Changes in the world

I'll try just to observe and not go too deep into this, because there's not much you can do about them other than to accept. A lot of people (including myself) find it difficult to accept, hence the complaining.

Let's start with the things that I am familiar with.

Google is becoming the smaller player in town: Instead of just googling for everything, now people only google some things. And even when googling, it might actually be reddit that they want. Reddit, Chatgpt, Xiaohongshu, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, they are all the new options for users that weren't popular just 10 years ago.

Just as an example, it used to be just searching Google for recommended restaurants. Now you can look for actual reviews on Google maps, look at photos on Instagram, etc.

Our habits have evolved: Related to the above, we really expect all kinds of information at our fingertips. I no longer have patience to read through entire articles to find what I need, even though long articles were what the Google algorithm was rewarding. When there are gaps in time, I find myself scrolling Reddit, Instagram etc. People live in virtual worlds like Roblox.

To be honest, I'm not sure if there were similar behavioural changes for technological changes in the past. You can say that Google and Youtube also made reading more redundant in its turn.

I summarise this to think that the virtual world is getting bigger because we don't cease to spend ever more time on it.

Harder to learn skills unless you have special resources: I'll just use Singapore as an example. How does it work? Simple. There are more and more people in Singapore. More demand for resources. You want to get a driving license? Good luck competing for enough practice learning slots. You want to learn tennis? Good luck getting enough court bookings. If you have more money you can join a club or stay in a condo. In this way, your quality of life just goes down, even though on paper you have made more money. You can call it inflation? But it's not that obvious. It's also my hunch that it affects the young more than anything. It's not a priority for those politically important people and even the electorate. They already have driving licenses and just want cheap services and stability. It's the young that suffer the ever-increasing rules necessitated by the increasing number of people. No wonder it's all better in the virtual world.

Politically, things are not going to change: Here, I'm talking about Singapore but I suppose it can apply to most Western democracies. The Gen X of the world, the Lawrence Wong and the Jeffrey Siow, the civil servants of the world, don't actually have much incentive or know-how to change. All they've known, the system that they've succeeded in, is the current system. They have great benefits and salary for keeping the status quo. They're gonna do what scholar civil servants have always been doing, which is to chase policies with buzzwords that convenience the government and fail in two years (fail in that it spends more money or is a greater inconvenience than what we currently have). It's really not about raising the quality of life for the population. You know, when we complain, we haven't accepted the fact that they're just going take the money and do worse than nothing. For whatever reason, that is the setup we have and I have to accept it. Being angry means I haven't accepted it.