Top 10 Ways Society Has Gone To Sh!t

Top 10 Ways Society Has Gone Downhill

Welcome to WatchMojo, and today were counting down our picks for the biggest issues plaguing society today.

This may sound a little funny coming from a YouTube channel. But just ask Dr. Brent Nelson, psychiatrist and chief medical information officer for Southern California-based Newport Healthcare, who says that smartphones have wide-reaching changes all over the brain. According to Dr. Nelson, a smartphone-addicted brain is working way harder than it should when youre scrolling away the hours, leading to whats popularly known as brain rot. According to the Toronto Star, Research shows phone use interferes with concentration and sleep, and is correlated with higher rates of depression, anxiety, stress and loneliness. While were by no means saying that all phone use is bad, your mental health will likely thank you for cutting down on screen time.

It probably goes without saying that, like Thanos snapping his fingers in Avengers: Infinity War, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the world we knew almost instantly. Perhaps the biggest change was the remote work boom, brought on by social distancing. As such, while Americans have increasingly spent less and less time in each others physical company over the years, The Atlantics Derek Thompson pointed out that face time dropped a whopping 30% from 2003 to 2022. Similarly, a 2024 Preply study found over 50% of Gen Z remote workers in Canada felt that their social skills had taken a turn for the worse since the rise of telework. In other words, we could all benefit from touching grass a little more often.

Big Brother is watching Well, not exactly, anyway. As noted by Security.org, many of the useful services and apps we take advantage of on a daily basis are nominally free, like Google Maps. But the hidden cost is that we as users pay for them in the form of data. Just by simply using ubiquitous social media platforms like Facebook, X, and Instagram, we agree to privacy policies and allow these services to sell off our personal data to third-party advertisers. Computer security researcher Christopher Boyd may have summed it up the best in saying that when a product is free, the commodity is you and your data.

The Pew Research Center determined that, in 2023, public trust in the American federal government was at an all-time low, at just 16%. That falling trust, a trend which Pew says began with the escalation of the Vietnam War, is due to several factors. Said businessman Richard Edelman in January of 2025, these factors include the Great Recession, rise of populism, and the lasting aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic. People are skeptical of scientists, and as a result, are increasingly looking to alternative (and occasionally disreputable) sources of medical information. All hope is not lost, though: according to Pew, a large majority of Americans still trust in small business, police officers, and public school principals.

Its the classic, age-old question: why cant we all just get along? In our gradually more polarized society, it seems like the answer is more elusive than its ever been. As living conditions for everyday Americans (and regular folks around the world) have become more and more difficult, it becomes proportionately more difficult to show civility to people whose viewpoints differ significantly from our own. To some, it would seem that polite debate and well-thought-out discourse is no longer enough for their voices to truly be heard. And when we cant agree with each other about issues that are personally important to us, we get peeved.

For a problem that most of us encounter every day, it seems like frustratingly little is being done to combat the growing wave of homelessness. In the United States, the problem of homelessness has accelerated drastically following the COVID-19 pandemic. The reasons for this are nuanced and complex, but key among them are a lack of affordable housing, as well as individual factors like mental health and substance use disorder. To that end, 2023 brought never-before-seen levels of homelessness in Los Angeles and New York City, and the following year saw it rise by a record 18%. While the solutions to problems like homelessness may be clear, implementing them is, unfortunately, a completely different story.

Dont worry, youre not imagining it: things are definitely more expensive than they used to be. During COVID, inflation at one point reached a rate of 9% a record high for the generation. As noted by NerdWallet, prices in America surged more than 26% on average from 2019 to 2025. Specifically, groceries went up by 29%, rent by 32%, and gas by a whopping 37%. The result of supply chain disruptions, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and myriad other factors, inflation is a problem as long as wages fail to keep pace. At this rate, the gulf between rich and poor only continues to grow.

According to a study by Pew Research Center, liberals and conservatives have viewed each other with growing disdain over the years: Most of these intense partisans believe the opposing partys policies are so misguided that they threaten the nations well-being. Media outlets also benefit by turning increasingly partisan, generating an us vs. them mentality. Said Dr. Lukas Wolf, researcher at the Department of Psychology at the University of Bath, this polarization means people become pessimistic about the future because the division in society stands in the way of compromise and cooperation for a better future. As such, its best to view all media with a critical eye, and interrogate why certain talking points feel true or false to you.

There are more problems with social media than just being addicted to it. Arguably the most worrying one of all is its effectiveness in spreading information thats patently false or actively malicious to scoop up a few bucks in advertising revenue. Other times, it works in favor of partisan politics U.S. president Donald J. Trump has often dismissed criticism of him by labeling it fake news, or as an intentional hit job. A recent Dutch study found that [r]adical right populists are using misinformation as a tool to destabilise democracies and gain political advantage, said one of the authors. Fake news hurts us all, and leaves us prone to increased polarization yet another reason to buck up on media literacy.

Simply put, theres no two ways around it: the rich are getting richer than ever, and the poor are getting poorer than ever. According to a 2024 Congressional Budget Office report that looked at household income in 2021, the top 1 percent of households made more than six times as much total income as the bottom quintile of households, and has become more pronounced since 1981. Its not limited to the U.S., either: Statistics Canada has noted that income inequality in Americas neighbor to the north has reached its highest levels in history. Knowing that, then, makes it all the more apparent as to why people are just fed up.

With all of that having been said, what are some things that make you smile? Be sure to let us know in the comments!