Has society gotten easier or harder? The usual rebuttal is that society is wealthier now compared to, say, 30 years ago. And this is true if you go by the objective economic data, but at the same time it’s hard for me to think of examples where American society has necessarily gotten easier or feels easier. ‘Society becoming wealthier’ and ‘how easy things feel’, are not necessarily mutually inclusive, as the latter also has a subjective element.
I argue that society has become both wealthier and harder at the same time, except for some pockets where it’s easier by taking the path of least resistance. A common characteristic is how American society is increasingly characterized by extremes, like wealth inequality or elite college admissions. On the one hand, we see an epidemic of coddling in higher education. Students are often shielded from controversial or uncomfortable truths and may leave school unprepared for adult life. There are reports of college students, even for Harvard, needing remedial algebra. But this is juxtaposed with a cutthroat job market, and getting into a good college has never been harder.
Consider the following:
Applying for jobs. In the past, ‘showing up’ and being of ‘good moral character’ was sufficient to be hired. Today, applicants must pass a dizzying gauntlet of impersonal screenings and interviews, only to to be ghosted at the end or passed up for one of hundreds of other applicants applying for that exact same position, even for the lowest paying of entry-level jobs. On the upside, this possibly means better-qualified employees under such an extensive vetting process, but it makes the process much harder and dehumanizing for applicants.
The difficulty of finding work is not just limited to the service sector. Newly-minted computer science grads can also attest to this, such as on Reddit. This is corroborated by data showing that the unemployment gap between college graduates and non-grads has finally closed, at least for men:
Landing an interview is really hard, let alone a job, even when qualified:
It’s not that the rejection is the only problem, but there is no way to fix the problem, as the automated process leaves no room for useful feedback, only that you’re not good enough. At least rejection in the context of dating has some human feedback, compared to a rejection email or being ghosted. It’s not surprising that many young people have chosen to ‘opt out’ of this if possible, either living with parents or friends than be subjected to this humiliating routine.
College admissions. The acceptance rate of top-tier colleges is the lowest ever. Parents have optimized their children’s lives in the hope of getting into one of these elite institutions. Consider Pomona College, although not an Ivy League school, has the same acceptance rate as Dartmouth, at around 6%, and a lower acceptance rate than Cornell at 8%. And then of course rising tuition costs and student loan debt, which combined with a worse job market, is a double-whammy.
Applying to graduate school invites the same problems. And then finding work, or landing tenure. Stories abound online of adjuncts working for peanuts, or postdocs unable to secure positions despite being qualified and having publications. This is perhaps symptomatic of the popular ‘elite overproduction’ hypothesis. There are too many talented people vying for too few slots.
Publishing papers has also become harder and acceptance rates for decent journals has plunged, tracking the increased competitiveness seen elsewhere in life. From the paper “Nine Facts about Top Journals in Economics”, by David Card and Stefano DellaVigna:
Using a data set that combines information on all articles published in the top-five journals from 1970 to 2012 with their Google Scholar citations, we identify nine key trends. First, annual submissions to the top-five journals nearly doubled from 1990 to 2012. Second, the total number of articles published in these journals actually declined from 400 per year in the late 1970s to 300 per year most recently. As a result, the acceptance rate has fallen from 15 percent to 6 percent, with potential implications for the career progression of young scholars…
The papers themselves have gotten much longer, typically requiring many authors and involving dense statistical analysis:
Content production. Musicians today have to compete with so-called AI slop, which has become so pervasive it even has its own Wikipedia page. Spotify not only pays a pittance per play, but also bypasses artists entirely with AI-generated music. This is seen in other mediums, like writing, where is there either more competition from AI or ‘unpaid contributors’ from developing countries, where the cost of living is much lower. The likes of Jay Leno, David Letterman, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, who became wealthy and famous during the ‘pre-social media era’, did not have to compete with nobodies on Twitter who can write arguably better jokes and are paid in ‘eyeballs’ or ‘exposure’.
This ties in with the ‘brandification’ of the internet. In the ‘aughts’, YouTube was still a niche medium. Anyone with an interesting video with minimal promotion and production value could go viral, and although this still happens, the competition, like as seen with everything else, is much greater, too. Mr. Beast for example routinely gives away life-changing-sized prizes. That is what you’re up against. These are people with studios, interns and other staff, professional equipment, lots of money, and so on. Entire businesses now revolve around creating effectively TV-quality content at scale for YouTube.
But at the same time, the major social networks seem hostile to self-promotion. This is seen on TikTok or Instagram, where the ability to post a link is limited to one’s profile page. Facebook and Twitter are thought to algorithmically suppress links or disable previews so as to lower clickthrough rates and encourage buying advertising instead. Reddit obviously does still allow links, but that too has become much more heavily moderated over the past decade at both an admin and sub-Reddit level. A decade ago, it was much easier to be like “Here, check out my website/blog/article etc.” So although the pie is bigger in terms of larger brands and more potential money, getting started without connections is also much harder it seems.
As part of the winner-take-all economy and society, either you have to choose between being the best at the world at something, or settle for table scraps, without much else. One can argue that no one owes musicians or other content creators a living, but this is orthogonal to how it has also become harder for those who want to make a living at it or otherwise stand out. Established acts still earn millions through touring and royalties, seemingly immune to the slop or dilution seen elsewhere. Same for AI: top researchers are being poached for hundreds or tens of millions of dollars, yet this is juxtaposed with the above stories of long-stretches of unemployment for qualified applicants in tech. This is not a new development per se, such as athletes signing huge contracts. But it has gotten more lopsided, with bigger payouts for the top, and more adversity and competition for the rest.
True, technology has made it easier and cheaper to create content, such as AI for image generation or Bandcamp or Soundcloud instead of needing to rent a music studio. But things like acclaim or income are harder due to also more competition, or higher standards. In the latter, short math papers that improved-upon or expounded on existing results were frequently published in the 1950s-80s, having read many of those papers myself in my own research, but nowadays papers tend to get rejected from decent journals unless they solve a longstanding problem or revolutionize a field. Yes, high standards are generally good, but not everyone can be a Terrance Tao or the Beatles.
Housing affordability, or lack thereof. The unaffordability of housing in the US has become a ‘meme’ on social media unto itself. Reddit subs such as /r/povertyfinance have thousands of members and posts of people struggling with everyday expenses, let alone buying a home. It’s also borne out by data comparing median income in certain metro areas to the median home price. Young people are scolded for failing to measure up to their parents or for delaying adulthood, but home ownership is an essential part of what it means to be an adult, so not being able to afford a home is a perfectly valid excuse, if by ‘delaying’ literally not having enough money.
But conversely, as part of this juxtaposition, life has gotten easier in the sense that standards or expectations have been lowered for large segments of the population. After graduation, many young adults seem to struggle with the transition to independence, with a significant number of people in their 20s and 30s stuck in a prolonged adolescence, unable or unwilling to fully launch into adulthood, and society as a whole seems perfectly content with this, compared to the ’70s, when there was a draft and the expectation was young people would go off to die in wars. A recurring theme of modern dystopian fiction is a public placated by entertainment. Between YouTube for children and Netflix for adults, cheap entertainment has replaced the role of parenting and adulthood responsibilities. Or pets replacing children (so-called ‘dog moms’, which is used unironically). Yet society has become much harder for those who aspire for more in life than just coasting along or doing the minimum.
Anti-social behavior. This is harder to quantify and is not necessarily a new development, although as I discuss in my article “The Age of Rage“, a case can be made it has gotten worse in recent years, whether it’s ‘social media mobs’ or people being worse-behaved in public. Even Vice magazine, hardly a stalwart of traditional or conservative social mores, observed the trend in the 2024 article “Why Can’t People Be Normal in Public Anymore?” Same for The Atlantic in the 2023 article “How America Got Mean”. Again, this is hardly a right-wing publication. I think educated center-left liberals are among the most acutely aware of these trends now, not just conservatives. Growing up, they were told that social progress, withholding judgment, and democracy were always good, and now, decades later, they are seeing there are some definite downsides to those beliefs.
This is part of the trend of America at least resembling a third world nation. For example, extreme levels of wealth inequality, but instead of drug lords or oil sheiks at the top, such positions are occupied by AI and finance CEOs. Extreme levels of wealth concentration is not bad per se and is an inevitable consequence of a society where some individuals produce outsized returns to productivity, but it has become lopsided to a degree never before thought imaginable. America’s tech hubs are creating the future, yet much of the rest of the country has regressed or is frozen in time. In reputedly the most prosperous country in the world, stores can barely keep in the cash in the registers, either because they literally do not have the money, or for fear of being robbed. ‘Breaking a $20’ can be a major ordeal these days, let alone $100, which is still somehow considered enough money to arouse suspicions, when AI companies and the elite spend millions like nothing. It’s just a weird juxtaposition of America becoming richer and poorer at the same time, all in the same city or neighborhood even.
Food prices, especially dining out. Americans who are old enough can remember when the McDonald’s ‘dollar menu’ was literally just that–for only a dollar you could buy a wide range of individual food items. This was gradually downscaled to fewer items until eventually discontinued altogether. On one extreme, billions of dollars are being poured into AI without an afterthought, even for companies that have only dozens of employees and no product, yet restaurants are skimping out on even the basics like napkins and other condiments. This ties in again of how American society is simultaneously getting wealthier and also poorer and worse off.
I had this experience with fast food recently. I go maybe a few times a year so in my head McDonalds breakfast should be 5 dollars
Roll up to pay and they say 16 or 17. Its shocking https://t.co/Oz90zEoUuw
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) August 7, 2025
Post-Covid saw the surge in restaurant prices, along with food prices and inflation in general, as fast-food and casual dining became a ‘premium experience‘ for people with lots of of disposable income, instead of just about getting a quick affordable meal. In hindsight, restaurants were leaving a lot of money on the table pre-Covid by not raising prices aggressively enough. And on top of that, there is the rampant tip-inflation, which too has its own Wikipedia page. Customers are effectively coerced at the point of sale terminal to have to choose between multiple exorbitantly-high tipping options, while the cashier and other customers look on–making the “no tip” option feel socially awkward. (I usually pay in cash to avoid this situation.)
User-summitted content. This is more specific than the others and is less symptomatic of broader societal trends, but the internet feels much more strict now. It cannot be just blamed on politics, like was seen in 2016 after Trump won or in 2020 during Covid, which saw an intensification of discourse and censorship. It’s rather that there is less tolerance for missteps. On Stack Exchange and related sites, for example, I have observed questions are deleted much more often and moderators are much more strict compared to a decade ago. Questions that would have been up-voted in the early 2010s are downvoted and removed for being uninteresting or redundant. Or quality answers are ignored instead of up-voted. A recently as 2015, calculus 1 or 2 level questions, such as “how to perform trigonometric substitution” were seldom closed or downvoted (although this could also be due to survivorship bias).
On Reddit, moderators for large (and even not-so-large) subs have implemented an increasingly Kafkaesque system of rules, many of which are automated and hidden (such as by karma score, account age, or other requirements) so you have no way of knowing you are breaking them until it’s too late. I understand the rationale of preventing spam, but the role of moderators is to actively moderate, not to outsource everything to an algorithmic filter. In 2006, when Reddit launched, the founders created many alt accounts to create the appearance activity to jumpstart their fledgling community. Today this would be punished by a site-wide suspension all the accounts
In conclusion, it’s hard for me to think of examples where I can say with a high degree of confidence that things are easier. Maybe GLP-1 drugs and treating obesity. That has been a revolution. AI can eliminate the tedium of daily tasks, like writing emails. But everything else just seems harder. Not only ‘macro things’ like the job market or housing affordability, but even down to the local, like more hostility on the streets and online. If I had to start again, compared to 2007-2020 or so when things were easier, I know I would fail, because none of those methods that worked then would work now, and nothing now works. I consider myself lucky having exited at the tail end of that boom. Compare to the early 2010s when people shared cat pictures or funny videos, to now everything being ‘on brand’ or ‘content’.