52 Posts That Show What Life In America Really Feels Like Right Now

If you think the people who posted these entries are just critical doomsayers, you'd be wrong. Other people online with some expertise are pointing out that the 2020s might be the worst decade for American popular culture, for example. Music critic and historian Ted Gioia has declared on his Substack, The Honest Broker, that America no longer has any "creative energy."

In an interview with The Atlantic, Gioia said that nowadays, everything seems like a regurgitation of something from the past. Countless reboots and revivals of movies and TV shows, the unwillingness of entertainment companies to take risks, and social media algorithms that show us "slight variations of our favorite things" are all part of a plan by mysterious forces to impose stagnation on us, according to Gioia.

Take a moment to think about your tastes, Pandas. When you think about the movies, books, and music that you enjoy and watch/read/listen to and come back to repeatedly, what decade are they from? Are you a fan of contemporary entertainment, or do you find yourself thinking, "It was better in the old days"?

Evidence would suggest that the latter is truer. In 2024, for example, people listened to more music that was released in the years before than to newly released music. There is also a trend that every year, "catalog music" (18 months or older) takes up a greater percentage of the albums people stream online.

In 2024, 72.6% of total album-equivalent music consumption in the United States was catalog music. In 2025, that share was even higher. Only 24.2% of new ("current") music accounted for streams in the U.S., while 75.8% were of "old," catalog music. While not particularly alarming, it still signals a trend that people might not be interested in music that comes out nowadays.

It's not just music: people think that movies, fashion, TV, and sports have all gotten worse in the 2020s. In fact, in YouGov's 2024 poll about the best and worst decades, Americans named the 2020s as the worst of the last century. There is, however, a certain amount of bias when it comes to these types of polls. People have a tendency to remember the decades when they were children as the best and perceive the current times as the worst.

For example, many Americans think this is the worst decade for the economy. But when we look at the Great Depression (when unemployment exceeded even the biggest numbers we saw during the lockdown in 2020), it can give us perspective. Still, almost anything related to politics can be explained by which party is in the government. "People whose party is in the White House always have more favorable sentiment than people who don't," director of the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers Joanne Hsu told WaPo. "And this has widened over time."

What the YouGov researchers have also found in their 2024 survey is that despite thinking that the many things that made the U.S. great are gone, this decade is still the one they would rather live in. Experts say that this is a natural part of "declinism," the belief that the world is getting worse. Even when we're on vacation, we often don't enjoy the trip to the fullest during it and focus on our lost luggage and the annoying mosquito bites. When we get home and a few days pass, though, the trip doesn't seem that bad, and we would actually gladly do it all over again.

What do you think about the current state of the U.S., Pandas? Do you buy into the declinist view that everything in America is going down the toilet? Or do you think it's just doomsayers blowing it out of proportion? Let us know your thoughts in the comments! And be sure to check out some things that are normal to Americans but that the non-American mind cannot comprehend.

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