I’m not sure this is true anymore. The median American will never be able to afford their own home at current housing prices. Sure, we have a higher gdp per capita, but it doesn’t buy us the things we actually need like housing, health care, etc.

Perhaps what’s needed is to bring back family homesteads, but that doesn’t feel like much progress.

Do you know what life was like 100 years ago in the US?

35% of households had access to electricity.

About 20% had some sort of indoor plumbing, running hot water would be even rarer.

Most people heated their houses by shoveling coal or feeding wood fires.

Society was even more racially segregated and legally codified and brutally enforced by the government.

In warmer rural areas it wasn't uncommon for hookworm to be endemic due to shallow dug latrines.

1/12 children 10 to 15 were working instead of school.

Most adults did not graduate high school and illiteracy was not uncommon.

This whole subthread is quite strange. I'm still not sure what societal collapse GP is seeing.

I'd say the difference between those times is the feeling of agency/possibility of a good life (defining good life by what that meant at the time). Objectively, material conditions were worse, but due to a variety of factors, the average person felt that society was getting better. We'll put up with a lot of shit if we think it's temporary or something that we could change.

And some people honestly liked living like that. My great-great grandparents lived until the 1980s (born in the 1870s) and refused to get indoor plumbing. People are weird and sentiment matters.

Well that notion of honesty is subjective and meaningless.

Subjective, absolutely.

Meaningless, no, because we're hairless chaos apes living in hives of other hairless chaos apes and plenty of our fellow apes live their lives based on this subjective measure which means it needs to be considered in governing and managerial decisions.

I want to add that the current feeling the country is getting worse, in my opinion, is pushed by right wing media.

One of the main themes of conservatives is that then is better than now as well as holding back change their supporters push the notion that things are getting worse (regardless if it's true or what specifics) to help them get elected

The right are open about pushing 'it's worse than it's ever been'. The left prefers to memory-hole history and combine that memory hole with thought terminating hyperbole: They like to present threats completely divorced of historical context.

(I worked in political communications and spent a couple of years getting lists of stories and headlines from all sides of the aisle fed to my email.)

One example of this is all the fear-mongering the Dems/their media arms do around things like abortion rights or queer rights/safety. (And before anybody comes for me, I'm a lesbian so I'm impacted by both.) Like apparently I'm supposed to be constantly terrified by the backsliding on both. And they do concern me but like I grew up in the 90s? I personally remember things being worse and I wasn't curled up in a ball throwing money at the Dems to Save Me. (And speaking of memory holing, as a gay millennial I remember quite clearly how long it took for the Dems to get behind gay marriage: Let's not pretend the current socially progressive planks are anything other than realizing we're a voting bloc that can be pandered to as hard as the MAGA people. I have no doubt the Dems would throw queer people under the bus tomorrow if it were a more viable electoral strategy to do so.)

> rapidly declining human fellowship, companionship and participation

What is the evidence for this?

This just reads like the eternal conservative lament that society is going down the tubes.

The evidence is that I can't even be bothered to look up evidence for you. :-)

So what are people missing today?

Tradition, nationalism, religion etc. were much stronger a hundred years ago. IE there was a society worth working to participate in.

Finland is in the top position in the world happiness report in 2022. Followed by Denmark and Iceland in second and third place. Switzerland, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Sweden, Norway, Israel and New Zealand, were among the top 10 'happiest' countries in the world [1].

Except for Israel wouldn't you say though counties have some of the lowest religious participation? What about nationalism?

I'm not trying to prove the opposite of you view as this doesn't show causation but I think it sufficiently counters your view