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I have feeling that how safe you feel is correlates strongly to your media diet, and weakly to your surroundings. I'd be curious to see what studies have been done.

No feeling necessary, it's well understood: https://news.darden.virginia.edu/articles/fox-news-versus-cn...

People who aren't afraid don't tend to vote Republican. Therefore, there's big money to be made selling fear.

Feels like NYT, CNN, etc may have been feeling the pinch and pedal fear now, as well.

A friend of mine had the cops called on her by a neighbor because her kids were playing in the front yard and she wasn't out there with them.

I don't know what world people here live in, but I am not expecting kids in a front yard in the middle of the day in a quiet neighborhood on a dead end road to be snatched up.

Could it happen? Sure. Should we force our kids to live under fear that it will happen as soon as a parent isn't watching them? Absolutely not.

I heard about this story somewhere and couldn’t really believe it. I also thought that the US/German comparison videos about the fact we Germans let our kids go to school alone etc are a bit over the top. Seems no. But to be fair. Also in Germany things around security have changed. Where it was normal in my youth that my parents had actually no clue where I was while I was roaming the streets of Berlin (Courtesy to a Berlin wide public transport ticket I got for school). Today that doesn’t fly anymore. Kids have phones and get tracked every step. It’s the more controlled level of freedom. Another connected anecdote that left me puzzled at the time: I spend some days in D.C last year (right before the National Guard got deployed) and wanted to do a short run from the Hotel. It was already going dark and I didn’t check for the weather and asked at the desk if it was ok outside to run. The answer was “yes it’s pretty safe around here.” See my mind never made the connection that something harmful would be out there waiting for me.

> “it doesn’t feel safer.”

> This conversation is usually about how no one lets their kids play outside unsupervised anymore,

Those two show overall fear is higher, not that reasonable fear is higher.

There's so much in current society that sells fear, that I'm not surprised. FOMO for the next Musk stock promotion. Stalkers, scammers, pedophiles. Burglar alarms being sold with a subscription at 70% profit margins (Verisure here in Sweden.) I recently calculated that I'd pay about $300k-600k in fees for every actual burglary where I live. The insurance deductible is way way lower than that, and I doubt they'd actually change the outcome. Incidentally, insurance companies care about water and fire damage, not burglary. But the scary marketing video with masked men in your garage sells well...

Of course, insurance is a a whole other chapter on selling fear. Sometimes warranted, mostly not. The Freetrailer app, used to book and pay for trailers, defaults to me paying for a deductibility reduction. With a big fat warning if I remove that, that if something happens, I might be liable for up to $700!

Not to mention the economy is always just one bad quarter away from a 1929 crash.

I blame media (new and old) for the fearmongering that sells my attention on low probability outcomes.

I'm glad you mentioned the economy.

Money is a form of communication.

The internet has enabled essentially instant communication between any two or more parties anywhere on the planet.

The next 1929 is going to happen faster than the last one, with less warning, and the impact will be more widespread.

Or ...

We'll all see it coming ahead of time, behave perfectly rationally, and avoid the crisis entirely.

Based on how we handled 9/11, and spent 20 years and $20 trillion to get 1 guy, im preparing for the former, not the later, because most people are not rational in the face of a crisis.

> The next 1929 is going to happen faster than the last one

For sure, and for reasons we can't imagine today.

I sometimes think about nuclear accidents. It seems very unlikely that we've already seen the worst accident that will ever be. Same goes for so many technologies less than 100 years old. Safety standards need to go up in parity with the scaling up to keep MTBF in check. Given what I've seen of human greed, I hold only partial hope that'll happen as energy demands increase. Hopefully batteries, wind, solar and regulatory oversight are enough.

I’m wrong with no real evidence or, and this is verbatim, “it doesn’t feel safer.”

At in part due to media fear mongering and lying 24/7? Fear, lies, doubts, hatred, division... all of this gets clicks, gets the ad dollars.

This is so depressing; my parents in the late 60’s/early 70’s would be serving a life sentence for negligence according to current standards, given how utterly (but basically harmlessly) feral we were back in the day.

The issue is overpopulation. In an underpopulated area neighbors tend to be neighbors, in an overpopulated one they tend to call police on your noisy kids to take you down a peg.

Mom said it's my turn to shoehorn my pet issue into an unrelated discussion.

It's actually about restrictive zoning preventing sufficiently dense housing and high quality public transit.

I think it's only safer since we're doing less. We're more immobile; sitting on our phones, TVs, iPads. We order stuff online instead of going to the store. There's also less adventure without immediate reconciliation. We can corroborate if what we're doing out-and-about is correct from a simple google search anywhere, which reduces person-to-person interaction.

But there is zero evidence of this. Safety has been a long downward trend since the late 80s and early 90s in most places.