Isolation And Loneliness”: 25 Problematic Trends In Current Society

We look at how the world has changed and have to admit there has been quite a shift in many aspects. From technology to principles and values, people’s ideologies have undergone significant transformations. However, whether these changes are necessarily good or bad is rather subjective.

There are some things that many people admit they have observed that left them rather concerned. This led to one Reddit discussion asking, “ What worrisome trend in society are you beginning to notice?” going viral. Folks responded with opinions varying from overconsumption to the introduction of AI and others which we’ve shared in the gallery below.

#1 The sheer lack of empathy people have now. It’s genuinely startling.

#2 The absence of critical thinking in any sphere of influence.

#3

Illiteracy- it’s an actual pandemic.

#4 Anti-intellectualism, part of the distrust of ‘experts’ and ‘elites’.

#5 People can’t spell. Most often noticed in online postings, but even novels and professional articles are frequently riddled with typos or other mistakes.

#6 Overconsumption.

#7 Parents aren’t parenting anymore -kids need rules, consistency, and structure!

#8 Instead of helping someone in need, whip out that phone camera and record it.

#9 Wages are not keeping up with prices.

#10 People don’t believe in facts when they don’t fit their opinion. They also don’t make any effort to look something up if they don’t know it, instead, they make up their own “facts”.

#11 We don’t own anything. Everything is subscription.

#12 AI starting to use AI as a source.

#13 Everyone is on their phone and missing the life right in front of them. Children feel ignored because their parents are staring at screens instead of them.

#14 The lack of common manners like please and thank you.

#15 No business takes responsibility anymore. You just always get the run around. If you have a problem, there is, in many cases, nobody who will fix it.

This month, I had $700 overcharged on my phone bill. I called customer service, and after waiting an hour on hold, they said I needed to go to the store. I went to the store, and they said I needed to call customer service. I convinced them I had and they told me someone would have to do it another day. Ended up having to go back a few times to get it fixed.

Or a couple years ago, I ordered groceries from the website of the grocery store. Something got messed up and I called the store. They said I needed to call some other company who actually does the shopping and have them fix it. The other company wouldn’t even take my call! Just a robot that wouldn’t help.

It really wasn’t that long ago that things were much better.

#16 Me-ism. It’s become all about what someone wants, everyone else can go to hell.

#17 How much the rich people treat us like expendable puppets. Getting us fighting each other over the dumbest s**t, keeping us distracted, bribeing our governments, and of course invading our lives at every angle they can get.

#18 The rejection of evidence-based science.

#19 Every damn person in the U.S. is expecting you to tip them.

#20 Death of Expertise. Everyone’s opinion is now valid.

#21 Authoritarian personalities being accepted as ok again. As if we don’t have endless examples from all eras of history showing how bad that turns out.

#22 Social media making people feel like their lives are “less than.”.

#23 Lack of humanity, empathy and community. Being primitive, ignorant and sociopathic is becoming more and more of a virtue. Society is becoming more and more mean-spirited.

#24 Our brains being cooked by short internet content, 6 seconds at a time. Find it harder a harder to pick and focus on a book..

#25 The difficulty of using the internet.

Yes I accept the cookies, close the advert, skip the sponsor, oh no this video is 30 minutes on how to toast bread, find a 5 minute another one, no dislike button, ah yes let me favourite it, on no I was auto signed out for security reasons, get my phone to 2fa, oh I need to also type in the code from my email, 2fa into my email, no I wouldn’t like an office 365 subscription, complete the recaptcha, oh my password expired and can’t be set again as the old one? I’ll just login to YouTube using google. or was it using my Apple ID? Or Facebook? or twitter, or Microsoft account… oh god I can’t remember which one I originally used. Oh and while I’m ranting, search engine results have definitely gotten worse over time.

Shanilou Perera

Shanilou has always loved reading and learning about the world we live in. While she enjoys fictional books and stories just as much, since childhood she was especially fascinated by encyclopaedias and strangely enough, self-help books. As a kid, she spent most of her time consuming as much knowledge as she could get her hands on and could always be found at the library. Now, she still enjoys finding out about all the amazing things that surround us in our day-to-day lives and is blessed to be able to write about them to share with the whole world as a profession.