I can think of a few reasons for this besides the reason that life has genuinely become worse:
1. Profit-seeking news orgs: it's no secret that negative and controversial news sells significantly more. With all the destruction of locally run papers in favor of the national consolidation of news by a lot of private equity investors, there are increased expectations to make a profit and therefore increase the amount of negative-sentiment news over the recent years.
2. 24-7 news cycle: people are also much more aware of all the bad news around them with smartphones and social networks. Readers' sentiment will just bleed into the papers over time. Ignorance is bliss.
3. Sampling bias: which kind of papers did they measure sentiment for back then versus now? There could be a divergence in the sources they use and different sources could have different sentiment tendencies. (I don't have access to the actual paper)
4. Rising expectations: humans are many orders of magnitude more powerful than our ancestors. We live like gods compared to them. Yet there are so many people who still aren't happy. Why? It's because our expectations also rise endlessly. Things may be better than before, but maybe it's not better relative to our expectations.
Point is, this isn't necessarily indicative of life becoming worse. There could be other plausible explanations.
> Point is, this isn't necessarily indicative of life becoming worse
It probably isn't indicative of life becoming worse. These articles are about economics, and the nice thing about macroeconomics is that its reasonably well measured. We can just look at the numbers to see in aggregate what the conditions are like.
To choose just the most dramatic example from the graph: sentiment was generally been more negative from 1975-2020 than it was during the great depression in the 1930s. Things aren't perfect, but no one would claim that economic conditions in the US have been worse than the great depression for the last 50 years.
I suspect that this trend holds outside of economics as well, but of course I have no data to back this up. Specifically, I suspect news-based sentiment of the world conditions have been declining while conditions in the world have not been declining.
I agree, life does not need to have become worse for the narratives reflected in this analysis to have become wise to the complexities of global society.
1. Profit-seeking news orgs: it's no secret that negative and controversial news sells significantly more. With all the destruction of locally run papers in favor of the national consolidation of news by a lot of private equity investors, there are increased expectations to make a profit and therefore increase the amount of negative-sentiment news over the recent years.
2. 24-7 news cycle: people are also much more aware of all the bad news around them with smartphones and social networks. Readers' sentiment will just bleed into the papers over time. Ignorance is bliss.
3. Sampling bias: which kind of papers did they measure sentiment for back then versus now? There could be a divergence in the sources they use and different sources could have different sentiment tendencies. (I don't have access to the actual paper)
4. Rising expectations: humans are many orders of magnitude more powerful than our ancestors. We live like gods compared to them. Yet there are so many people who still aren't happy. Why? It's because our expectations also rise endlessly. Things may be better than before, but maybe it's not better relative to our expectations.
Point is, this isn't necessarily indicative of life becoming worse. There could be other plausible explanations.