To think there's an off/bad vibe out there?

[ARichSeamToMine]

Does the world feel "off"?
Sorry if this seems ranty, I'm really interested in the vote though.

I'm feeling like there's a weird vibe out there.

I live in London, meet a lot of people through work and am not just judging by my circle.

I've been struggling to articulate this.

I'm late 40s and have seen recessions etc before.

Was out in the City tonight and I would say bar and restaurant were busy for a Monday night, so good there. The street I was on had several completely closed offices, pubs and two gyms, which was sad.

I understand that changes in social habits have been affected by working patterns etc.

I just feel there is something else at play

I increasingly find that people are a bit...strange? We saw groups in the bar, who presumably went out together from choice, just gazing at their phones. I was never anti tech but I'm starting to wonder if there is something in the idea that it affects communication skills.

my friend is worried about her dad because he constantly watches videos of fights - this is a TV show in the US now I hear.

I know a lot of people in my age group feel very "meh" and have little enthusiasm for things, but it's not just middle age. I don't think so anyway.

I'm happy if people are happy, but starting to wonder if they are happy. I meet a lot of people who don't want to go out, are up at 5am walking a dog, they take care of themselves with a good diet, often vegan, don't drink alcohol.

I'm not saying any of these things are bad. I can see if the City is reasonably busy on a Monday night, hospitality must be recovering, which is great.

But something out in the world feels off...like people aren't interested in much.

My online creative writing group has almost no posts. The tutor is regularly cancelling workshops and looking to do online only.

I'm in touch with a couple of exes and we are staying friends but they seem to do nothing but gaming. One in particular has no friends and is not bothered.

I might get flamed but I do wonder if men are particularly prone to doing less stuff if they are single.

Again, that is fine if they are happy. But I get this sense that people aren't happy.

Social anxiety seems very much on the rise.

Just curious to know if others get this vibe.

YABU - people are fine and just living life as usual

YANBU - people are losing communication skills and becoming unhappy

Agree about the gap between those who look at their phone all the time / are plugged into earphones & those who don’t.

It will be the same with children.

I'm really amazed by the response to this thread, so many of them. I thought I was having a crazy hippie moment tapping into a "vibe" but it's ,..there, I guess.

@Fishbones1 "I can’t cope with the world outside - it feels like a dog-eat-dog place where anything scary and dysfunctional could happen."

I don't want to trigger anything....curious to know if this a response to an event or just a feeling.

I mentioned in my first post that my friend's dad is watching videos of fights on social media. He is also sending them to her and saying "you should watch this" and getting cross she doesn't want to.

This is a level of crazy further than Jerry Springer? But if we watched them, I imagine we would become very anxious!

I think MN is very confusing but I'm not sure who you're addressing here.

It can't be me, because all I'm talking about is an odd feeling.

This thread is bringing out a lot of problems though and I am sorry for that. I wouldn't say "ooh, 21st century problems" just because we no longer have heads on spikes at the Tower.

I live in Italy and can confirm that the vast majority of people, young and not, are totally obsessed with their phones.

I agree. I'm in my mid sixties, my friends range from mid-50 to early 70s and we are all the same. None of us glued to our screens we just use them when needed (I'm probably online the most due to MN!!) otherwise we are busy and out and about. What news we get is via the old fashioned methods, TV and radio, or newspapers, and mostly we just get on with our lives. We've seen much of what is happening in the way of wars, disasters etc. before, and we just get on with life as normal rather than being constantly scared and on alert.

Incidentally, we've just got a new library in our town, and I'm heartened to see so many children and teens using it. Maybe there is still some hope.

So happening from about 1997 then? I can remember twigging that I needed to switch my mobile off in the late 90`s to avoid getting swamped by complete waffle from people at work who knew you were probably on the way on the bus and wanted to give you a "heads up" on what was happening that day when you got in, in reality they just liked the vision of themselves looking important braying into a (very ancient looking now) handset.

As I said, I find it odd that the OP just seems to be noticing this now?

Disingenuous. Smart phones which allowed owners to surf the web, use wifi, take photos and stream didn't become prevalent till the later part of the noughties and it wasn't until some years later that a large proportion of the population had them. There is already good research data showing that the rise in MH issues among young people correlates very closely with the mass adoption of smart phones which enabled cyber bullying, up-skirting, sexting, porn in your pocket and Tiktok social contagion among many other things.

That was the message we got in the UK i.e. New Zealanders had to shelter in place and weren’t allowed to leave the country or return home to NZ if they were out of the country when it was locked down. Was that actually fake news? I don’t trust MSM any longer.

I think it depends where you are in the country. But I think it’s perhaps worse in the UK than in some other comparable European nations. In my small town in Ireland we’ve got a brand new library being built. The town down the road is also getting a large new library, plus a new theatre and cultural centre. While the little town 10 mins in the opposition direction just last month got a new 500 seat music venue. Meanwhile new pedestrian/ bike friendly coastal paths and walks are constantly being constructed.

Part of the malaise IMO is the political choices the UK has made for the last 50 years or so. Heavy spending on wars. Small statism and dominant right wing ideology. Selling off green space. Low investment in education and in projects for the public good just for the sake of it (ie, libraries aren’t a huge boosts to GDP). Modern Britain just doesn’t seem to have a vision of what it WANTS to be or a stong sense of national identity/cohesion.

I take the point about phone addiction etc, but to an extent I’d see that as a symptom of a spiritual emptiness/lack of community rather than a cause.

You make some interesting points but given that you’d get arrested if you waved a British flag in most places these days it’d take a brave person to show a strong sense of national identity 😮

Also, I’m not sure what you mean by spiritual emptiness? There are a lot of places of worship in my local towns and cities and they seem very well attended. There are some churches too but they all look deserted to be fair.

In some ways I agree with you. Young adults relate to each other quite differently now - more disconnected IRL but more connected online quite a bit of gaming. But that’s their normal and most of them are still going to uni and getting jobs that require actual social skills. Bad politics and global crises have always been there and it’s really not worse now than in the past. Some people are rude arses but that’s always been so, and most people are nice.

OP don’t want to gaslight you but might you be peri menopausal and having a bit of increased anxiety about society/the world in general? It would explain you feeling somethings a bit off but not sure what.

Such an interesting thread, thanks OP.

I think there are several overarching issues which are definitely massive downers, to put it crudely. We are pretty much all aware of them, even if we choose not to directly focus on them.

Global warming.
The re-emergence of an immediately looming nuclear threat.
Growing economic inequality.
The dire calibre of global leaders.
Ever greater polarisation of, and antagonism between 'tribes' cleaving to different schools of thought.

Empathy is a human quality and technology enables us to see and hear of terrible suffering and misery all around the world, on an hourly basis. Some places right now are truly crucibles of pain and fear. It cannot fail to affect us.

I know many people will dismiss this as ludicrous, but I firmly believe that emotions are a form of energy. Physics tells us that energy is never destroyed but is transformed, and I think the whole world is currently infected by a contagion of negativity, variously expressing itself.

I think what we are all feeling is a lack of cohesion in society.
In years gone by people were proud to be British and all belonged to our society but, increasingly, people now belong to their own "tribe" whether that is as big as a race, religion, nationality, etc or smaller groups such as vaxxers/anti-vaxxers, neurodiverse groups, trans supporters/Terfs, etc. All of this is exacerbated by social media and media keeping folk in bubbles
I did hear a conspiracy theory a while ago that the downfall of the nuclear family, increase in porn, decline of religion, etc has all been engineered over decades to destroy western civilisation but I can't remember who was supposed to be behind it!

As a British person it’s painful to read but I am sure you have a point @anotherside . Another bad choice has to be brexit and maybe some people are morose because they realise they’ve been had. There was some big farming conference here today and it seems most farmers now list brexit as one of the causes for their current difficulties , it’s not the eldorado they were promised. It was the Trojan horse Johnson deployed to assuage his thirst for power and now we’re picking up the tab.

I can assure you that NZ was not locked down for years 😂

My family in Auckland certainly think it felt like it. They went from feeling smug that NZ had had only one or two cases to cursing Jacinda Ardern and wishing they'd followed the Swedish model.

Yes, I don't think Brexit's been mentioned but IMO that was more destructive and divisive than Covid. There are a number of people I no longer have anything to do with because of what Brexit revealed about them. It wan't so much that we disagreed about the EU, but that they showed me how aggressive, insulting and ill-informed they were through their social media posts. When you see someone you know and used to think was okay threatening someone who shares your views on Twitter it tends to shatter any illusions you have about them.

I also think a lot of respect has gone. Not sure why…….

Yeah, me too.

WFH has been good for my husband, and in many ways our family, but that doesn't mean it's overall socially positive. To some extent it's a reflection of workplaces that already had problems, or work set ups. Particularly the necessity for many to commute long distances to find housing. Long commutes have a high social cost.

I'm a fairly extreme introvert, so in some ways lock-downs were easy for me, but I don't think they were especially healthy. It became much harder to put myself out with people, and the thing is, in general that turns out to be rewarding even though it takes effort. Both on a large scale in terms of having dependable friends and community. But also in terms of mental health. Similarly to how it can be difficult to make the effort to go for a walk or to the gym, but you feel much better when you do and it's better for you long term too.

I was really strongly struck the other day about how weird stuff has become, culturally. In an unsettling way.

The Social Contract has been broken.

Yes I think there’s an odd vibe since about 6 months ago. It feels like a resignation that there’s no real plan or structure to local or national government. We are rural, pot holes, buses axed, taxis now only do SEND kid runs so not available, GPs only work part time to avoid tax, DHs work doesn’t even bother recruiting locally as nobody interested in working or training so has to use foreign visa scheme, south east so accommodation shortage. Those with savings and mortgage free doing well as interest rates rise so just doing their own thing - join a private gym, go to a private dentist, use a private GP to get referred, go to a bar or upmarket small plates place. If you have kids you stay in those bubbles. People don’t mix, we don’t go to the same swimming pool as the minimum wage workers, we don’t work or see anyone from the huge council estate in next town. Everyone I talk to is looking to minimise tax they pay and hours worked and just in a opting out way - not my monkeys not my circus way

NZ citizens not being allowed to return to the country was, IMO, one of the most shocking things that happened during the pandemic, only surpassed by the fact that so many didn't find it shocking at all. The most basic, fundamental, non-revocable right of citizenship, to be on the soil of your country, which can't even be taken from the most evil of criminals, quashed by the state - effectively leaving those denied entry stateless, dependent on the mercy of other nation-states where they had no citizenship.

I remember being a teenager and someone flying into my country from Africa who had caught ebola, and was returning for medical treatment. Much of the airport was quarantined so that this person could be transferred to a special hospital unit.

It does resonate with the general feeling of deep social breakdown.

I think you doth protest too much. We all looked on in complete disbelief that you weren't allowing your own citizens home and that your Premier didn't let anyone in for pretty much 2 years. Those quarantine hotels etc, we saw it you can laugh all you like but it looked bat shit crazy from where the rest of the world was sitting. Oh along with some of the Australian states too...

I remember watching This Morning during Covid where they were interviewing a celeb in NZ. He said he'd been out for a meal, bumped into some friends and then they all went for a drink. It was one of the times I had a big cry because it made me realise how much I missed socialising and spontaneity. I haven't been able to regain it.

Different countries managed Covid differently. I don't think our government managed it well.

It’s a load of rubbish. Every generation thinks this. Look at Ghost Town by The Specials and that was in the 80s.

Again, not sure who you are addressing.
London is not a ghost town by any stretch.