Is life worse today compared to 10 years ago?
It sure feels like it.
Over the past year, there’s one conversation I feel like I’ve had almost every week.
The world is getting crazy. AI is going to take everyone’s jobs. People don’t want to work anymore. Everything is expensive. Politicians are evil.
All in the same conversation. And the conclusion is always the same: Life was better 10 years ago.
Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t.
But here’s what I know for certain. Spending your mental energy on that question is one of the most expensive things you can do.
That’s what this article is about.
Not whether life is actually worse.
But why do we think it is, and what to do about it?
Your brain is lying to you
Before you accept the story that everything is getting worse, consider the following. The human mind is not a reliable narrator of history.
A cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking. A mental shortcut that distorts how we see reality. We all have them. They’re not a sign of weakness or stupidity.
They’re just how brains work. The problem is that some of them are particularly good at making the present feel bleak.
There are three cognitive biases worth knowing about.
The first is rosy retrospection. This is the tendency to remember the past as better than it actually was. The research on this goes back decades.
We consistently rate past experiences more positively in memory than we did when they were actually happening. Your brain edits out the boredom, the anxiety, the uncertainty. What’s left is a highlight reel you never actually lived.
The second is declinism. This is the belief that society is in decline, that things are getting progressively worse. Historians and psychologists have documented this for centuries.
Every generation believes the previous one was better. The Romans worried society was collapsing. Medieval scholars mourned the loss of ancient wisdom. And yet here we are. Declinism feels true because the evidence for it is always available. You can always find something getting worse if you look hard enough.
The third is negativity bias. Bad news gets more of our attention than good news. It always has. Our brains evolved to notice threats. A tiger in the grass deserved more attention than a pleasant sunset.
That wiring hasn’t changed. But the media figured it out long ago and has been feeding it ever since. The world you see through a news feed is not a representative sample of reality. It’s the worst of it, curated and delivered directly to your nervous system.
Put these three together and you get a reliable machine for making the present feel worse than it is. Not because life is bad. But because your brain is doing exactly what brains do.
As the psychologist Daniel Kahneman observed, we are not thinking machines that feel.
We are feeling machines that think.
Emotions color memory. And memory colors how we see today.
To be honest, I’m not sure life is better either
Here’s where I want to be straight with you.
Until recently, some people confidently argued that life was objectively improving every year. Crime is going down. Cars are getting safer. More disposable income. Global poverty is declining. And so on.
I find it hard to make that argument with the same confidence today.
The previous decades had a clear story. From the 1980s onward, each decade brought visible improvements.
Technology got better. Opportunities expanded. Life became more comfortable and more connected. Every ten years, something genuinely changed.
What’s changed in your day-to-day life in the last ten years? You have a smartphone. A big TV. An energy-efficient car. Netflix. Online shopping. Those things existed in 2015 too.
The fundamentals of daily life have largely stayed the same, but the cost of living has gone up and the anxiety about the future has gone up with it.
So I’m not here to tell you everything is fine. I’m just saying that whether things are better or worse isn’t really the right question.
What actually shapes how you see the world
One thing I’ve come to believe is that your view of the world is largely shaped by when you entered the workforce.
I finished my master’s degree at the end of 2010. The global economy was in a deep recession. Negativity was everywhere. Jobs were scarce.
I remember the feeling of finishing years of education only to find there was nowhere to go. That shaped how I see economic risk to this day.
The people who entered the workforce around 2015 or 2016 got a completely different picture. Full growth mode. Opportunities everywhere. Optimism was easy.
Neither view is objective. Both are real.
Right now, many graduates are facing something similar to what my generation faced, but with a new twist.
The career they spent years training for has been disrupted by AI before they even got started. The dream collapsed between the first and final year of their degree. That’s genuinely hard.
But this is the nature of life. It rarely goes as planned. The world does not hold still while you prepare for it.
This is where Stoicism has helped me more than anything else I’ve studied.
The Stoics didn’t live in easy times either. Marcus Aurelius ruled during plagues, wars, and constant political instability. Seneca navigated corruption, exile, and eventually was forced to take his own life. Epictetus was born a slave.
And yet their message was consistent: focus on what you can control. Not on circumstances, but on your response to them.
Marcus Aurelius wrote in his private journal, for no audience but himself:
“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
Epictetus put it even more bluntly:
“Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.”
These weren’t motivational posters. They were tools for survival in genuinely difficult times. That’s why they still work.
Ruminating on the past is a waste of energy
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that life really was better in 2015. That the world really has gotten harder and more uncertain.
How does that thought improve your life today?
It doesn’t, and it can’t. The past is fixed. You can study it, learn from it, use it as context. But you cannot live in it.
And when you spend your energy lamenting a version of the world that no longer exists, you’re draining the one resource you actually need to navigate the version that does.
I’ve had these conversations too. The ones where someone spends an hour talking about everything wrong with the world and leaves the conversation feeling worse than when they started. I understand the impulse.
But at some point, you have to ask: What is this doing for me?
The Stoics called this the discipline of desire.
Wanting things to be different from how they are is the source of most unnecessary suffering. Not the circumstances themselves, but the resistance to them.
Seneca, writing two thousand years ago, put it this way:
“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare. It is because we do not dare that things are difficult.”
That’s not an instruction to be passive. The Stoics were not passive people. It’s an instruction to direct your energy where it can actually make a difference.
To stop fighting reality and start working with it. Ask yourself the question I come back to whenever I find myself in one of these conversations:
Is it worth my time to stress about the state of the world?
Most of the time, the answer is no.
Not because the world doesn’t matter. But because your energy matters more. And the best thing you can do with it is build something, help someone, or improve yourself.
That’s what you can control. Everything else is noise.