> Now, in the 2010s, under American capitalism, we young people all have to pack ourselves into overcrowded apartments and nobody can own their own car.

The people packing themselves into overcrowded apartments and going carfree are doing so by their own choice. It's a fad among a particularly vocal group of young people, and it's not nearly as large a percentage of the population as people think they are [0].

The suburbs are cheaper than the cities. I'm just not seeing what you're describing in my own life. I live in the burbs; almost everyone I know has a car. I'm one of the only people I know who doesn't own one, and it's entirely by choice. Besides myself, I know one guy who doesn't own a car, and he can't drive because he's legally blind... but his wife owns a car. Half the people I know live in houses, and the other half live in suburban apartments... which are far larger than the tiny, cramped studio apartments you find in cities. I've got a townhouse myself.

> Living standards have declined.

And gotten quite better in some respects. Technology has made the world of my dreams a reality.

I'm so glad I can keep in touch with friends who I'm not able to see anymore thanks to us moving away/changing jobs/etc. I'm glad I can (legally, even!) watch or read all kinds of media without leaving my chair. Man... if someone told 12-year-old me that I can pay $10/month to watch every single episode of some of my favorite TV shows, I'd think they were messing with me. Back then, if I wanted to catch up on something, I had to pray for the network to air just the right reruns.

> Personal freedoms and privacy have retreated.

Personal freedoms are greater than ever. Especially if you're a minority. LGBT rights, women's rights, and PoC rights area all better than they ever were. Sure, we have a ways to go, but 50 years ago life sucked if you were LGBT, a woman, or a PoC.

I'm a woman who works in a technical field and has no interest in getting married or having children. 50 years ago, that would have been nigh impossible. I'm also openly LGBT, and nobody bats an eye. 50 years ago, being openly LGBT would have gotten you killed unless you lived in your city's "gayborhood", in which case you were basically trapped in a ghetto and couldn't take part in the rest of society. Seriously, back then, being accused of being gay had the same effect as being accused of being a pedophile (i.e. it would completely and utterly wreck your life). And forget about being trans... assuming the medical establishment would even let you transition (which wasn't likely), your only option was to go deep stealth as soon as possible.

And while race relations sure as hell aren't perfect, they're a far cry better than the era of racial terrorism that lasted until the '60s. You want to see what it was like to be black in the south in the '30s? Go read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor. Segregation was just the tip of the iceberg. And there's an excellent article out there on what MLK actually did [1].

Or hey, abortion wasn't always legal.

Or being able to watch media that handles sensitive subjects: movies used to be under the strict control of the Hays Code, cable television didn't exist, and broadcast television was subject to strict regulation by both the FCC and network standards and practices. You couldn't even say the word "pregnant" on TV, for crying out loud.

Even as late as the '80s, being a geek would get you beaten up, your face shoved in a toilet bowl, etc. Hey, I went to high school in the early '00s, and that attitude was still floating around in a lesser form: nobody got violent, but if I mentioned comic books or fantasy, the class would laugh at me. Things got better for kids not too long after I graduated, and I'm glad today's kids don't have to worry about being pariahs for being nerds. John Cheese did a pretty good writeup of that on Cracked, of all places [0].

And back in the day, railing about how the system sucks, the man is out to get anyone, and America is evil would be enough to get somebody blacklisted. Now, nobody bats an eye. In some circles, it's even considered cool.

Now, yeah, privacy has gone down, but that's because we like it better this way. We chose it for ourselves. We like sharing our lives on Facebook. We like posting photos of everything, checking into places, writing status update after status update. We enjoy keeping in touch with people who have moved out of town. It used to be that if somebody moved away, you'd never hear from them again. I don't miss those days. Moving on: we love Google Street View, and we don't care if we can see people watering their lawns because Street View is awesome. Basically, we chose to give up some privacy because giving up some privacy has made our lives a whole lot better.

> Science is being rejected rather than advanced.

Science is constantly advancing. Read some journals, check out the ArXiv, read any of the numerous science articles that pop up on HN every day.

Yeah, sure, we have a whole bunch of antivaxxers and climate change deniers around, and unfortunately they're in the government now. But we've always had these kinds of people. Go look up the Scopes Monkey Trial. Go look up the massive backlash against plate tectonics; deniers managed to maintain control over that issue for 50 years before plate tectonics was finally accepted (it was first proposed in 1912, and the deniers shut down all discussion of it until the 1960s).

> It's a low-grade dystopia.

Maybe I should ping a former co-worker of mine, whose parents escaped the Khmer Rouge to start a new life in the US, and ask her if life here is even remotely comparable to 1970s Cambodia.

Or, since my family is Jewish, I could ask my mom to tell the story of her second cousin. She and her parents escaped Nazi Germany when she was a child by walking to either Spain or Portugal (I forgot which) and stowing away on a ship to the US. Can you imagine a dystopia so bad that escaping it justified walking across half of Europe on foot?

I'd go on but edblarney nailed everything else I wanted to say: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=edblarney

[0] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/02/04/the-high-co... points out that Millennials are actually moving away from coastal urban centers and into suburbs in "flyover country", despite the popular perception that Millennials are all preferring to crowd themselves into downtown areas.

[1] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/8/29/1011562/- No, he didn't end racism. He did, however, end what was a straight-up terrorist regime.

[2] http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-modern-kids-dont-unders...