@atomicpoet people keep complaining about prices but my pension and social security payments are higher and both my millennial kids are making higher hourly wages than ever 🤷♀️
@thepoliticalcat@BillySmith@atomicpoet the price of eggs went way up but the lady at the store explained Washington State passed a cage free law... totally fine with me. 👍
@atomicpoet I think it's because a lot of the fediverse skews agewise into the area where nostalgia becomes a driving force.
and yeah, we should keep in mind that back then a lot of stuff was kind of crazy as well, TV was generally bad, modern music always was mostly crap, and in general everything was a little less shiny than nowadays.
@atomicpoet this is so true. as John Hodgman says (paraphrase), nostalgia is a toxic impulse, the idea that we can return to the good old days that never existed
@atomicpoet I I want to agree with you but I think compared to all the "things were better before" that came before we do actually live at a turning point in history and not a good one. Western democracies are very probably ending. The Western world as we know it is very probably ending. The climate collapse is a few decades if not a few years away. Environmental collapse and the Sixth Extinction are already on the way.
I don't know if the present is better or worse than the past, but the future will only get worse, and it won't get better until well after we're dead.
So it's understandable to see the past with fondness when the future is beyond terrifying.
@DavidBHimself Thing is, that feeling of doomerism has always been here. It felt like the end of the world in 2020. But also in 2015. And also in 2007. And also in 2001.
On and on it goes. And yet, we’re still here and things persist.
Sure, but they're talking about specific things: the Internet, American infant mortality, economic disparity; which are worse. Some things can be better, at the same time that other things are worse. It's ok to want everything to be better. Life should not be a zero-sum game.
I find the misplaced nostalgia is far more a problem on Facebook/Meta than here - on groups popular with Gen X Brits there's folk who seem to actively enjoy the fact that 1970s austerity is returning to society and being inflicted on their own adult offspring and their grandchildren, its like a kind of Neo-Calvinism/Puritanism (albeit more secular here in Britain) and is also interlinked with rights/freedoms being rolled back in USA
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