drip, drip of depression as the Long Emergency unfolds

“What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment.”

January 2000 was a time of relative optimism because the Cold War had ended ten years earlier with “our side winning” and eight years of the Democratic Party/Clinton presidency had been OK and things looked a little brighter in the Middle East for a while, etc.

But things are not really bright in regard to the macro trends so one-by-one the expression of sentiment is: “illusions dashed” . . . and the analyses of why are all over the place;

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/opinion/elites-euro-social-media.html