Schrodinger's nostalgia - life was worse and better depending on the current goals of the speaker.
this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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Both are kinda true. We didn't have all of human knowledge in our pocket at all times, the ability to meet people of the same interests across the planet, and the ability to order pretty much anything we want within the day.
We also could afford a decent living situation, it wasn't a daily struggle to remain thin, and weren't seriously worried about a Christian Nationalism take over.
It is like everything that depended on shared institutions got worse and everything that depended on one individuals or single companies got better.
and weren’t seriously worried about a Christian Nationalism take over.
this was around since the 80s and before.
EDIT : here's a great quote from 94
Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.
Said in November 1994, as quoted in John Dean, Conservatives Without Conscience (2006).
My high school history teacher idolized Goldwater, but Goldwater would have hated him.
Fun anecdote: The eurozone once came up in discussion and he said that he and one of the hyper-Christian students in our class were going to march down to Washington and warn them about the impending one-world currency and the coming of the end times 🎉🥂🎉
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Had to walk to school, uphill both ways in -40C everyday, all year. Things were better back then.
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I had to read it three times, because I didn't find it funny at all in any sense and I was trying to find a funny twist, but I didn't succeed. It's too real for me
It's just funny-sad. We both have it the easiest and the hardest.
I didn't laugh either. Though I think the contradiction of "life fucking sucked back then" followed by "life was fucking awesome back then" was supposed to be funny.
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I lived in Southern California in the early nineties on very little money. The only real "hardship" was that I needed a co-signer to rent an apartment until I was about twenty five.
Other than that, it's not like I was living in luxury, and I certainly could not have bought a house, but it was comfortably doable on slightly more than minimum wage. (And several of my classmates did buy houses in southern California on starting salaries while still in their twenties)
I make roughly seven times more money now, and feel like I wouldn't be able to afford a two bedroom apartment anywhere in California.
It wasn't harder then. At least not for me.
But we did have a way better music environment. Like a lot better. I can say this because I spent the 2010s taking my daughter to hundreds of shows at every size and style of venue imaginable. It was a lot of fun. It was our thing. But it didn't compare to the vibe back in my time. Everything got gentrified. Even the "dive" venues felt suburban.
Entertainment in general has gotten a whole lot greedier while providing a whole lot less.
I have a fuckin' dolt of an uncle who was trying to tell me that points ignition is better than electronically controlled ignition. Like??? Yeah dude I love adjusting my spark timing by hand it's so much fun 🙄
And more moving parts that wear out, yay!
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—Every. Single. YouTube comment section. For videos of vintage media
"back when good music was made" ad nauseum
Oh, not just music. I’ve seen people comment about the ‘80s, when they made… [heavy, plaintive sigh]… REAL cartoons. For christ’s sake…
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Don't forget that the best music ever was the one that came out when I was in my late adolescence, everything since then went downhill fast.
Men At Work, Rick Springfield, REO Speedwagon... now that was REAL music!
"I was into Star Wars. You were into that Empire Strikes Back shit."
I mean, the 80s were an objectively awesome time for music.
(I wasn't alive yet)
I think the big reason people think that music from another time was better is because you only get to hear the good songs; they stopped playing the shitty ones long ago.
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I like today's music but it seems derivative. Maybe I'm full of shit, and feel free to tell me why, but it seems like music from my dad's youth (which I also like) was way different than mine, but nothing has changed that much since then.
You could take today's music and put it on a radio station in the 90s and it wouldn't seem out of place if you didn't know any better. I don't think the same is true for 90s music on a 60s or 70s station.
A good chunk of that is going to be because the 90's was around the time when digital tools became accessible, good, industry wide things, and we haven't had a kind of big musical innovation since that point, as far as the technology itself goes. That transition probably happened more noticeably in the 2000's, but you could tell it was happening over the course of the 90's for sure. The music industry has also not changed that much, we're still very much living in that reagan kind of neoliberal huge music label era, but that's kind of been around forever, so I kind of doubt that's been a major change from the 60's up to now. You could maybe say that streaming and the internet has changed music, and it certainly has, because now there are no gatekeepers, everyone listens to everything, and lots of artists put out like, a 10 minute single that changes styles six times so it might be propagated better online, instead of like a 90 minute experimental album. But then, there are more room for both of them, because people are more easily able to find what they want, and the latter was never gonna be mainstream anyways.
If I had to point out a larger genre shift, there has definitely been a large mainstreaming of rap and this kind of "pop country" more recently. You had those in the 90's, kind of infamously, but hootie and the blowfish does not really sound like modern country through some cultural progression that I don't really understand because I'm not brushed up on it. NWA and Tupac do not sound the same as modern rap, which has been getting a lot more of a "soft" kind of vibe, which I'd probably attribute to the influence of like, kanye, and maybe some lo-fi stuff like nujabes, and maybe just a mainstreaming of the genre at large. The subject matter has shifted, the tone has shifted, and the music itself has changed. Those genres would not sound the same, relative to their 90's counterparts.
The biggest thing I can think of that probably makes 60's and 70's music sound out of place next to 90's music is probably how hair metal got killed by grunge, which I couldn't really attribute to any one reason in particular. There's a pretty clear line between your rock acts, which have been going forever, and your later metal acts, and that line still exists with grunge, but grunge marks a kind of tonal shift. You'd also have to ignore the whole of disco and club music, that motown shit from the 70's and 80's, which died out pretty hard, but most everyone does that anyways, so who cares. I don't know if I've heard many 70's or 80's stations that actually play disco, certainly, not in proportion to how popular it was, usually they just play like. Stevie wonder, from what I've heard, shit like that. Or MJ. The thing you could probably derive from disco, from the 70's and 80's into the 90's, would probably be like, drum and bass, and eurobeat, stuff like that, and then you'd get stuff like daft punk later on which has a pretty clear connection to disco generally.
I dunno, this is all to say, shit has substantially changed in almost every mainstream genre I can think of in the last like, 60 years, from the 60's. Some stuff has remained pretty similar, and some stuff has had an almost cyclical nature, but that's just kind of the nature of music, I think.
That's an interesting point about the accessibility of digital tools. Without a completely new way to craft a sound nothing could sound all that different.
Although I do like "real" country music (sorry about the gatekeeping) "pop country", Nashville pop, or whatever you want to call it, is the one genre of music I dislike the whole of. I guess it's different from other country but it's similar enough to generic pop I wouldn't consider it new.
I do agree about rap/hip-hop though. The artists I listen to now are very different than what I listened to in the 90s and there is a much wider variety of style. I wonder how much of that is due to how easy it is to discover new artists now. Back in the 90s learning about underground rap artists, or underground anything, wasn't easy.
So strange that everyone looks back at hip-hop in the 90s and 90% of the time it's about stuff like Tupac and NWA, while another parallel current with bands such as De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and Arrested Development gets overlooked.
Those bands were extraordinary, like Hip Hop in a tradition of Stevie Wonder, and kept putting out excellent albums that sound just as fresh today and are just as influential as anything from that era, but mid-decade the music industry swept them aside swiftly and unceremoniously, to make way for West Coast and Gangsta Rap.
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I think if you take today's pop music and do a side by side comparison with 90s pop you'd be surprised by how different they are. Not to mention, there are many many electronic genres and subgenres around today that have arisen in recent years.
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Tv's ending up not being supported anymore after 2 years, leading to needing to buy a new one or rent a device to still get tv from your isp is absolute shit.
I haven't been able to buy decent work pants and or shoes for the past 5 years, i remember my first work boots lasting me 11 years and costing €40. My most recent ones were similar in material make up and cost €170, but they looked worn after 2 weeks. I used to buy work pants for €60 and they would last literal years upon years. My last pairs of pants (3 combined) were €80 a piece on discount and were worn beyond repair within a year...all 3 pairs.
To think i pay more than double the rent, income is up only €60 a month compared to then.
There is a lot that has gone backwards.
Having to look 3 times to cross the street on a green because the world is filled by people in cars not paying attention anymore and i get into near collisions 4/5 times a week is also absolutely insane. It feels like i'm the only person that understands traffic lights xD
Tbh i find it hard to think of positives about everything that has changed...
My energy bill is going up significantly because our government has decided we now (as a result of ev's) are using too much electricity. I don't own a car, any car for that matter as i can't afford one...but now i'm punished for my neighbours big fat fancy ev.
Our energy usage (2 people) is far below the 1 person average and we are now being punished for it?
Health insurance (legally required over here) is also going up significantly, we can't even find a doctor as they are all at their limit and don't take on new patients.
This really needs to stop.
So eh..good things...good things..hmm, can someone help me out a little?
Western Europe, 1950s era. Capitalism had to make compromises. The soviet union was right next door - if people realized that seizing the means of production would improve their quality of life, they'd have a communist revolution on their hands. So concessions were made. "See, you don't need communism to have a good life, we're giving you all those things too!"
And finally, the capitalists won and the soviet union was no more, parceled up and sold to the capital owners in the west. Now they don't feel the need to make concessions without a major communist power in their backyard. So they roll back the progress slowly, hoping no one notices.
Yes, but what about insert whatever culture war topic of the hour?
Personally I take on because and I take offense that you would suggest that it's entirely a manufactured issue created by the capital class to keep us fighting each other instead of them. Even suggesting it just serves the purpose of !
(not to imply that culture war bullshit doesn't have real world consequences, that's why the capital class picks these topics as wedge issues)
Stupid sexy schismogenesis!
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Porn is definitely easier today, kids can just go on Twitch
But at the same time when kids want go have fun they go on Twitch but we had Pogs
We had pogs, they have pogchamp. That's called progress.
*pogress
The two of these things aren't mutually exclusive to be honest. It's possible to
I very much miss places and experiences which don't exist any more, or have changed as society has changed.
An example is the way music is consumed. When purchasing physical media it took much more effort, thus you were more invested. You would typically visit a music shop, purchase the album, take it home and listen to it. There would usually be an album liner where you could read the lyrics, see photos of the band (which you'd only otherwise be able to see in magazines) and you felt like you had a direct connection with them.
The purchase of the physical asset connected you in some way to the artist and made for a type of relationship with the music which is much harder to emulate with streaming services, where the music is free and available immediately.
As a result, the way I like to discover music is at odds to the way Spotify wants to provide me music. It wants to provide me more of the same, I want to discover things I haven't heard before.
That being said, Spotify has given me access to music I didn't know existed by artists I love but had never heard of till I found them on someone's random playlist. And it's perpetually there when I'm driving, exercising and working. It plays for it doesn't require rhe effort or thought of dubbing tapes or recording from the radio.
As someone who grew up poor, I never got the record store experience, because if I wanted music, it would either be on the radio, or I'd need to play it myself.
The limited childhood budget would be like $20, which means, you could buy one CD with eight or ten tracks to listen on repeat, or.. buy something like SimCity 2000, for possibly hundreds of hours of fun (I had a family friend neighbor who threw out an old PC/donated it to us because they got outdated real fast in the 90s).
Accounting for inflation, that $20 is probably closer to $40-80 now, and a Spotify subscription is definitely a lot less costly than even that, for not one disk, but an endless amount of music.
The value proposition, the cost of entertainment has dropped precipitously, and now as a rich adult and technocrat, artificial intelligence can autonomously create new music, much in the way Spotify can discover tracks that "you like".
Every night, I've got 138-357 MB of brand new music, that no one's ever heard of, courtesy of my algorithm, recombining chunks of music from everything I've ever heard, to create brand new bangers.
If these tracks were released to Spotify, people wouldn't be able to tell they weren't made by people. AI is after all, a plagarism machine, built on the hard work of real people and artists.
But between plagiarism and piracy, I feel this new streaming world answers a great need:
The desire for culture, to be free, for any and all, to enjoy.
Friendly suggestion to anyone reading this that many of your favorite artists are on SoundCloud and other platforms: it costs nothing to send them a message to say you love their music.
Direct platforms like bandcamp also make it feel so good to know most of every dollar is heading their way.
But it's also improved music in general. It used to be possible for an artist to make one or two good tracks for radio play and then create subpar filler for the rest of the album, but now all of the tracks of the album are sold separately so every track has to be of equal quality. Additionally you aren't bound to just the one song played on the radio when looking for new artists.
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(ಠ _ ) ಠ
As usual, it's actually somewhere in-between the two.
When I was a kid, things were pretty much the same! Y'all are doing roughly what I would do! Life was pretty OK back then! You kids have similar things to deal with! And everything nowadays looks to be about as challenging as what we used to have! Life was quite OK back then! But you kids have experienced a similar quality of life!
Dude came full circle.
Edit: I now realise it's actually a half circle, but hey.
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"I miss the old (insert thing that still exists here)"
Name a perfect time for everybody
Ehh. A little from column A, a little from column B.
Rinse, repeat, ad infinitum. Every generation thinks exactly the same way.
Facts
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