber and the zodiac killer. Today, we're worried about government tyranny because both sides can't agree on not only sides, but even presidents in a party, and rather than serial killers, we now have corrupt corporations.

Are things demonstrably worse? I'm reading that they are but I'm not seeing that they are. I don't live in a great area, but people generally seem as they've always been. Some struggle. Most are fine. Life goes on.

Healthy food costs more than unhealthy food....

Edit: mb, not really an answer to your question, but it sucks nonetheless..

I think the 2020 election and the pandemic are largely to blame for some spiraling plummets in our feelings about our system as a whole. Both of these events caused some pretty large divides in our government, communities, and even family and friend units.

War and human suffering were already there. Corporate greed and late-stage capitalism effects were already there, as well. We're all just critically assessing everything together at this point because some of those divides removed a security net of reliability and trust.

Corporate capitalism.

Profit before people in literally every facet of modern western society.

Years of believing the adage that "we should just be happy to HAVE a job", which ultimately gave carte blanche for companies to treat their employees like line items on a spreadsheet; something to be minimized as much as possible in order to squeak more pennies into a stock price.

Literally every bad thing today is the wholly expected endgame of 80s trickle-down economics.

Capitalism seems to run in a cyclic manner. If you remember in the 80s we had movies like Wall Street and Other People's Money, because I think things were at a similar point then to where they are now. But, through the 90s (and I joined the workforce in the mid 90s) I recall a more customer-centric view, and even some level of consideration for employees. This has gradually deteriorated starting in the new millennium.

The last 10 years I think has seen this accelerate such that the only consideration for a company is to the shareholders (public or private), customers are in the equation somewhere but way, way after providing value to shareholders via cost-cutting in any way possible. Employees are absolutely just a cost of doing business and if they could eliminate them too, they surely would.

The only hope I have is that I've seen this reverse before, so it CAN happen again. But what makes me place some doubt about this is headlines like the four richest people doubling their net-worth in an incredibly short period. The economy is a zero-sum game, if they doubled their worth other people lost everything, MANY people needed to lose everything to achieve that. Those people need to lose, and lose a lot to bring us back, and I can't imagine they will let that happen.

Maybe things will improve, maybe there will be a revolution/uprising when it just gets too bad. Who knows?