> I sincerely mean it when I say that life used to better.
If there is anything I’ve learned in my old age, it’s that things were not better in the past. And while I don’t accept Steven Pinker’s optimistic claims about the fruits of progress as much as other people do, I think he makes a good baseline argument regarding how much progress we have made over the last century. It’s just that we have so much farther to go and that seems overwhelming at times, at least to me.
There’s a common cognitive bias known as nostalgia or rosy retrospection that makes people think the past was better, as well as any number of psych studies showing how this works and why people do it. The most common example is of a parent who only remembers the good times while their children remember the bad. I won’t bore you with the details, but you can look into this phenomenon for yourself.
With that said, you have listed some legitimate complaints about negative societal changes that have occurred over the last thirty years. That doesn’t mean or imply that everything was better in the past, but it would be accurate to say that some things have gotten worse while other things have gotten better, but mostly, humanity has achieved some measure of progress that makes even the most recent past look barbaric, IMO.
We have this idea in our head that progress and advancement and the uplifting of humanity (and its relationship with nature) should be neat and orderly, when in reality it’s extremely messy, gruesome, and violent, much like the labor pains of a woman giving birth.
If you were an alien and had never seen a human giving birth, you might think the mother to be was being attacked or suffering from a disease. I think progress is a little bit like that. Its appearance looks like chaos and suffering and pain, but the end result is a new form of life, a new form of living. That’s what we are experiencing.
I personally believe it is a dangerous error to believe the past was better, because it prevents people from looking towards a better future, as they seek to repeat the same mistakes from the past, over and over again, endlessly seeking a Golden Age that never was.
The other problem with looking in the rear view mirror, is that you neglect working to improve the present, which inevitably informs all future progress. If we are looking backwards, then we are neglecting the present and its subsequent future, so we have to be wary and cautious about people who tell us that things were better in the past, as it tends to impose a false historical mythology on the past, present, and future, disrupting the timeline of progress in all directions.
Well said. Do you follow Kitty Tait and the Orange Bakery? I just bought her book "Breadsong" as a gift. Her story about dealing with mental illness is incredibly inspiring. Check it out.
I think this idea that the teen mental illness epidemic began in 2012 is probably wrong. What is far more likely is that society began to open up more to these ideas, more people got diagnosed than before, and more young people identified with these struggles and felt more comfortable talking about them.
Susanna Kaysen's 1993 mental health memoir "Girl, Interrupted", which recounts her experience as a young female adolescent struggling with mental health in the late 1960s, for example, received an enormous amount of renewed attention and interest when it was adapted into a film in 1999.
The popularity of that film really opened up the conversation for a lot of young people in the 2000s, but even before that, similar struggles by teens were covered in the 1967 novel "The Outsiders", which also was adapted into a film in 1983, and if memory serves, there was also a similar rise in reports of an epidemic in the 1980s.
I’m not saying that any of these books or movies led to a mental health contagion, I’m saying that the struggles that today’s teens are going through have always been there, but in the past, they were either ignored or hidden away. Today, everything is shared far more widely and freely, which is why it looks like teens are suffering more than the past.
I also think if you go back into the literature of the past, you’ll find these same mental health concerns expressed just about everywhere. It’s just that instead of talking about them, they did everything possible to hide them away. Let’s not forget Bertha Mason, the character in the 1847 novel Jane Eyre, who was locked away in a room in a house. We are no longer doing that to people so it seems like there is a new epidemic at work, when it’s always been with us.
"Love language" is a hugely popular, but pseudoscientific concept in the relationship community in the US. It's BS, just like astrology, the law of attraction, and all that jazz. But people swear by it, and they won't back down from it if it works for them.
I use Facebook for hyper-local news and groups only. I have no other use for it. I use Insta to follow subcultural interests, such as vegan cooks, shapers, small niche bands I like, car modders, and unusual cat reels.
I had something interesting happen to me last week on Insta. It was very late at night and I was about to fall asleep, when a live feed alert informed me that a band I liked was talking live directly with just about anyone about their new album release.
It was amazing to see them that open and welcoming to their fans and to be able to instantly download their album after being told it had just dropped. That kind of instant communication is wild.
That seems highly unlikely. Almost half of social media users are considering leaving the platforms, while around 10% have deleted Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or some other app. We also know that the data shows that the pandemic increased the likelihood of people leaving social media, which would seem odd on the face of it, because you would think it would lead to more adoption due to being at home. What happened is that the pandemic was a catalyst for people finding what was truly meaningful in their personal lives; social media wasn't it.
If there is anything I’ve learned in my old age, it’s that things were not better in the past. And while I don’t accept Steven Pinker’s optimistic claims about the fruits of progress as much as other people do, I think he makes a good baseline argument regarding how much progress we have made over the last century. It’s just that we have so much farther to go and that seems overwhelming at times, at least to me.
There’s a common cognitive bias known as nostalgia or rosy retrospection that makes people think the past was better, as well as any number of psych studies showing how this works and why people do it. The most common example is of a parent who only remembers the good times while their children remember the bad. I won’t bore you with the details, but you can look into this phenomenon for yourself.
With that said, you have listed some legitimate complaints about negative societal changes that have occurred over the last thirty years. That doesn’t mean or imply that everything was better in the past, but it would be accurate to say that some things have gotten worse while other things have gotten better, but mostly, humanity has achieved some measure of progress that makes even the most recent past look barbaric, IMO.
We have this idea in our head that progress and advancement and the uplifting of humanity (and its relationship with nature) should be neat and orderly, when in reality it’s extremely messy, gruesome, and violent, much like the labor pains of a woman giving birth.
If you were an alien and had never seen a human giving birth, you might think the mother to be was being attacked or suffering from a disease. I think progress is a little bit like that. Its appearance looks like chaos and suffering and pain, but the end result is a new form of life, a new form of living. That’s what we are experiencing.
I personally believe it is a dangerous error to believe the past was better, because it prevents people from looking towards a better future, as they seek to repeat the same mistakes from the past, over and over again, endlessly seeking a Golden Age that never was.
The other problem with looking in the rear view mirror, is that you neglect working to improve the present, which inevitably informs all future progress. If we are looking backwards, then we are neglecting the present and its subsequent future, so we have to be wary and cautious about people who tell us that things were better in the past, as it tends to impose a false historical mythology on the past, present, and future, disrupting the timeline of progress in all directions.