Online or offline. News keeps reporting about loneliness and disconnection, but in my experience it’s just that it’s harder to interact with people in a civil way because they are so hostile, angry, and arrogantly convinced their viewpoints and experiences are the only legitimate ones.
Not to mention the lack of civility towards servers and other service workers. I can’t recall if I was just indifferent 10 years ago, but on a almost daily basis it blows my mind how openly rude many people are to servers and such, which seemed like a much more rare thing when I was younger.
My experience is that folks are much more openly vile in person now, than they ever were in the 2010s. I see a lot of the vile online discourse openly discussed in real life between people, and also directed at myself.
For example I’ve riding bicycles my entire life, and never did anyone make a big fuss about it. The past few years people I meet will openly tell me to fuck off and die and what a douche I am if the topic comes up. Or they might go to the other extreme of patronizing me about it. Either way, it’s not longer like a fact or a quirk, it’s an Issue. in 2015 nobody cared that I rode a bike to work.
Which is exactly what I see in a lot of online discourse, people going to one extreme or the other, very rarely treating it as not a big deal. About so many things.