That kid 20 years ago still had the expectations of a better future, of having a nice and fulfilling life. Now, it’s clear we’re outstretching everything in order to keep things barely afloat, and some form of collapse is inevitable. It’s not just people that were kids back then and felt life was better,
A while back, Michael Moore got a bunch of MAGAs of all ages together and asked one question. “When did America stop being great?”
The ones who were born in the 1930s thought that things started going wrong in the 1950s. the ones born in the 1940s thought it was the 1960s. The ones born in the 1960s thought it was in the 1980s…
Decline as the oligarchs siphon money out of the classes.
Years ago, a single factory worker could buy a house, raise a huge family, send a few to college, have a couple of cars, take a nice yearly vacation.
then a couple of kids, and student debt
then a big vacation every couple of years.
Now a single factory worker, if you can still find a factory can just feed themselves and rent a cheap apartment.
So, worsening since the 1930s? Mostly, I’d agree with them.
I was born in 1982. I think I have a good excuse for thinking America went to shit, oh say, around the end of 2001.
Personally, my 20s sucked. My 30s were much better.
I was born in the mid 90s, and I feel like my experience of things going to shit in the mid 2010s is similarly justified.
'93 here and I think the passage of the Patriot Act was a pretty important demarcation line, not just for abandonment of due process, but also when all the major networks embraced telling their audience who to hate.
That was how it was before the Vietnam War. The news media disconnected itself from the foreign policy desires of the State Department during the Vietnam War because they actually saw the lies on the ground and reported the facts.
The first Iraq war started the change back to having the news media play lapdog again with “embedded reporters” meaning that the news media couldn’t wander by themselves like they did in Vietnam.
So we have shifted back to a news media basically toeing the line for the wishes of the government.
A huge difference between the coverage of Vietnam versus the first and second gulf wars was the change in media broadcasting regulations.
While you would think a nationalized service like broadcast airwave licenses would lead to a state-controlled media, in the US it led to the opposite effect because of the Fairness Doctrine and the general cultural expectation that news media would be impartial and dedicated to truth.
When privately distributed cable news rose in the early 90’s starting with Ted Turner starting CNN and 24-hour news cycles, it led to news becoming a unmoderated, uncontrolled, unlicensed commercial entity that could do or say whatever it wanted without oversight, and could get funding from any source.
Ronald Reagan was deregulating the media from Inauguration Day 1981.
There used to be a thing called ‘The Fairness Doctrine’ that required stations to give time to opposing viewpoints if they ran an editorial. There were restrictions on how many TV/radio stations one entity could own.
Just look at children’s TV. Once Reagan came in you started seeing half hour long commercials for GI Joe and The Transformers.
Funny thing. I was living in NYC on 9/11/2001. None of the people I knew thought that the Iraq Invasion was a good idea.
Across a vast swath of the nation people were screaming for vengeance.
The idea of invading Iraq raised a few eyebrows but when we were overtly told that Saddam and Iraq were responsible in some way for 9/11, a LOT of people got on board. Like, more unity across America than I’ve ever seen in my life. People of all walks of life wanted war.
A couple years in, and there were no chemical weapons, no Osama, no nuclear warheads, and lots and lots of Americans started coming back in body bags, including National Guard members, that’s when the US started turning on the government and the war, but there was nothing that could be done, we were stuck by then and it went on and on and on.
I was there. There were a lot of antiwar marches.
The New York City alternative paper, The Village Voice ran two cartoons I remember.
One was a cover. Bush Jr. as Mickey Mouse in the sorcerer’s apprentice outfit. The big broom looked like Saddam and the little ones looked like bin-Ladn.
The other was Bin-Ladn and Saddam cast in a ‘buddy cop’ movie where they have to learn to get along to take down the bad guys.
It wasn’t that Bush was carried away by an unstoppable tide demanding war. Bush manufactured the ‘evidence’ and his people sold it hard.
If you have not seen it, you should watch the movie Wag the Dog, and check the release date on it after doing so. Phenomenal movie about government spin doctors.
You should read the original book.
In the book they specifically name Bush Sr. and Saddam. But the author says that the person he was most afraid of offending was the Hollywood producer…
It was a good movie, too.
I know all that, I was also there, I am saying that even with the marches and protests, there was still an overwhelming mandate among Americans, manufactured or otherwise, for blood.
Nostalgia is a universal feeling that fascists have been leveraging for centuries to get average idiots to pick up weapons.
Resist fascism. Resist nostalgia.
Not all nostalgia is equal.
There’s wanting to go back to when all the slaves were happy and there’s remembering when you could go to the airport and buy a ticket for cash.
And in 50 years there will be people waxing nostalgic for the good ol’ days when you could just fire up your own access to the internet and buy a plane ticket with your credit card.
Wanting freedom and comfort is not a “return to the past” thing as much as a “why has capitalism robbed me of the feeling of freedom and choice” thing.
And in 50 years there will be people waxing nostalgic
Kinda proving my point here.
Not sure what the point is. I’m saying people always look back and cherry-pick what was “better” and things are always changing.
You can advocate for those better things without tying it to the past. When you do that, you are feeding fascism. I know it sounds hyperbolic but I am dead serious, every time anyone even casually says “it was better back when…” a GOP intern gets promoted to media manager.
Now you’re being hyperbolic. You seem to be saying that we shouldn’t point out Left victories of the past [the New Deal etc.] simply because they happened in the past.
Nostalgia is a human trait, and like any other it can be manipulated.
I already said I know it sounds hyperbolic, I am saying broadly, we need to take better care with how we talk about things in the past.
Lots of people saying “I want to have the system we had in the past” has a very different material outcome in our world than lots of people saying “It was better in the past.”
Life started to suck when the responsibilities came.
I feel it is less responsibilities and more the societal awareness that comes with them that tends to make the change. When you start paying bills you start dealing directly with greedy corporations, landleeches, and greedy employers, all of whom view you as a commodity rather than a human being.
Life being pay to play, as it has been for a couple hundred years, is where I feel the “downward trend of society” feelings come from.
it’s the responsibilities and accountability that’s different
It’s the blissful ignorance and, most importantly, the lack of existential fear many people are missing. All your basic needs were provided (if you had a safe childhood).
Unfortunately there are way too many bad, powerful people believing that humans require to feel existential fear to be “productive”…
When you are a kid, you haven’t let life pass you by yet.
*30 years. FTFY
Don’t do this, please.
*40 years prior
Games were constantly improving and fun, pizza was tastier because it was novel (and either not paid by you, or paid by your own hard worked for money (which differs from adult hard worked money due to lack of feeling of achievement)), and oh my god the sugar rush from snacks.
Wanna go back? Order some food you love but you order rarely, pop an energy drink and boot up some new, uncharted game after reserving a whole night to yourself. Yeah, you gonna feel like that kid back then.
Each decade from this kids years tho will translate to an hour of feeling like shit next day tho, no advice there xD
pop an energy drink and boot up some new, uncharted game after reserving a whole night to yourself. Yeah, you gonna feel like that kid back then.
Our problem as a species is we’re cursed with knowing.
You can do this but you can’t escape the things you’ve seen, the experiences you’ve had, the new context you view the world in.
Some people can get out of their heads, some people need chemicals to do it for them, but every adult is weighed down with more knowledge than our minds were built to parse and file away safely.
People aren’t scrolling in misery until 4:00 AM looking for something new and exciting, they’re trying to not be in their own head for even a moment so they can feel like that kid with fewer worries again.
Yeah, doesn’t mean you need to drag yourself down and what’s worse, justify being down. Reserve the night and let out lil’ you back into the wild. Have fun ^^ Especially if you hit rock bottom, the only way’s up.
Factually correct, practically impossible for a vast swath of humanity right now.
Rates of self-isolation are soaring, people forming new relationships and having children is plummeting harder than we ever imagined.
I would say to people longing for that “simple pleasure” night for themselves, put yourself on a diet first. Stop feeding your brain media, including sites like Reddit or Lemmy. Stop reading the thoughts of thousands of strangers written as text, read in your own voice inside your mind. Stop reading or watching pundits or reaction streamers or people sitting on chairs, playing games and talking about shit in a one-way narration.
Socialization makes you feel happier generally as an adult, and now we’ve fostered an entire movement of people who cling to their self-diagnosed introversion, autism, ADHD and other labels as if they are shields against having to do hard things like learn emotional intelligence and socialize like an adult. Get out, meet people, start getting comfortable with not knowing what’s blowing up on Twitter.
Okay. I may read the room wrong which does happen sometimes so feel free to correct me but…
To me, you sound heavily judgemental, even borderline aggressive. Some people - me from the past included - need these small moments like feeling again like a kid to build up motivation and yearning for betterment before they can even start working on themselves. It’s rarely a matter of simply willing it to happen, and for some reason people who already feel different and unhappy don’t react well to being patronised and judged.
If you want folk to move forward, offer support. To come out of shell you need to feel safer rather than pressured.
I am very aggressive about some topics and unapologetic. I have seen too much hate and death and loss to feel like I need to be gentle with people who are ostensibly on my side. People retreating from discomfort is how we have such an atomized world with so many people withdrawing from socializating, and as a result, abandoning the only real power we had which is community.
Seeing nostalgia for what it is, a tool of destruction, is a hard step to get over, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Your first sentence does clear up some space for me so…
I do feel for you and I symphatise with your point but my experience and what I saw in others screams at me that pushing and judging people only brings more suffering, because the only reaction to that is going on the defense. Even if they agree, they will protect themselves first, ask questions later…if ever.
Nostalgia can be a drive for better or a brake, depends on the person - as an example, it was what pushed me to finally better my mental state. I remembered how I was, and how I felt and I wanted to go back. And I did, at least mentally. Demons still out there but as you said in first comment in this chain, it ain’t gonna go away. But I wouldn’t be better if not for nostalgia, among other things, so yeah.
Do some acid it’ll return your mind to kid for a bit
You holding?
Nice try, FBI, nice try
No joke though, as a man in his fifties it’s become damn near impossible to find some! I have plenty of shroom connects, but finding anything else is tough. Is the “dark web” really a good place to source such?
shrooms are good enough
Agree to disagree. I prefer the trip from cid more, and my stomach has never been a fan of shrooms.
I do agree with you and always made tea or got them in capsules. I cannot eat the actual stuff it’s just too vile
But I do like that they’re shorter which is mostly just a current lifestyle problem. I like both trip about the same tho
I can’t speak for currently, but I’ve had great experiences in the past. I wouldn’t know where to begin as far as markets go now though.
Gaming for hours and hours is still fine. :)
I need the self-parenting (adulting?) to enjoy it though. Some things need to be done, can’t ignore them - need the feeling that I did something with my time and can’t have the pressure of undone tasks.E: verbosity
Yeah, but back then no work, no responsibilities, friends not busy all the time…
It’s the same flat screen TVs!
