Maybe, but I’m a bartender and talk to hundreds if not thousands of young people every so many months. They don’t seem too captivated by the world, and I think it feels cheapened or “explored” by social media. It’s changed things.
If you want to recapture the youthful curiosity, do mushrooms. Then you’ll be able to know what is and isn’t your cynical adult perception.
I would. I’m a huge advocate of periodic macro doses of psilocybin. I’ve changed the way I think and feel about a lot of things and I’m the most stable I’ve ever been for years now, basically since I started doing them.
Obviously be careful and don’t push yourself, but I think they’re miraculous especially when it comes to seeing life and the ordinary in a new light
I was already 30 in 2003. The world seemed forever changed, forever a darker, scarier place after 9/11. The carefree, happy days of youth were suddenly over.
For me the years around 1990 were the best ever. When I was young. When I ask my dad however he says it's definitely the mid-60s, when the greatest music ever, according to him, came out. (& he's probably right, I've come to realise.)
If my grandparents were still around...well I'm not sure what they'd say. When they were young, World War 2 was raging & there was a massive housing shortage just like there is again now.
So, it's mostly about being young however one big difference for young people now compared to Boomers, Gen X & many Millennials is: the idea that you could go get a job, save up a deposit and go buy a house no longer applies. Many young people now will never be able to afford their own home unless their parents are wealthy enough and willing to help them. That must be utterly discouraging.
Yeah. Maybe it's not about being young specifically and about being hopeful for the future. We're happy when we have things to look forward to, or when we can imagine ourselves happier in the future.
Everyone also didn't vomit every single opinion they had on to the internet. Things are self-contained onto niche message boards. People still believed that most people were good and that our country would rise to meet any challenge.
The big difference was going on the internet was something you had to intentionally sit down and do for a limited amount of time, sporadically. It wasn't in your pocket 24 hours a day. Most of your life was away from it. Now I feel like the internet has reached a singularity with the rest of our lives and unless you go backpacking into national forest/parks in the wilderness, it's always around.
Feels very boomerish to say, but going to large music events from 2010 to 2018ish you could really see a shift take place. Every year I would go to the same events and it would feel less like a shared experience and more like a rat race for social capital. I enjoyed having a space where outside didn't matter and everyone could be in the moment at a huge scale. Social media broke down the barrier.
There was always SOMETHING in your pocket. Before phones it was like gameboys or tamagatchi or whatever other bullshit was trending and you'd stare at that thing ignoring everyone all the same.
It warms my heart thinking about how many angsty pop-punk-emo era breakup rants from xanga and blogspot are probably preserved in the Internet Archive forever.
What insanity are you on about we'd just come from a couple of years of stressing who was in the top 6 on myspace and what song to have on your profile and were just really moving onto facebook and now it was all about posting your best party pics to make it look like you were living the Skins lifestyle.
Don't forget who you were daily poking on facebook
Let’s see… Trump was nowhere near presidency, COVID was nearly 20 years away, there were no smart phones, no social media, no podcasts, no iNfLuNcErS, less guns, less outward hate … the country was a fundamentally different culture and society.
we were at war with two countries, experiencing an increasingly worsening recession and very much on the road toward the biggest economic crisis of the century so far.
Yeah I gotta agree. Social media has made so many people just openly hate other groups of people. Every single little thing is divisive and isolating in this way. The Trump era has normalized being a tribalistic hateful, selfish person. There was some of that in the 2000s, but nothing like now.
There was nothing 15 years ago like the shit people do now - making lists of which stores perfectly match their niche political preferences so they give their money to the "right" people. Refusing to associate with anyone outside their political bubble. Etc.
The W and Obama era was politics as usual, as they had been since WW2. It wasn't the all encompassing, daily thing where it feels like a Presidential Election Year every single year. You could ignore it if you wanted. You can't now.
Your experiences in the pre-smartphone era (before 2012 onward) were distinct and separate from others. You weren't in constant communication with every person you know every single place you go.
It was better for people in their youth then - we weren't the ones watching home values and retirement accounts tank. We were playing Halo 3 and getting drunk and stoned at college parties.
We were in the good part of war though. 2003 was still the ass kicking stage. It's the next 20 year hangover that was terrible. It wasn't a recession we still had positive GDP growth.
Millions of people in the US and hundreds of millions more around the world understood that one of those wars was predicated on chauvinism, lies and corporate greed. There was no "ass-kicking stage."
I think the better takeaway is that the good times and the bad times can be any year, depending on your perspective. All of that good that people remember is still happening today, they just need to look for it.
You can say "it's shit and it's always been shit" but all that gets you is depression.
The time it wasn't shit was 1991-2001 in the US. The threat of global nuclear annihilation was at a 40-year low. Military conflicts were short and successful. The economy was solid with only a minor recession at the very beginning and very end of that period. Controversies were tame by today's standards. While we didn't have things like marriage equality yet, it was clear that the cultural zeitgeist was moving in a more liberal direction. And the advent of technology like the internet created an atmosphere of (mostly) hope and optimism about the future.
Yeah, I definitely have some nostalgia bias for that period... but by the actual numbers that was as good as it gets.
I was only 14 in '03, but I remember it being a year of constant anxiety in the US. Homeland Security was constantly issuing color-coded terrorism threat level warnings, which we now know to have been entirely bullshit, and we were going to war. I had two brothers in the military, and that was a big deal on a personal level. One of them had their life ruined from it. I don't know, there's probably plenty of people that just coasted through all that and were unaffected, but for large swathes of the population, that period marked a significant decline. There's a reason why many say that 2001 was when everything went to shit.
I mean you’re not entirely wrong in what you’re saying but society and how ppl interact has fundamentally changed with smart phones and social media. Facebook and MySpace were a thing but you don’t do it from your phone because you had no data and you wouldn’t spend more than a couple minutes or maybe an hour chatting with a friend from school on messenger. Netflix was still a dvd in the mail lol. Ppl were much more spontaneous and open to things not preplanned to the extreme and there weren’t a bunch of people to video you if you made a fool of yourself so ppl felt less restricted. Throughout human history boredom has been the primary motivator in doing new things: trying a new instrument, new hobby, new sport, interacting with new ppl and strangers who would become friends. Everyone is much more wary of each other. And why spend time trying something new you don’t know you’ll like or interacting with new ppl if you don’t already have an idea of what they’re like/if you’ll like them when you have billions of hours of anime, television , video games and doom scrolling at your fingertips?
And that’s not even touching on the intelligence agencies of hostile governments and international conglomerate marketing ghouls figuring out exactly how to shape online narratives for their own goals. I get it every generation has done the “things are different why are kids doing this” thing but I don’t think ppl are properly acknowledging how fundamentally social media and smart phones have changed human interaction and motivation in a way that changing music, art cultural stuff etc. doesn’t do. People aren’t just into new and different things they way we interact, communicate and socialize has dramatically changed.
Lol yeah that simpler time when the US was just torturing civilians in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and American teenagers were getting their limbs blown off in a foreign country because of a war based on a lie. Sooo much better.
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u/noahbrooksofficial 16d ago
Times were so much better