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It's easy to idealize the past... particularly a past that *you* didn't live in.
I grew up in the 80's. Lemme tell you about the 80's. We didn't have air conditioning either at school or at home until I was a teenager. People still got ring-worm and pink-eye... these were common. Corporal punishment was the norm in school. Vehicles were unreliable... total junk in many cases. The economy was garbage- at least in the area where I grew up (well to be fair, it still is). There was *no such thing* as the internet for 99% of people. If somebody moved elsewhere, you just never heard from them again. They might as well be dead. We lived on the brink of a nuclear apocalypse (which to be fair may still be true today, but everyone was keenly aware back then). *Everybody* was christian, and it was unthinkable to be otherwise. If you wanted information on *anything*, your best bet was an encyclopedia that could be *easily* 20 years out of date. Or maybe a magazine article. People these days have no understanding of how hard it was to get information on *any* subject back then.
The 90's were better, but still no shortage of problems.
I'm just saying that no matter what time period you look at, there were things about it that sucked... that you may not be aware of if you weren't there.
Frankly things these days are pretty nice by comparison. Technology has made so many things easier. Even in the most isolated podunk backwaters like where I grew up, you still have the internet to connect you with the outside world. Whatever you need information on- it's just a google search away. And these days, you can be gay, straight, any combination thereof, or something else entirely... that's all ok. It was unthinkable in decades past. These days everybody and their dog can go to college- that wasn't always the case. And even people of modest means can travel to other continents... again, unthinkable outside the context of a World War for my parents' generation and earlier.
Kids, you've got it pretty good these days. Not perfect by a long shot... but things are WAY better than they used to be.
You have every right to feel the way you do and you are correct about the rapid rate of change. It leads to a feeling of instability. There is a lot less that is tangible than in past eras.
Sometimes I wish I lived in the past and I'm also a millennial. I was probably the last generation to know about watching movies on VHS and now other people in my generation think it's not cool anymore. My generation seems to be killing more things than the ones before it in that regard. I also don't like how people stopped using photo or motion picture film anymore. The only niches that exist today are extremely small and not sustainable. I don't want to come off as sounding like a killjoy to anybody (in fact, I am anti-killjoy), but the pace at which stuff is becoming replaced or being extinct is scary to me, and I don't have a lot of confidence about the future of society. This is it, things are changing faster than when my parents were young and it's not going to stop going in that same direction. I don't know what people should do. I hate sounding like somebody who is suicidal and depressed, but I have that similar kind of bad feeling.
I especially wish more people that were in my generation appreciated it more, from our own childhood but also when our parents/grandparents were growing up.
Why aren't more people concerned about the "old ways" becoming extinct?
OP, you don't have to buy into what seems like an inevitable process. You can make your own choices, and to some extent, create your own world. People still use old-fashioned film cameras. Some professional photogs swear by them. I find the need to replace batteries annoying, so I use a film camera. I also needed that particular make and model, because other cameras would freeze up in super-cold conditions, and steam up in tropical environments.
I still have VHS movies, and a VHS player. Some of the films I have on VHS are irreplaceable, and are precious and rare documents of exotic cultural practices that are being lost, so I"m not going to get rid of them, and it's expensive to transfer them to disc. I should do that eventually, just because VHS tapes degrade over time, if they're played much, but it's not an urgent need.
However, you should also look at the positive side, of new stuff being invented. Advances are being made, as well as losses being incurred. There are always two sides to everything; look for the positive. You can also get creative, with preserving some of the old-timey stuff in your own life.
P.S. Turkey-head brings up a really good point: the internet, and household computers! OMG, I can't believe the miracle of having this GLOBAL encyclopedia at my fingertips! I couldn't live without it, now! And easy access to cultural and musical traditions of the world--youtube! Fiber-optic cable--what an incredible invention! I bet you're taking these things for granted, but. you shouldn't be.
P.P.S. How old are you? Have you been to college yet? You might find the field of anthropology interesting. You could study other cultures' lore and life ways, and study disappearing "artifacts" and life ways in our own culture. You might find an interesting career track in that, somewhere.
Another thread of yours that I'm in agreement with. There are so many things that have gone away from the past that I miss. The last nail in the coffin lately was IMDB message boards. I did find an amazing replacement..problem is hardly anyone is aware of it so it's pretty much a ghost town ATM and that doesn't replace the threads that were already deleted from IMDB before they closed it so they can't archive it. The biggest issue though is I can't even login to post! I'll have to figure out how to contact them because I've tried so many times.
People think the internet has gotten so great now because oh look we have Twitter now. Like I mentioned before I don't understand the obsession. I tweet occasionally to keep up with the times so I pretty much have no other choice but to use it since everyone moved to there and I can only spend a few minutes on there before I get really bored. I never liked Facebook. I never post on mine but sites often require you to have one to use their site so that's the main reason I still have mine. The one social network I still miss is Myspace before it completely changed. Remember the days of putting music playlists and pretty backgrounds on your page..? I also had a virtual pet on mine too. They were there for a little while and now they are gone..may never return again.
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Originally Posted by walmill
Not to be that guy who has to go against the grain, but why should things from the past be assigned higher value?
Why do you wish we were still using VHS? Man I hated rewinding them. I rewatched aliens over and over and as a kid rewound the “cool” parts to the point the video quality significantly dropped. I sure as heck don’t want to go back to those. The new technology is far more efficient and practical.
Why, othe than nostalgic value, should we keep VHS tapes, black and white TVs and other obsolete products?
Few years ago my mother bought on eBay some nostalgic items. After realizing they were cluttering and of no use she got rid of them and got a speech from my aunt about “you can’t relive the past “
When “stranger things” came out I remember watching it and just felt very nostalgic of the atmosphere. I wasn’t alive at the time, born in 80s but my older siblings and cousins were. I have thought about wishing I had lived in their time instead feeling it was a different pace than my experiences. But guess what, I grew up on Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64. Nowadays those game systems are looked back with strong nostalgia and envy by the generation that followed.
It's mainly about the days of VHS not the VHS tapes themselves. There was no Comcast (or maybe there was but they weren't a monopoly then) We could probably get antenna television easier and if we had to get cable it was Adelphia and Adelphia didn't screw things up and charge up the rear like Comcast.
But VHS does have something that other forms don't. They are more durable. Of course with digital recordings that's obviously the best but they also have a flaw. If the drive they are stored on crashes your stuff is all gone. The DVR from the C place had a problem with the On Demand. They didn't fix it so we lost every recording and some of them I think were recorded as far back as 2013. That's partially why I sometimes like to have physical copies of certain things. Of course consider the source so it's not as likely with other places I'm sure but you can't be too careful.
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Originally Posted by Fat Freddy
Unless you were born yesterday, you have lived in the past.
I don't know why somebody would want to go back there and live it over again and do things they have already done when there are so many things in the present to do.
I would just mainly want to go back and change things. There are irreversible outcomes to my past..things I can never get back. I've been wanting a time machine every birthday. People say to move forward but sometimes there is no moving forward.
I also would want to go back and see my grandma one more time. I feel like with losing her when I was young I kinda took her for granted.
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Originally Posted by WannabeCPA
I'd often think I'd want to visit the past, for maybe a week or so just for nostalgia. Live in the past? Hell no. This is of course knowing all that I know now. I grew up in the 80s and 90s. While I love 80s music, I wouldn't want to go back and live in that time. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say if given a choice, the vast majority of people, including yourself, would not want to live in the past either. I think what you have is a severe case of nostalgia. Just think about it for a moment. Would you really want to do without the internet (or very slow internet), not having the convenience of watching movies at home without having to drive to Blockbuster to pick up and return a rental, no smartphones, no ordering anything online, no information (or misinformation) at your fingertips, etc. Not to mention sky high crime rates in the US. As far as things being replaced much faster, I think you're on to something, but to me that means we're making progress much faster. People are trying to create better ways to do things rather than just settle for the status quo. Of course it may not always work out, but the ambition is there. I'd much rather live in a time like this than in any kind of "dark ages" where people are just accepting of the way things are.
The 90s were the best decade for me. Right around 2008 was when things started to really suck. I was going through trauma that I never thought I'd go through. I didn't like the newer music artists. There was a lot of great TV in the 90s. I will never forget TGIF.
The internet was slower but it worked well for the time and it was a lot more affordable. I actually didn't mind going to Blockbuster and picking up a movie. It made no difference to me.
No smartphones? I've only had this one since 2013 and sure I like it but if everything else was as it was I wouldn't need it. It's merely to help me cope with the unpleasantness of an unfulfilled life and even then I'm still not happy.
No ordering anything online? Seriously..I mean I love Amazon don't get me wrong but do you like waiting a few days or more for things you really want or need? I don't think Amazon is to blame persay because if it wasn't Amazon it'd be somebody else but it's a sign of the depressing times. A few years before Amazon came to the mainstream we could get so many products in the store. Now I'm lucky if I could even find much PS3 games in the store anymore. We do have two retro video game stores in our town but it's a limited quantity since it's mom and pop stores.
I like how you put misinformation in parentheses. You basically proved the point. Why would we like living in a world overwhelmed with misinformation? That is part of the problem with having so much information. It's overload and you sometimes don't know what's right and what's wrong.
Maybe it helped I lived in a small neighborhood when I was a kid but I didn't have to worry about any type of crime until sometime after I moved out of my childhood home. However, the world has clearly gotten worse not too long ago. There are reports of more violence than ever before. It was always bad but it seems like every week I hear about a shooting of children and I don't even watch the news on TV.
Well they're not trying very hard. With the internet being so big you'd think you could find shows that you watched growing up but there's one I still can't find. They don't sell it anywhere..you can't stream it on places like Netflix. It's like it never existed. I dug really deep only to find they had some episodes but there were about 5 or 6 missing. The other one I haven't found even one episode of and I think it had more episodes than the former.
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Originally Posted by turkey-head
I'm just saying that no matter what time period you look at, there were things about it that sucked... that you may not be aware of if you weren't there.
The only thing that sucked is that I had to deal with my parents fighting but I'd take that over the crap I've had to deal with over the years especially if I can go back and change things.
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Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth
I still have VHS movies, and a VHS player. Some of the films I have on VHS are irreplaceable, and are precious and rare documents of exotic cultural practices that are being lost, so I"m not going to get rid of them, and it's expensive to transfer them to disc. I should do that eventually, just because VHS tapes degrade over time, if they're played much, but it's not an urgent need.
However, you should also look at the positive side, of new stuff being invented. Advances are being made, as well as losses being incurred. There are always two sides to everything; look for the positive. You can also get creative, with preserving some of the old-timey stuff in your own life.
P.S. Turkey-head brings up a really good point: the internet, and household computers! OMG, I can't believe the miracle of having this GLOBAL encyclopedia at my fingertips! I couldn't live without it, now! And easy access to cultural and musical traditions of the world--youtube! Fiber-optic cable--what an incredible invention! I bet you're taking these things for granted, but. you shouldn't be.
YouTube..that's another thing that has been destroyed by time. I still use it occasionally but since they've gotten way too strict with copyright I can't watch things like I used to. There were accounts that I bookmarked that made fan montages that are now dead because they're worried about getting blocked. Google destroyed them.
Fiber optic cable. Ha what a laugh. That is a good example of there being a catch. The present is only great in certain areas so that's why many of you are saying you're fine with living in the present because you're in the designer parts of the world. Where I live Comcast rules. I'm bitter every day because I know damn well I want to move anyway but can't so that makes it worse. I've been wanting to leave this state ever since I was forced to leave my childhood house.
Quote:
Originally Posted by turkey-head
Whatever you need information on- it's just a google search away. And these days, you can be gay, straight, any combination thereof, or something else entirely... that's all ok. It was unthinkable in decades past. These days everybody and their dog can go to college- that wasn't always the case. And even people of modest means can travel to other continents... again, unthinkable outside the context of a World War for my parents' generation and earlier.
Kids, you've got it pretty good these days. Not perfect by a long shot... but things are WAY better than they used to be.
Google is an illusion often times. It might look like a vast world of knowledge but I figured something out recently. Unless you use exact wording in your searches (and even then sometimes it'll still come up with something irrelevant) you'll often sift through pages of pages and sometimes still not find what you are looking for. I've tried other search engines too even the one on the Tor Browser, it's not much better either. There are so many problems I'm looking for solutions with and one in particular I've googled my eyes out practically every day for several months only to drive my overthinking mind more and grow more and more discouraged.
That's only partially true. People were more accepting of gays for a while but in recent years we've gone backwards especially thanks to you know who. Gays can now marry but they might again have to worry about other rights being taken from them. I saw there is no longer protection for LGBT when it comes to being hired. Something else entirely? I might be wrong on what you mean by that but it sorely depends. On the rare times I've opened up about love I get about as much closed mindedness as the gays have. You'd think with all this talk of progression I wouldn't get that judgement but I still do.
People of modest means CAN travel to other countries? Not really. It may not be unheard of but it's almost more torturous in a way..it's the extent of putting a carrot in front of your face and not being able to reach it. I spent 1000 + on my vacation across state a few years ago so going out of the country I can just forget at this point. It has probably gone up since then too because we might be going through inflation at this point.
Last edited by Nickchick; 08-06-2018 at 09:37 PM..
However, the world has clearly gotten worse not too long ago. There are reports of more violence than ever before. It was always bad but it seems like every week I hear about a shooting of children and I don't even watch the news on TV.
I have to vehemently disagree with your statement of the world getting worse not too long ago. There may reports of more violence than ever before, but that's just it. They are REPORTS. The internet has allowed every thing eventful that happens in the world to be available to the masses 24/7. This was never the case before. Believe it or not, violent crime is way down from the 1970s-1990s in America. There are numbers from reputable sites like the FBI that support this. Ex. in the 80s and 90s NYC used to have well over 1,000, sometimes over 2,000 murders a year, now it's down to a few hundred a year. Even my city, Honolulu, had a vastly higher homicide rate in those decades than today. Just because you don't remember hearing it on the news, doesn't mean these things didn't happen. Auto fatalities were also much higher due to lack of education regarding responsible driving and less advanced safety features.
That's not in doubt, humans having been thinking the same for thousands of years - and they'll continue to do so in the future.
Sure, some things may be better at a certain time, but invariably it's tied up with subjectivity.
'Nostalgia's not what it used to be'.
Big deal, because there were disadvantages or cons to some things back then doesn't make up for the same things like that today.
It's easy to idealize the past... particularly a past that *you* didn't live in.
I grew up in the 80's. Lemme tell you about the 80's. We didn't have air conditioning either at school or at home until I was a teenager. People still got ring-worm and pink-eye... these were common. Corporal punishment was the norm in school. Vehicles were unreliable... total junk in many cases. The economy was garbage- at least in the area where I grew up (well to be fair, it still is). There was *no such thing* as the internet for 99% of people. If somebody moved elsewhere, you just never heard from them again. They might as well be dead. We lived on the brink of a nuclear apocalypse (which to be fair may still be true today, but everyone was keenly aware back then). *Everybody* was christian, and it was unthinkable to be otherwise. If you wanted information on *anything*, your best bet was an encyclopedia that could be *easily* 20 years out of date. Or maybe a magazine article. People these days have no understanding of how hard it was to get information on *any* subject back then.
The 90's were better, but still no shortage of problems.
I'm just saying that no matter what time period you look at, there were things about it that sucked... that you may not be aware of if you weren't there.
Frankly things these days are pretty nice by comparison. Technology has made so many things easier. Even in the most isolated podunk backwaters like where I grew up, you still have the internet to connect you with the outside world. Whatever you need information on- it's just a google search away. And these days, you can be gay, straight, any combination thereof, or something else entirely... that's all ok. It was unthinkable in decades past. These days everybody and their dog can go to college- that wasn't always the case. And even people of modest means can travel to other continents... again, unthinkable outside the context of a World War for my parents' generation and earlier.
Kids, you've got it pretty good these days. Not perfect by a long shot... but things are WAY better than they used to be.
I understand where you're getting at with some parts, but I still think it's kind of a selective reasoning, and the experience it was for you probably wasn't the exact same as everyone else's.
I would like to mention some things including the brink of nuclear apocalypse. I get that we aren't living in that era anymore, but there has been an uptick about it again the started around the 2010s. Things have changed since the last time and the quality of our leaders have gotten even worse. It's just that less people are thinking not as deeply or critically about it and have been fed certain stuff by others.
And corporal punishment, I don't really care if a school or other place wants to pursue that or not. I personally think it led people to being performers or people in general. Instead, the norm has just shifted to being laughed at or called names for not being totally against corporal punishment. That sucks too.
And it sucked because I just became an adult when everything was changing or already has.
I think my youngest son’s dad would love it if we hit-stop-reverse-past his birth year (1956), kept going about another 100 years-hit-stop & play ...
He would be in 7th heaven with a good axe, good knife, good gun & a good dog. Some land to farm & livestock to raise. A good woman (ha, guess I’m out) & some kids to leave it all to.
Sometimes I think the fast-track into the global, technological world has been harder on a particular breed of man; the men who got us from the caves to the Industrial Age. Those qualities; I guess you could call them “alpha”, are no longer needed or even wanted in order to succeed today.
He went through a “prepper” phase for a few years & while I wouldn’t say that’s a bad thing; I feel like some of the more extreme believers actually hope that some kind of catastrophic global economic collapse would happen so they could reclaim their place in the “pack”.
He has a grudgingly & minimal level of technological functioning & is somewhat contemptuous of “kids” (he calls everyone under age 55, including me, a kid) who “wouldn’t know their a** from a hole in the ground, if the lights went out”.
To be fair, I grew up in Southern Appalachia... outside a dying coal mining town. So that colors my memories of the 80's.
But lemme tell you... it was a whole different world back then. Some of that was good... much of it wasn't. But it was totally different. I feel like an old geezer when I reminisce about growing up in the 80's:
If you didn't grow up in the Cold War (or at the tail end of it in my case), I don't think you can really grasp what imminent nuclear annihilation meant to people, and how it affected society. My grandparents had a fallout shelter in their basement. The local schools and the local dam had fallout shelters. We had air-raid drills (though we didn't call them that)... and I remember that when Chernobyl blew every adult around damn near **** their pants. Read the book Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner and you'll realize how right they were to do so. IMO there are apocalyptic denominations of christianity still around today that largely grew out of that mentality... whether consciously or not. The Holy Rollers I grew up among were no exception.
We didn't have air conditioning until I was a teenager. Didn't have cable til I was grown and gone. We were poor but not *that* poor... this was common when and where I grew up. Even for kids whose dad *wasn't* occasionally unemployed and/or in a mental hospital.
In the world I grew up in, it was *common* for a man to build his own house. Literally put it together with his own hands. My dad did that- the preacher, his father-in-law, and his friends helped him out. My grandpa built his own house. So did several of my friends' dads. Today's cardboard castles built by Mexicans just didn't exist... at least not in Deepest Darkest Appalachia where I grew up.
Men worked on their own vehicles- this was the norm. If they weren't very good at it, they'd get a friend or relative to help out- hardly anybody could afford to go to a mechanic. Women raised gardens and canned stuff... seriously, they'd mess around in the garden all the time. When we weren't at our home almost directly under some high-voltage power lines, my brothers and I roamed the woods, rode our bikes for MILES in any direction, played in the river just down the holler. We climbed trees and cliffs... threw anything we could find off the cliffs. Got in fights with other kids in the neighborhood, built assorted tree-houses and crap like that. Chopped down trees with our hatchets that for some ludicrous reason our parents bought us when we were maybe 8. Got ran off the road on our bikes on a few occasions by the local drunk white trash... my brother and I both ended up in the hospital on separate occasions this way. But my parents didn't seem to think much of it We also enjoyed playing with the large jar of mercury that my grandpa kept on the mantle above the fireplace.
My friend lived in a rotten trailer house on top of the ridge... so rotten you had to watch where you step or you'd go through the floor (his half sister still lives in that same trailer thirty-some years later... no kidding). His dad worked for a foundry because the coal mines had closed down... never did make much money. So when they had supper, he was only allowed one serving- the kid was so hungry most of the time that he'd come over to our house where he could eat all he wanted. They didn't have room in the house for all the kids and step-kids, so he had to sleep on the couch. But he's doing well these days and still lives right across the road from that rotten trailer.
Our school was built in 1939 (I remember this plaque on the wall). Still had a boiler room to heat the cast iron radiators in each room (and this dirty janitor guy who would shovel coal all day). No air conditioning- ever. The playground had this 20-foot-tall metal slide... bare metal that would reach about 150 degrees surface temperature in the sun. With either jagged rocks or a mud puddle at the bottom depending on the weather. We also had falling-apart see-saws, some sort of basketball court thing that might have been level and usable in 1950, swings with chains that occasionally broke, and steel 'monkey bars' that we would throw each other off of. Oh, and field full of sharp rocks where we would play tackle football.
We used to have a Baptist preacher (Mr. George!) show up now and then and preach to all us kids assembled in the gym. At least he didn't dwell on hell so much like they did at my church. There was one Mexican kid who showed up at school one time... none of us really understood what that meant, we just wanted to hear him speak Spanish. He left after a couple months. Another time a these two half black kids showed up- their dad was black and their mom was white. I remember that it was quite a scandal, though I didn't really understand why. They also left after a few months. Nobody ever said why, but our barber was a Klansman (not even embellishing there), so I can guess.
The only computers we had in the entire school were three old Apple computers of some sort... took a 5 1/4" floppy. I was one of five kids selected to tinker with the computers after school. Learned to write a few very basic programs and change the colors around in f r o g g e r (it was a video game- why is the board censoring this word?). Also played some Taipan and Oregon Trail... damn the dysentery! That was pretty much the extent of my education on computers until I started tinkering with them as an adult. Anyhow we were the last class to 'graduate' from that ancient, asbestos-ridden, lead-paint-clad elementary school. They closed it down the year we left. It's still there, last I knew it was being used as a machine shop.
So, children, are you getting a somewhat different impression of the 80's than you'd get from Stranger Things or ET? I'm sure it beat the hell outta Sub-Saharan Africa... but the 80's weren't necessarily all they were cracked up to be. It was mediocrity of a whole other kind than we have today.
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We also enjoyed playing with the large jar of mercury that my grandpa kept on the mantle above the fireplace.
