There is a lot of language that has to do with "more and more this is the case" or "today this is happening more than ever" or "today it is much worse" and so on. You can go the other direction too if you wish, like "we just don't have as much of this today" or some such.
I do it all the time. A habit you could say, and sometimes a bad one. Really it is a mythological construction, which is useful for rhetorical purposes and illustrating things in a simple way.
This sort of qualification - or quantification depending on what's happening - is based on perspective and one's place in time. Yes there are broad trends in history which display a clear pattern of increasing or decreasing over a period of time. Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is a readily calculable parameter that is easy enough to demonstrate, for example, or economic inequality, but say quality of workmanship or human cruelty is a little bit more difficult to trace, and much more observer dependent.
But even those well-documented trends can have larger historical cycles that can have a greater or lesser significance depending on who is paying attention. Just another set of caveats worth thinking about, perhaps even ritualistically.
