When I was a child and into early adulthood, I loved space. But, when I was a child and into early adulthood, I still believed my life would be school+career+wife+kids+live happily ever after. That life came crashing down when the realities of modernity hit me. Then covid happened and now I don't even know if we even went to the moon. I've lost trust in our institutions and I've lost care for our society. It has nothing to do with a lack of awe. I just want a better life than what this society has provided to me. Caring about space is a luxury I don't have anymore.

Decadence is a moral and spiritual disease, resulting from too long a period of wealth and power, producing cynicism, decline of religion, pessimism and frivolity. The citizens of such a nation will no longer make an effort to save themselves, because they are not convinced that anything in life is worth saving

• John Bagot Glubb

It could be part of it, but we've seen the death of comedy, action movies, and various other genres that have little to do with civilization aspirational goals. No one takes risks anymore and everyone is afraid to offend. That's a huge part of the problem.

Innovation died because of capitalism gone rogue min maxing fiat currency over actually building anything.

That's not true. The USA built elaborate conceptual superstructures for the population to feel obligated to shoot itself in the foot and work against its own self-interests in the form of mass-immigration and other suicidal delusions.

The decline of music began in the 1850s and it has been dead for almost 100 years now.

I never tied it to decline of media, but I can't argue. Even if you flip it around to other old media that isn't sci-fi at all, like westerns, they still were typically very aspirational just set in a different time period.

I've been complaining for ten years how we totally quit trying to do anything cool. We don't try to do the impossible anymore, unless you count impossible as mutilating a man to make it into a woman. Things like computers have become sterilized espionage for the masses. Even AI isn't exactly revolutionary as much as we've just managed to stack enough hardware computation to make it possible. It was always possible since the world of programmable computing existed, just the resources weren't there. I saw this video recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUE3FSIk46g This guy is an old OS dev who worked for Microsoft in the 90s, and it's about running AI algorithms on ancient hardware.

I'm not sure about music though. I put that on decline of IQ, or perceived decline of IQ as I'm not well versed on whether the IQ has declined a lot.

It comes down to a lack of moral foundation for anything. It's hard to describe the single biggest thing you lose when people become unrooted from deeper meaning, but 'awe' is one word, 'morality, 'goodness', 'grace', 'honour', 'love', 'pride', there's lots of them...

When leftist culture attacked the establishment in the past, certain artists might at least have been creating out of a passion and a feeling of deeper connection to something - some greater moral that they felt the establishment was getting in the way of or corrupting. But with nothing at the core except NPC firmware updates - in the same way there's nothing at the core of our national governments, no pride or representation of a shared value - then you just get a nihilism spiral, where your 'anti-'anything is just performative and the greatest 'establishment' you can possibly attack is the concept of morality or awe. That's how you get anti-aesthetic, asymmetrical, crap architecture popping up because someone got the bright idea that their design principle should be to attack the concept of awe itself.

I personally think it is confirmation bias.

How many hits from the 1920s can you name off the top of your head? The 1840s? The 1770s?

We get once-a-generation talents, and their works are preserved. And we look back upon the once-a-generation talent, and say "all works back then must have been at this quality".

To be a massive success, greater than all of history, a mere three people across thirty years need to make good content that will be engraved upon history. That would put us ahead of everything that came before.

There's a lot more slop now. It is true. There is also a lot more population, both to consoom the slop, and to produce it. But lets not pretend that the folk songs of 1540 were all bangers, either.

Or their own chickens have come home to roost. You cant traffick the prettiest girls and pay them off with stardom forever. Once feminizm became the MO, that gravy train came to a halt.

On the music side, the same thing happened, but with the mix in of niggers.