In terms of cost, the cost of doing business likely rose due to inflation over the past few years. Those costs have supposedly plateaued but costs for consumption continue to rise. My two cents are markets will continue to increase prices until demand goes down. Eventually they will lower their prices out of necessity as they compete for those who can still afford their products and services.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

I mean, graded on a wide curve of history right now isn't complete shit. WW1 saw entire generations of young men slaughtered uselessly at the hands of unelected kings. It was so horrific we actually still try not to use chemical warfare. Absolutely brutal combat with casualties that have hardly been seen since. Absolutely nightmare conditions. We baulk at the deaths of 25,000 over a few months of conflict where WW1 regularly saw those numbers in as little as a day. I do not want to minimize the absolutely brutal conflicts going on now. A newly orphaned child is not comforted by history, but your question seeks context and what else is history for but to contextualize the present?

To me, history shows we have not even begun to experience the the depths of the horror people are capable of. At least in the states decenting voices are not carted away into slavery camps, actively trying to wipe out whole populations with starvation at least has some voices calling out the brutality, I do not see people trying to sell their children to survive like in the depression. These are not far away times where these things happened on a scale they do not now.

Long story short, history has shown the measure of brutality and uncaring to be significantly worse at times. Raw and unquestioned genocide, slavery, persecution, war, child beating, women opressing, and all manner of the lowest acts of evil are the norm of humanity, not the relative peace we have known over the last 80 years. This fact does not make life suck less, but can at least act as a measure for how horrid is has been.

I think the 2020 election and the pandemic are largely to blame for some spiraling plummets in our feelings about our system as a whole. Both of these events caused some pretty large divides in our government, communities, and even family and friend units.

War and human suffering were already there. Corporate greed and late-stage capitalism effects were already there, as well. We're all just critically assessing everything together at this point because some of those divides removed a security net of reliability and trust.

Two words:

Willful ignorance.

Are things demonstrably worse? I'm reading that they are but I'm not seeing that they are. I don't live in a great area, but people generally seem as they've always been. Some struggle. Most are fine. Life goes on.

Because Nash Equilibriums, prejudice, and freeloaders.

Every generation feels this.

I believe the reason that each generation feels this way is the different ways that each generation is exposed to information about current events, wars, etc. and now more than ever with the internet, it's hard to escape. The internet also makes echo chambers worse than before because not only are they easier to get into, they're much louder and have more influence.

As for products, companies are focused on user/subscriber growth more than ever instead of having a good product. The idea is essentially “why have a good product people pay for when you can half ass it and get people to pay”.

Corporate capitalism.

Profit before people in literally every facet of modern western society.

Years of believing the adage that "we should just be happy to HAVE a job", which ultimately gave carte blanche for companies to treat their employees like line items on a spreadsheet; something to be minimized as much as possible in order to squeak more pennies into a stock price.

Literally every bad thing today is the wholly expected endgame of 80s trickle-down economics.

Lots of stuff involved. For one, globalization and mechanization are driving forces. The Wikipedia page for pretty much the official term enshittification has a link to another page describing another term "rent-seeking behavior" that means:

Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society.

i.e. when something just takes takes takes and never gives, that describes the broken state.

Also in the late 70s, corporations were given enormous power and now they have more power than any individual human beings - even their CEOs exist as slaves to their whims, except to the extent that they also are shareholders in their stocks. Humans have to do things like breathe, eat, die, and pay their debts, but corporations have special legal exemptions and don't have to do any of this. And this even without the extra special stuff done on top of the normal when they are deemed too big to fail - e.g. banks can smuggle money from genocidal terrorists and get away with it, but don't try that at home unless you too are a corporation of at least a certain size, and can afford to bribe/threaten the life of your own personal judge!

And underlying it all is the dirty word politics, an ancient Greek word meaning "how (the process by which) we all agree", or another definition is "who gets what, when, how". Every time something happens, whether it be genocide or school shootings or even just allowing corporations to claim one thing on the internet while delivering the exact opposite of that (without consequences), it is this "politics" that decides the outcome - like WILL we support Ukraine (financially and/or otherwise) to defend itself from Russian aggression or WON'T we? And on that note, there is a fascinating series of videos on YouTube called "The Alt-Right Playbook", which explains why conservatives like what has happened the last 10 years - e.g. not paying taxes is "smart" and Musk taking over Twitter is "his own business/matter", and corporations having all the stuff while we merely working stiffs have none of it is very much not a byproduct but the literal point of the systems, which is very much working as designed. You may call it words like "inflation" and "price gouging", but companies charge what the market can bear, so according to that philosophy, whatever you call it is a good thing, very much not something that government should be doing anything to stop, and in fact perhaps corporations should be given even more power on top of that.

Like everything else - e.g. physics, biology, chemistry, economics, etc. - you are not going to understand everything in less than let's say a year, or possibly a decade, but you will get there if you really want to know. The short answer imho is that giant corporations now have more rights than mere human beings and thus normal folks are fast becoming obsolete. We will either be killed off (a large number anyway) and the rest absorbed into becoming slaves for them, the same as has happened many times throughout history. And we will be shocked, shocked I tell you, shocked, as if this entirely predictable outcome had never happened before and never would again. Basically they are putting in huge efforts to do these things, and very few people are bothering to lift a finger to try and stop it so... how is it not inevitable? About the only thing I see working against corporate enshittification is FOSS and piracy, each providing for free what corporations want you to pay for.