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Our vocabulary is so stunted. Has no one else noticed that we increasingly talk about the world like it's fiction playing out in front of us?
It's not a vocab problem. It's inherent to the human brain, which appears to be fundamentally designed to prefer to view the world in terms of stories, with heroes, villains, and a narrative arc.
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Nobody can gauge the world for what it really is. It has always been like that. Proper empiricism is expensive and often enough impossible.
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Language shifts and evolves over time as the lives and viewpoints of speakers evolve.

Your complaint is that young people use English in a way you dislike.

Or devolve. Perhaps it reflects an increasing detachment from reality in younger generations.
The complaint isn't actually about they way they're speaking. The way they're speaking is a symptom of the way they're thinking.

In an age of the dumbest, most propagandistic narratives since the 50s, pumped out by the largest multinational corporations in history. Young people are looking at the world through shitty Marvel movie-colored glasses.

It's also not their fault, and the fictions they think they're living through are written by gen Xers being paid by boomers. It is not a youthful point of view, it is the sabotage of any emergence of a youth point of view, substituted with Disney product.

> Language shifts and evolves over time as the lives and viewpoints of speakers evolve.

This is a "things just happen" argument. Things happen for reasons.

"Has no one else noticed that we increasingly talk about the world like it's fiction playing out in front of us?"

Most of our world is a fiction or at least a highly distorted version of reality.

My advice to people is: Get out into nature, stop believing everything on the news and meet people in person.

Most of the news is ragebait designed to get you angry at specific targets rather than the systems themselves.