Quote: (08-15-2018 08:47 PM)Cr33pin Wrote:
After being back in Murica for the past year.... It's abundantly clear to me that something is wrong here. The majority of the males I see have super effeminate mannerisms. There are sooo many fat people its stupid, also girls who are young and not fat still have nasty cellulite looking legs.. its like the female skinny fat (not all of them but a lot of them) Four out of every five girls on dating apps are snarky "dog moms." An the majority of the population walks around looking defeated.
What do you think are some of the main causes of Americas decline?
I felt similar when I had returned to Texas 3 years ago after an extended period abroad. There were a lot of improvements but a lot of things seemed to have gotten worse.
Some evidence of progress:
Technological upgrades in the workplace were marked and noticeable. The 'prettification' of many shared/public spaces had improved. Restaurants and retail experiences improved. Among the more educated, fashion sense and style had improved. Anecdotally, working conditions for family + friends who had stable employment seemed to have improved: more relaxed and less pressurized. In Texas, the economy was and has been humming and those that were even mildly motivated never seemed to lack for opportunity.
In the bigger cities, there were a lot more meetups and different activities to get involved in - people still seemed to have a lot of curiosity and enthusiasm for their pet interests and I find the near-obsessive way that many Americans pursue what fascinates them to be a virtue.
Another plus was that showy consumerism/materialism seemed to be falling out of favor. The social competition seemed to have shifted toward lifestyle and having the right taste in things (music, food, hobbies). As an example, whipping around in an Audi had less social prestige than being known to have a restored, classic jeep. Inviting someone out to eat Pho at a hole in the wall Vietnamese restaurant would net you more credibility and appreciation than treating them to Ruth's Chris.
At least to me this was progress.
There was also noticeable decay:
A lot more people had become shamefully fat and gross and grotesque. There seemed to be an uptick in people with body-image complexes, eating disorders on the one end or some kind of physique obsessions on the other. Tats, piercings, and other forms of body modification became mainstream and also more extreme, exaggerated, and ridiculous. You had Anglo Brian from accounting with a sleeve tat he got at the mall, and hapa Lauren from H.R. with some idiotic Arabic symbol behind her ear.
Mental health seemed worse : A lot of people, young and middle aged, seemed to be on one kind of psychoactive drug or another, a phenomenon that appeared more pronounced from the educated middle classes and up. I lost count of the number of acquaintances that were 'depressed' or had an 'anxiety disorder'.
Most individuals' personalities struck me as a strange mix of affable, polarized, rigid, confused, frivolous, and self righteous all at the same time. Like the OP mentioned, there seemed to be a major uptick in snark and irony and a decrease in simple humor and playfulness. If I had to summarize, I felt that an elevated affect of bad faith, coreless-ness, and agitation had taken stronger root in the common American's soul -- at least among my cohort where I was living in a big city in Texas.
Maybe all that was to be expected in response to a deteriorating inner life.
A lot has been said on the forum about the girls and I likewise I came to find the girls somehow had gotten worse over the years. Crass, bare, clumsy, clueless, and depleting. Being intimate and trying to have relations with them was the equivalent of eating cheddar rice cakes: moderate flavor but empty calories and undernourishing.
Social media had also become exceedingly significant in the lives of nearly all my peers. I couldn't help but notice that it was the prominent medium through which most of them sought validation, dispensed approval, and revealed their selves.
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Many changes then and now, and the prevailing sentiment in this thread is that these changes seem to be accelerating toward the worse.
Yet somehow I still feel that the reports of America's death are greatly exaggerated. There are numerous pockets of supreme excellence that abound in America and despite many national characteristics and traits that I consider odious, I still find that there remains a not-so-dormant strain of vigor, virility, creativity, optimism, and imagination that no other nation seems to possesses.
In the words of Charlie Sheen, a great and awful American, there's too much Tiger Blood in those veins.
The place isn't for me, but it's hard to ever count America out.