Thoughts on Millenials being obsessed with the past

[Ultrapenguin]

There was some article that discussed how nostalgia is a defense mechanism though we tend to have a romanticize view of the past. There some things I think I would relive but I have to remind myself that there were shitty parts too.

That's a major element I think.

Nostalgia has kind of become a culturally promoted escape mechanism, where people deal with stress by telling themselves all kinds of stories about how great things used to be when in reality that's not necessarily true.
It's a sentiment I don't understand, and honestly I can't help but notice it's strongly associated with weirdos. Tons of trannies, coomers, autists like Chris Chan, etc. all have really intense perceptions of nostalgia.

What was so great about the 90s? Oh boy, I'm going to play some Sonic and then watch Animorphs, now that I'm consuming my life is really complete. Even as a little kid none of that stuff was that amusing.
No point within the last 30 years has been that amazing.

I guess it was less uncertain, but the tradeoff is that it's not that fun being a helpless kid who has no idea what's going on.
Hell, being a grown man who owns power tools and can make actual adult things is the natural extension of something that was pretty amusing as a kid, which was building stuff with legos or k'nex.

Plus if nothing else, if you disliked the culture of the preceding decades, at least now you fit in much better by feeling alienated and dissatisfied.

"What kills you is not the life you have but the life you didn't have"

Why would it upset me that I didn't get in a car wreck and wind up paraplegic, or develop MS, or have my parents die as a kid?
Or should we only agonize over the things we think we want that we don't have, but not be grateful for all the awful things that could've happened to us that didn't?

What could have been is silly and imaginary, nobody can know where life will or could have taken them, and a lot of times even when people achieve their vision of what they think the perfect life would be they wind up coming to despise it. Life isn't a la cart, and if it was people wouldn't be happy.

I understand how the mind works especially when someone's feeling shitty, but I don't think putting stock in regret and escapist fantasies is going to help anyone.

 

[xX_rAcE_wAr_420_Xx]

I understand how the mind works especially when someone's feeling shitty, but I don't think putting stock in regret and escapist fantasies is going to help anyone.

When you don't have anything to look forward to, all you can do is wax nostalgic. "Dude, remember back when we just played cool old video games and listened to cool old music and just had a good time?" Adolescence into very early adulthood is largely unconcerned with the future outside of the vague notion that you might go to school for programming, hey you like computers and that's supposed to be a good job. The cutoff for all of these low-responsibility fantasies is right when you get enough perspective to do a serious accounting of your future prospects.

To echo a lot of this thread, what are those prospects? Everyone seems to think that awful societal trends are on the rise, whether they're crimes against women and marginalized communities, 'cancel culture', every new media being a sequel or reboot, economics, spirituality, the environment / climate change, politics... what are we even in a golden age of, remotely? It's limited to cheap consumer goods and tech, pretty much, and I don't know how many people would trade their entire sustainable society and way of life for half-off a new iPhone. You can have a union job working on tangible goods, see the work of your two hands, and support an entire family on your wages... OR you can voice-activate your blender via your home assistant that may or may not call the police if it hears you saying "nigger"!

Remember when you just got to play Guitar Hero with the boys, go to the corner store and get some Mountain Dew, stay up late? DUDE those were the days!

 

[Netizennameless]

Nostalgia happens because we remember the emotions of an event far more than the details. It's also why the veracity of our memories fade with time.

It's easy for people to dismiss that question and the talking points surrounding it (which I could prattle on about, but won't in too much detail) by calling the person asking it a "Doomer" but look at what a 30 year old millennial (let's say a man, white and in a western country, considering the average person here who'd be reading this) is looking down the barrel of and ask yourself: do things look good to you? If the future outlook was the stock of a company would you buy shares or would you short it? Personally, I'd probably be shorting it.

I personally would buy. We are at the point where the pendulum has swung back in the other direction but most people haven't realized it yet. The market is still reporting doom and gloom but the reality on the ground is different. The Supreme Court is dismantling decades of federal overreach and is showing no signs of stopping. Joe Manchin is playing the part of controlled opposition and Democrats are losing the culture wars again. People got a taste of what could be with Trump and they are not going back under the thumb.

You see it in subtle ways. People refusing to let go of remote work. People net emigrating from the largest bughives and not falling for Ron DeSantis. Record increases in first-time gun owners the last few years. Times are changing.

 

[Biggie Smalls' Taint]

Basically, progress... happened way too fast

Everyone always says that it's 'progress', that we have 'progressed' in some way. If you really think about it, have we? We've made progress in a lot of pointless things, but are we moving forward?

Take Netflix for example. Every show you could ever watch and more at an instant for a small fee. Watch whatever, whenever in HD. Progress? Is there anything worth watching there? Is it the shining beacon of convenience it sounds like, or a place to watch some of the shittiest mind rot and do nothing else?

The Internet. All of humanity's knowledge accessible in an instant. Now censored, centralized and used by normies to get into stupid arguments and watch porn 24/7. You can sit at home like a lazy slob and order hamburgers off the internet. Is it really better than going to the drive through?

Brand new convenient foods of the future! You can get a pre-made peanut butter and jelly sandwich with the crust cut off it! Pop open the fridge and eat it with ZERO preparation! Never mind the fact that it's processed beyond recognition and full of seed oils and more chemicals than a highschool chem lab. It might make your dick fall off but boy howdy is it convenient! All while food prices soar beyond affordability and companies keep engineering frankencorn to resist the plutonium 223 they use as pesticide.

What a wonderful future world! I can sit at home eating slop watching porn and arguing with 13 year olds on twitter (sorry, on X) without leaving my IKEA couch! I can't afford a home, can't get a good car, my future employment prospects have been slashed in half due to everyone and their mother having a diploma, can't find a partner because no one leaves their house and if they do they are constantly in fight or flight mode or zonked out on SSRIs, roving gangs of niggers loot every store, Most of the entertainment I enjoyed is being censored or just outright nuked, I will own nothing and I will swallow the business end of a pump action shotgun.

I'd rather live in a caveman world where I can afford a house and have no internet.

I have a seething hatred of gen X-ers for their disdain of complacency. Their hell of a corporate office job, a house with a picket fence and two kids is the thing I dream of but will never get.

 

[TV's Adam West]

I always hate the 80s-90's house aesthetics you see. Always retro Nintendo shit, posters, and toys everywhere. You know what most houses in the 80's looked like?

This.

 

[cybertoaster]

I've known about a fair share of suicides over similar circunstances.

Is weird how after all the sperging about NFTs and other crypto nobody is talking about the deaths and poverty caused by crypto scams.

Every time bitcoin takes a nosedive and drags the rest of the crypto market down or some major scam is revealed crypto sites and subs have to post suicide hotline numbers and links, I have never seen that happening in any other community.

That gives you an idea of how bad it gets.

The modern social media panopticon also promotes a culture of toxic positivity.

We have given the dumbest more stupid people in our society a voice. Not saying the old internet was like the Athens of Socrates but there was a technical barrier to enter which kept the dumbest of the dumb who couldn't even figure out an AOL disk out.

Now that's gone and all the dipshits can enter and shit the place, which they already did.

Why would it upset me that I didn't get in a car wreck and wind up paraplegic, or develop MS, or have my parents die as a kid?

Did you even read the rest? the context is not "boohoo I'm not a millionaire cowboy astronaut rockstar!" its that things in a global scale were supposed to get better and instead everything got way worse.

And don't go around pulling WEF numbers out of your ass like redditors do saying "b-but now 5 more african kids have water!" as if that compensates for the hellworld we're living in.

FFS, cyberpunk future? cyberpunk was supposed to be a warning not a manual, and Snowcrash was a parody yet the 'gig economy' is literally what happened in that book, its insane.

I have a seething hatred of gen X-ers for their disdain of complacency. Their hell of a corporate office job, a house with a picket fence and two kids is the thing I dream of but will never get.

Is like the song "once in a lifetime" from talking heads, it oozes that kind of dumb attitude that assumes even back then everybody had that, but no worries now everybody gets to be the "cool dude" (whether they want it or not) that couchsurfs all the time (because he can't afford a house) and its hanging around with the guys (because they are all unemployed).

 

[I Love Beef]

Why shouldn't we be nostalgic for the past? We were all told this shit about how the next millennium would be a "new slate", a new time for mankind and all of its possibilities. We were young. We grew up in what is probably one of the best eras and places to live in all of mankind's history.

I'm not going to disagree, the past wasn't all that either. The 90s and the 2000s were full of shit that went beyond us, beyond anything we could ever imagine or come onto. But we know that peace, we know that foundation that generations before killed and died and sought for their children and their children's children to have.

Spoiler: Some powerleveling

I was young around the turn of the millennium. I grew up in small towns a lot. But as I grew older, I was taken to the city a lot. My siblings attended college, from local to out of state. One of my siblings even got to work at a game company, and no his name was not John Nintendo. I had family just about everywhere in the state too. I remember the times I got to journey around and see what life was like, what the atmosphere and feeling was like to attend a big university. I remember visiting the studio with my sibling and going back to his pad, walking about the city streets at night to get dinner and checking out the cool spots he frequented.

Even then, those small towns were something that left an impression deeply on me too. I went from polite and delightful Americana in a resort town to white trash but eventful and happening in another. I remember journeys out to the movies and to find that small town anime store that had what no one else in that town had. I knew both possibility to frustration, and to learn you could still do anything even supposedly in the middle of bumfuck nowhere because you are in America, and that as long as you held onto those core values and freedoms the country has, the detractors and naysayers will always lose out on what they took for granted.

I remember the start of the internet. Before every idiot got a chance to spoil it, I remember all of the fansites, all handmade and done by fans on nothing but Geocities, Angelfire, and other small providers. No drama and horseshit from the community up front, all fandom and celebration first.

I'd hoped I'd get to know the adult side of things when I'd gotten older. Apparently I barely got to, financially any way. I graduated the time the Great Recession hit. I was hoping to just take care of college, have something to do as a job from that, do side hustling as I saved up money and lived life. Glad I trusted my gut and didn't go all in. Interest on my debt from the only semester I attended jumped it like 700 bucks. The biggest and best fuck you moment of my life was handing in that check in one lump sum and never looking back.

Human life, is inevitably struggle. We can't have halcyon days everyday. But I'd rather die a free man fighting for those times I remembered than to live on my knees begging them from misers.

 

[William Tyndale]

This is irrelevant to this thread but I can show you exactly where I was standing when I found out about the challenger exploding. It struck me in a significant way because my music teacher was standing in the hall crying her eyes out and she was my favorite teacher.

 

[Pissmaster]

I always hate the 80s-90's house aesthetics you see. Always retro Nintendo shit, posters, and toys everywhere. You know what most houses in the 80's looked like?

This.
View attachment 5231348

It seems like those were made by idiots who saw catalogs like this and thought that's how people in the 80s really decorated.


I'm sure there are plenty of idiots out there that'd see that picture, and assume they're using purple LED lighting, despite how that wouldn't become a thing in homes for another 30 years.

edit: oh neat that thing i linked to has shitposting in all the tiny text

 

[Takayuki Yagami]

Is it really that hard to figure out? Everything is rotting from the inside out; and even if they refuse to acknowledge it, the system we’ve been taught to deify will not help them under any circumstance if it doesn’t sneer and laugh at them all the while. They’re realizing they were sold lies, so they’re looking to anything else for escape.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

I think the reason people get obscure things published before their time is the feeling of an ever need to connect with an interesting past they were never involved with, in many cases it feels to them as if they walked into an abandoned hamlet. Example. 1977 Ringo Monogatari. There is a niche community revolving around things like this. That niche community does it's damndest to preserve it.

 

[MirrorNoir]

When the present fucking sucks and the future's even worse, nostalgia for the past reigns supreme because the brain turns backwards for happiness and distraction from the bleakness that lies ahead and the idealist notion that society can fix itself via regressing backwards.

I think a big problem with millenials is this sort of weird self infantilisation where they want to be treated like children forever. A big part of this is that we didn't hit a lot of the milestones of adulthood that we expected to because the economy went to shit in 2008 and now we have gig economy hell. idk that zoomers are going to go through the same thing. They seem to be plenty fucked up in their own way. But I don't think things like not owning a home are going to bother them as much 20 years from now because they never expected that stuff in the first place.

Gen X was the first generation to idolize and venerate the manchild; back then it was transgressive to be an overgrown kid into video games, comics, etc and basically NEETing yourself out of the rat racing. Nowadays, everyone in their own way does it and the dark side of being a manchild is everywhere. Not just the lifestyle attracting pedos and other sick fucks, but the fact that the manchild is the modern equivalent of the "sad clown" cliche.

Is like the song "once in a lifetime" from talking heads, it oozes that kind of dumb attitude that assumes even back then everybody had that, but no worries now everybody gets to be the "cool dude" (whether they want it or not) that couchsurfs all the time (because he can't afford a house) and its hanging around with the guys (because they are all unemployed).

I'd make the case OIAL is a universal song about sadness and existential dread. Especially since the lyrics can be read as a lament that you DIDN'T get the beautiful wife, house, car, etc and at the middle age of life, you wake up in a cold sweat realizing you wasted your life ("Oh God, What Have I Done" is up there with the line "Oh dear.... It IS Morning" from Follies, as a line that should always be spoken or song devoid of all hope that you may have about your life ever improving or getting better)..

 

[cybertoaster]

the idealist notion that society can fix itself via regressing backwards.

I think we already regressed and that's the problem, we've regressed to the age of robber barons and 1920's level of economic speculative fuckery. We're regressing to first industrial revolution-levels of workers rights and employment quality. Our economic inequality is already approaching middle ages levels if not worse. Culturally we're back to the inquisition if not worse since that thing wasn't as big as most people think, the cultural revolution in china was far worse and we might actually be going there.

The problem is that we were going forwards and some people on top didn't like that, so we're going backwards full speed while disguising it in identity politics like race and gender to pretend that's the way forward and everything else bad that comes with it is part and parcel of said process.

the manchild is the modern equivalent of the "sad clown" cliche.

Idk, the manchild is reviled by all, even by the very socially permissible left, probably because its a huge indicator of the social malaise they don't want to acknowledge. Sure there's always been manchildren but not at these levels, and you can blame media and culture all you want but there were videogames 40 years ago, there were superhero comics and movies 40 years ago, but you didn't have these many manchildren. Why? because most manchildren today are men who seeing the lack of opportunity and skewed effort/reward ratio have just given up.

 

[Angry Alt Right Nerd]

The problem is that we were going forwards and some people on top didn't like that, so we're going backwards full speed while disguising it in identity politics like race and gender to pretend that's the way forward and everything else bad that comes with it is part and parcel of said process.

This is literally what "we" all asked for, and we would have arrived at this point even if those at the top did nothing to accelerate it.

 

[William Tyndale]

Millennials are the first generation in history who have even had the opportunity to be nostalgic about history. Gen x got to see old news articles and old videos only if they were played on tv or reprinted somewhere. There was no YouTube or internet archive or any place where the relics of the past were so easily accessible. “History” before 2000 AD was a story your grandmother told you, or a thing you read in a book, or something you learned from your teacher. At any given moment you can go rewatch every cartoon series I had access to in the 80’s in a week on YouTube. Or you can order the DVD set online. Like someone once said, we have the information of the library at Alexandria at our fingertips and we use it instead to look at pictures of cats.

 

[WitchfyndeGeneral]

I always hate the 80s-90's house aesthetics you see. Always retro Nintendo shit, posters, and toys everywhere. You know what most houses in the 80's looked like?

This.

As a gen Xer who grew up in the 80s. This is 100% accurate and a accurate photo of what a childhood room looked like. Most homes at the time (or at least where I lived as a child) didn’t have all the cool futuristic aesthetics that zoomers think we had. Instead we had vintage-looking furniture because the vast majority of people were devout religious fundies who thought hard rock and metal music along with Dungeons and Dragons was satanic. Even when I lived on my own in the 90s, apart from a game console, it looked nothing retrofuturistic like what zoomers think it had.

It seems like those were made by idiots who saw catalogs like this and thought that's how people in the 80s really decorated.

Yes, I feel you. Most young people thought that we all listened to R&B and played NES when in reality, I did not do any of that stereotypes.

I'm sure there are plenty of idiots out there that'd see that picture, and assume they're using purple LED lighting, despite how that wouldn't become a thing in homes for another 30 years

Literally nowhere I stayed or went to from 1980s-2000s had any of the purple LED lights from the catalogs. Most people who where too young or aren’t around at the time period I listed wouldn’t ever understand that.