>>102821218The bleakness is definitely not a new, but a cyclical thing.
But what's a little bit different today is that in the past, people either believed or pretending to themselves and other really, really hard to believe in whatever the local religion of the time happened to be.
Thanks to advances in technology, engineering, and science, we understand the universe more today. But unfortunately for some, we didn't find any evidence of gods or meaning inherent to the universe, at least not yet. This alone left a lot of people feeling adrift and depressed, since there's no obvious point or meaning to anything in the universe.
Ironically, having a lot more "free" time to think about this makes people more depressed (people are "at work" today more often than in the past, but a lot of that is in mundane repetitive jobs where people can ruminate on other things, or else office jobs where people "need to be there" from X time to Y time but do hardly anything).
People are also now totally isolated, spend little or no time socializing, have zero community or sense of family or friends in many cases, and in the first world, real wages for nearly everybody except multibillionaires are going down. The "purpose" of most people's lives is just to make money for a billionaire to give to their douchey rich kids to go to elitist schools on the Coast and complain about society or have drunken bisexual orgies or buy stupid shit or whatever. That's not a very worthwhile life for most people, and even the douchey elite Coastal school rich kids feel pretty empty, since their lives and relationships are themselves pretty empty in spite of the fact that the entire world exists only to support them and give them more free stuff.
So no community, point, religion, anything but making more money for people you hate makes people depressed and bitter, and even the few kids people sacrifice everything for have empty pointless depressing lives a lot. People think what's the point?