I think humanity is overall just suffering from skill inflation. Times are too easy. Everyone is really good at SOMETHING, so if you don't stand out you fall by the wayside. Especially with the internet making learning and information so easily accessible.
Think about professional gaming - 15 years ago, the top players would get absolutely wrecked by todays players who aren't even top 100. Everyone has just gotten better and better. Same with professional sports, the mens 100m sprint is now measured in milliseconds and the athletes all have ridiculous drug diet and training regimens. 50 years ago you just ran a bit in college and you'd be competitive enough to try for the olympics.
There are guys on youtube who are MASSIVELY more technically proficient at the guitar than some of the 80's rock legends.
This is one of those topics i've been meaning to make a thread about for a while but never got around to, mainly due to a chaotic work schedule, crippling insomnia, and living in an apartment that is so loud I can't even hear myself think (which makes it much more difficult to focus and write longer posts).
Overall, the world has become a fiercely competitive place for men, when it comes to literally anything. As you said, sports is a good example. 50+ years ago the MLB was full of skinny fat guys who would get drunk the night before a game. Now they're all on PEDs and on intense training regimens.
And speaking of youtube, look at how much effort youtubers put into videos now compared to the late 2000s. There's a hundred times more editing and production involved. And look at the quality of web animations now compared to the newgrounds era, when stick death videos were considered the pinnacle of web animation. Everyone under 30 is chasing internet clout. They're all trying to be the next jake paul or pewdiepie or whoever the hell it popular these days on the internet.
Even gaming has been ruined by tryhards. These days you have tons of guys who autistically analyze match-ups, tier lists, and the number of frames every move is in some fighting game. Hell, look at the speedrunning community. You have guys who spend literally thousands of hours trying to get the fastest time on some N64 game from 21 years ago so they can have an obscure high score on twin galaxies.
Even for minimum wage jobs there's so much more competition these days compared to before 2008. When I applied for a burger flipping job back in 2006, all I did was fill out an application and got an informal interview on the spot while I was wearing street clothes. I got hired without even submitting a resume. Now for every low wage position, you have dozens of guys applying, submitting their resumes, and showing up in suits and ties for interviews, sweating bullets over whether or not they'll make the cut for a second interview in hopes of landing a minimum wage job that a teenager with no experience could have easily gotten in the mid 2000s. Then you have brown-nosers that are constantly trying to get brownie points with the managers, the guys who volunteer to do extra shit for no additional pay, and the guys who snitch on or sabotage others in hopes of being viewed comparatively more favorably by management in hopes of getting that 35 cent raise or maybe even getting promoted to assistant manager in 7 years.
Every facet of life has gotten far more competitive and nearly every guy is a tryhard at everything he does.
