alt Hacker NewsOur 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?
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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.
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.
"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.
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.