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1) There is a natural cognitive bias, the older one gets, to see society as going downhill.
2) I have been increasingly worried about social trends for several years now.
It's getting very hard to write off my worries as just being a symptom of #1. All the antisocial behavior we kept excusing as something "just on the internet" has been leaking more and more into the physical world. We all spend all our time in an environment where the only response to the most hideous of attacks is just "oh, ignore it, it's not serious". Of course empathy is becoming increasingly unfashionable! Even traffic is getting more aggressive, with people breaking the speed limit much more consistently and to greater average degrees it seems. But obviously it's hard to trust those observations.
Is there an intellectually rigorous method for resolving this dilemma?
2) I have been increasingly worried about social trends for several years now.
It's getting very hard to write off my worries as just being a symptom of #1. All the antisocial behavior we kept excusing as something "just on the internet" has been leaking more and more into the physical world. We all spend all our time in an environment where the only response to the most hideous of attacks is just "oh, ignore it, it's not serious". Of course empathy is becoming increasingly unfashionable! Even traffic is getting more aggressive, with people breaking the speed limit much more consistently and to greater average degrees it seems. But obviously it's hard to trust those observations.
Is there an intellectually rigorous method for resolving this dilemma?
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In my observation, the "society is going downhill" tradition has pretty much always been "kids these days" as your title says, and how their newfangled ideas are going to destroy society (though gay marriage/sexual equality, rock and roll, short skirts, flapper dancing, women working, factory workers organizing, apprentices striking for better wages, peasants demanding protection under the law, nobles demanding that the king be subject to the law...etc. etc. Someone probably complained about meat cooked over a fire at some point). However, I feel like the current situation is a very rare inversion in which the kids are fine, and the *older* people (I'm looking at you, Boomers) are causing society to go downhill in THEIR reactive effort to get back to "the good old days", while the rest of us are trying to move forward to a better future. It's a tug of war between the past and future, and due to demographics the two teams are pretty evenly matched.
I think the aggressive driving thing is a separate local phenomenon due to frustration at the local region's abysmal traffic. I work next to a freeway on ramp, and it can take 20 minutes for people to go three blocks onto the on ramp because so many streets full of cars are converging into a single point (and the freeway is backed up). There are traffic officers at the intersection every evening to prevent people from blocking the intersection in their desperation to get out of the gridlock.