Some things are better many important things are worse. Consumer goods are doing well, and are high quality where regulations are intact, the good can be trivially inspected on purchase, or reputation provides enough of a backstop to prevent quality decreases. That's the upside of capitalism.
On the downside, many people are underemployed even in a so-called tight labor market, fewer and fewer people own anything like a house or car and are highly indebted. Few people have any savings whatsoever and the administration in conjunction with the monied classes seeks to strip whatever protections remain while scapegoating immigrants. Additionally, the US and the west appear to be better off than they are because we use the power of our military, monetary system, and relationships to make sure items are produced cheaply overseas with negligible labor protections resulting in abusive labor conditions.
Also, the planet is dying due to unlimited resource extraction.
The depressing truth ... how do you deal with it? I’ve been going through depression cycles — sometimes I can ignore the depressing nature that comes from holding an inherently non-positive expectation for the future as basically my best attempt to rationally assess the present and predict the future from it — ignorance is bliss? - but sometimes I embrace that most rational perspective as the “most likely source of truth” and promptly get incredibly (deeply) depressed ... to the point where i can feel myself faking “normal” interpersonal interactions and struggling against the fact that most or all locally true reasons for a hopeful outlook basically pale in comparison to the macroscopic reasons to be non-hopeful ...
It’s deeply sad to know that future generations won’t have as much opportunity as I had to enjoy life ... but to pity them will feel patronizing to them - and so what is left for them to know of me and me to know of them ...?
Dear citizens of the future, know that some of us are sorry for how your life will go — and know that some of us are not for they got theirs before you arrived and that was enough for them ... for some of us this wasn’t enough - we lived your pain in our imaginations while enjoying a physical life of abundance that, in the end, has helped you in no way at all ...
Consumer goods is great, things nobody really truly needs except to satisfy a missing dopamine hit from no longer really being engaged in society, nature, and life, only living an image, an appearance, existing only as a commodity.
Just about everything else is worse though. Wages stay the same while costs rise, markets continue to monopolize and we get fewer choices.
