There’s a big Economic Supercycle which lasts about 100 years, or around 3 generations.

We’re now at the most painfull point of that supercycle, when wealth has accumulated in too few hands as has real power, inequality has exploded, social mobility has crashed and growth has ground to a halt, so the elites have switched from capturing most of Economic Growth to pillaging existing wealth from the rest of the population - a handful of people are fine, most people are getting poorer and young people most definitelly don’t have the opportunity to “be anything you want”.

All this, of course, translates into social discontent, increased autoritarianism from those in power in order to keep said power (just notice the fast growing desire from widespread surveillance amongst mainstream politicians as well as the increase in anti-demostration legislation in supposedly Democratic nations) and political movements subsidized by the elites (i.e. the populist Far Right) that scapegoat foreigners (immigrants, “interference” from other nations) for the pain that most people are feeling so that they’re not punishing the local elites for their pillaging and the way they mismanage the country.

All this in turn translates into more wars: if you’re scapegoating foreigners for the pains in your country and/or there is not enough economic growth for the elites to grow more wealthy, then it’s only natural to go to war with other nations, either to “punish” them for their “fault” in the pain of the population or to take their shit to make the local elites richer.

Naturally, when people are discontent and have no real hope to change the way the place they live in is managed or they live somewhere that keeps getting attacked by foreign military because their elites want to steal your shit, a lot of them turn into “extremists”. Also a lot of things which are pretty natural and democratic things to do start getting painted as “extremism” by the mass media owned by the above mentioned elites and/or made illegal by said elites (when directly in power) or the politicians they bought.

And then most of this shit feeds around into reduced Economic growth, so less of it for the elites to capture, hence the elites pillaging even more, propagandize the “foreign enemy” even more, push even more for Far-Right parties and reduced democratic rights even more.

Social flows from Economic and Economic flows from Social.

• The first school shooting in the US was in the late 1800s.

• During an 18 month period between 1973 and 1975 there were an average of five terrorist bombings a day in the US.

• There were more serial killers in the 1970s than any decade since.

• Before 1974 a women could not open a bank account unless she had her father’s or husband’s permission.

• Do yourself a favor and do not research what Belgium was doing in Africa in the 1940s and 1950s…

• At the peak of the Irish Potato famine British companies were exporting 150 tons of beef a week out of Ireland. In fact the Irish Potato famine meets all the criteria of state sponsored genocide.

• 1816 is called the year without summer. A volcano erupted in Singapore and put so much ash into the air summer never happened. In North American there were heavy snowfalls into July. So many crops died in Europe that food riots erupted and massive disease out breaks occurred.

These factoids are not meant to depressed you. They just illustrate that there have always been major problems and fucked up things to solve. We should not destroy ourselves because of them, we have to address them.

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Authoritarianism is increasing globally and with it come atrocities.

It’s not that it’s more volatile, but that the volatility is coming closer to home (and 24 hour news amplifies it).

South America is at its most peaceful in about 100 years, South East Asia currently only has 1 war ongoing, while slightly up from 0 in 2010, is still lower than most of the last 100 years.

Africa is more stable overall and developing better for most people, with some exceptions.

Although if you mean volatile as “the US is no longer sure it can curbstomp any likely military opposition”, then yes. That is now true due to other nations’ improvement, and changes to asymmetrical warfare capabilities.

I think that it was just the last 30 years being an anomaly. In Europe you had lots of very interesting stuff happening pre WW2. Also pre WW1 was calm just briefly. After WW2 you had communist revolutions in the east which took a while, then in the west you had Basques, Northern Ireland, extremists in Italy and Germany doing interesting happenings. And decolonization struggle in the rest of the world. All very eventful. Real calm for Europe came after end of cold war up until 2014 Ukraine. And that is if you disregard the wars in ex Yugoslavia that was ongoing for 10 years! And included eventful things like a genocide and several ethnic expulsions. So maybe real calm was for all in all 14 years in the 21st century…not to say that Middle East was anything but calm in that period. And that Russia ended its civil war circa 2008 and invaded Georgia that same year. That leaves us with 6 whole consecutive years of calm on European continent.

It seems to me that many responses in this thread lean towards oversimplification which in turn garners the most votes.

While these simpler responses contain a grain of truth and that the big picture viewed trough the lens of day to day news might seem elusive; if we look at the evidence it seems we are on the cusp of a demographic collapse in global economy dominated by geriatric capitalist superpowers that lean heavily towards techno feudalism.

Most signs point towards a quite unpleasant next 40 or so years.

If you’d like a data driven analysis with realistic estimates of the likelihood of some things happening in the near future I would recommend intelligence reports, or at least the danish one seems quite well thought out: https://www.fe-ddis.dk/globalassets/fe/dokumenter/2025/-fe-intelligenceoutlook-25-.pdf

It is a wave of volatility not seen since the end of the Cold War.

Abundance of news and remember the golden rule. Modern day journalism sacrifices the core principles for more clicks. Doomscrolling makes more money at the end of the day.

Things are getting worse.

Yes we can access information more easily but things are also getting much worse.

Despite what they may say out loud, wealthy oligarchs are well aware that climate change is going to cause widespread famine, and natural disasters like drought, fire, floods, and storms.

People are conditioned to pay attention to bad news.

It’s a survival mechanism. If you find out there’s lions in the savannah to the left, then you want to know that so you can go to the right, you know?

News organizations profit off of that survival mechanism by constantly telling you that the world is ending so that you keep paying attention to them so that they get ad revenue.

There are bad things going on, but it’s not as bad as it seems.

It’s just the bad gets so much more attention because it is actively being shoved into your face, whether you’re looking for it or not.

It’s multiplied and accelerated, so yeah.

History always had power struggles, empire exploitation, death disasters, etc. but the modern era has significantly expanded on that with the boom in technology and the global population.

Add to the fact that we are digging our own grave in several forthcoming critical problems that the world is already starting to see the effects of.

It’s the information.

Before, what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you, so, when someone on the other side of the country did something, it would have to be REALLY important for people to talk about it here.

Tv gave us national news, but still, they were limited by broadcast time. Not every little bit of news can fit in a 24 hour day, and they’d have to repeat the important stuff just in case someone wasn’t watching at the exact time it was reported.

Now, there are no limits. Every local drama, every crime committed, every break up and make up, and every plate of food is recorded and immortalized on the Internet.

Statistically, crime is lower than ever, less crimes go unsolved, and more people have more rights than ever before. This world is literally the best it’s ever been, but we’ve also never been exposed to so much injustice before. It’s quite the Faustian Contradiction.

Climate change makes it worse. Not yet, but soon.

I think a large part of it is the internet. Like everything else, popularity ruins everything. I grew up with the internet, my family was one of the first I knew with a computer. For a long time, it was fun as fuck, play videos games, post on forums, chat with friends, MySpace, etc…

But over the years it’s become a shell of what it once was. Everything is about engagement, predatory algorithms, ads, fear mongering, censorship, control, bots, etc… Capitalism and greed sunk its teeth into it and ruined it for profit like it does to everything else.

Instead of it being a way to escape and have fun, it’s a place to get depressed, demoralized and preyed upon.

Yes, there was a long period of post WWII stability, though there were still lots of problems including the Cold War that ended by 1990. Then there’s also been a series of slowly escalating Middle East conflicts. I think a lot of people are pointing to that period 1990-2001 or so with no “major” global conflicts happening. But even then, there was genocide in Rwanda. But the information/reporting was less global at the time.

It was always volatile. It’s more volatile lately than 30 years ago, but if you go farther back I don’t think this is unusual.