Autism

That’s super interesting, I don’t know much about Hinduism so it was cool to Google those terms and see what they mean. Bummer that things don’t get better for another 426,873 years, though. I was hoping to see improvements in my lifetime.

Oh it's not all or nothing. Lots of improvements in our lifetime. Many a different interpretation of timings exist, with many a mistranslation of duration measurements confound interpretations. But still... it's not a spectator sport. If we merely watch, we let the tragedies of the commons fall foul of deceivers' exacerbated races to the bottom into worsening kakistarchy. Like the Chicago experiment showed, meditators can really shift the goodness meter. [... Goodness meter? LOL. That'd be a better metric than the already-wrong-then-corrupted GDP meter.]

I have noticed a dark trend in society lately. People are masking up and withdrawing inwards, and judging each other more harshly, and good deeds are rarer than ever. I even noticed it in myself; when a stranger asks for help, the first thing I do is check if it’s a trick or trap to prey on my goodwill. It’s unfortunately necessary nowadays.

Much bystander effect to overcome, in the vast population densities. Especially in this [fake] economy that holds us all under duress of manufactured scarcities, and disempowers us to keep us separately dependent upon the centralised hoard of illegitimate power and wealth. Very impressive when one finds ways to not let the parasites turn one into a parasite too, despite these pressures. Higher wisdom beckons us out of the desperate shortloop that's contributing to the degeneracy that worsens these pressures. Some see the only way out as accelerating the worsening of the situation, to get it so bad it has to bounce to something better. Risky. I'd rather mend, than to break worse faster in faith someone else will clean up the externality. It's a fine narrow path, to retain the prudence in danger, and not succumb to habituating there.

I have also noticed that the newest generation of young kids are quite cynical already (~8 year olds). They’re keenly aware of the way society works and make fun of it, but pretend to play along. Hopefully they’re able to change things to be more honest again.

That's quite encouraging in several ways. The line I've heard attributed to Aristotle, something like "show me the child of 7 years old and I shall show you the man", springs to mind. If they've [all, or just majority] already got it, ... good sign for one of those fractal iterations of satya yuga. "Darkest before the dawn" done enough, we see the arc change better? Remains to be seen, how well the insight of youth survives and persists through the residual pressures of the psychopathic circle-jerk that malformed civilisation.

... And many more ponderings about the psychology, the sociology, the availability of information, of energy, and their censorship and suppression, and agnotological awareness able to increase despite the agnotological abuses... but, I'll curtail my verbosity here. :)