Granted, the focus of my attention for the last thirteen years has been the mentality and behaviour of the very worst of us, so, just as The Narrator in Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men In A Boat was convinced he was suffering from every ailment in the medical dictionary (bar Housemaid's Knee), my perspective is probably somewhat prejudiced towards seeing the worst in us everywhere I look.
Nevertheless, I have noticed (in the last three or so years especially) a trend not simply in the direction of more pronounced narcissistic traits/behaviours but in a mentality of utterly insular self-absorption.
It truly is reflective of utter self-absorption. I mean … if you are going to fuck me over, at least do me the courtesy of doing so with intent. If you are going to hold the point of view “I’m alright, Jack,” at least preface it with “Fuck you,” so that I know you care. Because there’s nothing worse than someone who doesn’t care enough to even notice you exist blandly apologising for their thoughtlessness — they simply add insult to injury by refusing to apologise when reproached for their selfishness.
People don't only seem incapable of accepting that others' views might be valid but incapable of apprehending that others might even have another perspective ¹.
And with that mindset has come an arrogance born of the supreme complacency that inevitably companions it. Hence the number of self-professed 'developers' today who couldn't develop shit from scratch: if you sat them down in front of a text editor and said "There you go, now develop the solution you're being paid for," they'd burst into tears, because, without someone else's framework to simply include in their own solution, they'd have to know about things they've never taken the time to understand, never mind learn ... instead, relying upon others' work bringing with it a whole slew of extra components of which which they have no knowledge, let alone understanding ... that, ironically, the developer of that very framework knew little to nothing of, because the components they included in their own framework included elements they were themselves unaware of, because the developers of those elements ... and so, it, goes, turtles bearing loads of ignorance all the way down, because people these days are so smugly convinced of their own superior capacity born of their status as 'digital natives' that they don't even need to understand the nature of the wheel, much less reinvent it — vehicles have round spinny things on their corners and only someone with absolutely no chance of being an influencer would design one without ... because no-one would actually ‘like’ their design (a fact which is self-evident from there being round spinny things on the corners of vehicles since they were invented) ... not unless they were looking to move fast and break things in a radically new way, like say, using an app instead of going anywhere themself, thus obviatng the need for vehicles in the first place (at least until the harsh reality of the World not caring how they cope once their parents are gone and the fridge in the basement doesn't magically refill itself at the weekend took them by surprise anyway).
And that's just one field in which it's noticeable.
Look around you and you'll see it everywhere though.
Consider the fact that too many people, who really shouldn't, communicate by way of the written word these days — texting and social media have turned them all into readers when … in days gone by … they'd rather have had a root canal with no anesthetic than read anything. As a result, they write as well … but have few, if any, comprehension skills; you can tell from the appalling spelling, grammar and misuse of words that mean something else altogether — if Failbook and text/IM messages are anything to go by … pretty soon we'll all be able to read the Canterbury Tales in the original Chaucerian vernacular with no trouble at all.
That is, of course, when they aren't scrawling poor imitations of hieroglyphics everywhere in a truly stunning display of ignorance of language or human anatomy: https://whereangelsfeartotread.medium.com/dear-prudence-6cb8f76938c4
Seriously ... people today are so ignorant, it's scary.
And it it all stems, as I said, from a complacency born of the arrogance .that accompanies the sublime self-satisfaction that one is superior to others by virtue of Virtue itself — they are not merely convinced of their innate superiority but that they are, furthermore, virtuously so (and can't even see the contradiction there either).
To be perfectly frank ... whilst I (for reasons I have yet to fathom) still hope I might yet have a not inconsiderable number of years left to me ... one day, when Death finally comes for me then ... short of my finding myself in entirely unexpectedly un-/fortunate circumstance at the time, with seriously unfinished business ... I shall greet him like a long-lost brother and ask him what took him so long to find me.
TL;DR: You and me both.
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¹ Take a look at the increasing decline in functionality here at Medium, for instance: never mind italic/bold fonts, you can’t even add emojis to your replies any more, because the functionality has been removed unless you return and edit your reply after first writing it. Why? Because ‘nobody needs it’. After all, you can just get your keyboard to add one for you, can’t you? I mean … what other way is there of interacting with Medium than a mobile device, right?
It’s increasingly difficult-to-impossible to even edit your stories/replies at all: fewer and fewer pages from which you have the option of getting to them as stories rather than BBS threads.
And it’s increasingly difficult (to impossible) to namedrop anyone, because you can’t do so in a reply but have to go back and edit it afterwards to add the ‘@<name>’ … and then it’s too late because it doesn’t notify anyone after the event, only if you do it from within the mobile app, where (apparently) you can insert name tags from a popup that doesn’t exist on the desktop version (because, again, what’s a desktop?)
The ‘developers’ seemingly have absolutely no concept of doing things anywhere but on a phone/tablet, so the design issues that negatively impact the desktop experience don’t factor into their thinking — they seemingly have no concept of there being any other experience than their own and it apparently never crosses their mind to investigate the possibility either.
