sus
Moderator
You shouldn't judge the world by YouTube comments of course but it's notable how fixated they are on nostalgia and regret and the sense that things will never be good again. There's no hope. I mean, YouTube is a nostalgia machine, so it's weighted in that sense of course, and I've built that into my equations.
The alternative hypothesis is that humans are nostalgic by nature, always have been. For instance, basically every society we view as a Golden Age—Renaissance Florence, Socratic Athens—itself believed that the golden age had come *just before* them, that they were a hundred years too later or whatever, that all the good stuff was past.