It Will Always Look Easier
Content is content, but there is a particular trend worth naming that I’m noticing. I don’t know what it’s officially called.
In my mind, I’ve been calling it “doom” or “doomer” content.
The format is consistent. Videos and other forms point out how much easier it was to accomplish something 20, 50, 100 years ago. How affordable things were, how attainable. It’s designed to produce a specific feeling, and it does its job well. The comments agree and make jokes geared in the same direction.
Plenty of things were easier back then.
This is evidently true. Plenty of things were harder too. I wasn’t alive 50 years ago, but history is not difficult to read.
There is a line from a film most people know: “Get busy living or get busy dying”. I find myself returning to it. Because the space between those two ideas are not neutral. It produces a kind of passive resentment that is very easy to live inside.
It’s easy to wallow with the thought of “if only I was born in 1950, I’d have bought a house in San Francisco”. Instead, I offer an alternative. Pick up The Gray Collar Collective skills or look where no one is looking. No one is building a robot that makes custom wrought iron gates in the next decade. Nor is AI creating hand-thrown ceramics. Maybe just go independent. Become genuinely expert at something people need. Build the kind of judgment, relationships, and reputation that no agentic tool can replicate.
The people who figure that out tend to stop watching and start doing.