Everyone experiences nostalgia. It is the natural response of people to looking at the uncertain now with a fond and often rose colored view of the past. Teens often quietly remember when they were little and had less pressure and less responsibility. Young adults look think back on their school days and those long summers while they get ready to go to work and contemplate doing that for the next 40 years. People in middle age like me fondly remember our days as a young adult when you could get out of bed, or your chair, without groaning. It even means that music I hated in the 80s is still preferable to any of the synthesized crap being played today. There is a reason why we call them the good old days.
Nostalgia is often accompanied by regret for time wasted and opportunities missed. That often makes nostalgia suspect as an emotion and raises the question: was it really better back in the good old days or do I just think it was as a way to cope with current difficulties?
One of our local classic hits stations asked the question a few days ago: Was life better before or after the internet? Most of the responses were from people my age and that makes sense since the people listening to that music would mostly be Gen Xers and the replies seemed overwhelming that things were better before the advent of the internet. Certainly some things are better now, or at least easier. If I see an actor in a movie and wonder where I had seen him before, I can just look on IMDb but it wasn’t like you couldn’t figure it out before the internet. My mom had a whole book that was like IMDb in paperback form. The problem is that the firehose of information was not accompanied by a subsequent increase in wisdom. In general I would say the average person is far dumber now than when we had to look information up in a book. More on this in Information Is Not Knowledge; Or Why People Are So Freaking Stupid Today.
One thing that is becoming painfully clear is that things were generally better when we didn’t know how shitty things were. When it comes to most of what fills our news, ignorance would indeed be bliss. Back in the 80s or even 90s, if a cop restrained a drug addled violent felon and he died in Minnesota, no one outside of Minnesota would know about. If a corpulent black teen tried to gut a different black teen like a trout and got rightly shot by the cops, no one would be offering their idiotic takes, especially not professional athletes. Our news was local except for the big stuff.
Something I often ask when it comes to progress is this: has it made people happier?
For example, look at feminism. The feminist movement wins over and over again, getting what they wanted and then changing their demands and getting that as well. Women are in the workforce in huge numbers. Thanks to the pill and abortion women can sleep around without ending up with a baby. Women vote. They go to college in significantly higher numbers than men. Every career field is open to them, even though for some reason they don’t seem to end up in the really hard or dirty or dangerous fields very often.
But….
Are women happier today? Are they more satisfied with life? Given the general state of endless bitching and the enormous volume of anti-depressant use by Western women, I would say no. Hell no. As it turns out, they already had what made most of them happy: being wives and mothers. Then all of that was snatched away from them in the name of feminism and now they can’t even talk about it without being ridiculed. I spent enough years with career women who were guilty and depressed because someone else was caring for their children to know that women are far less happy today.
The same is true for most advancements. We live much longer but is the quality of our lives better? Wouldn’t most of us rather live to 70 with a fulfilling and joyful life instead of eking out a miserable existence kept alive by a cornucopia of drugs that make us sad and depressed to age 85? It is pretty hard to imagine something that has improved in our general lives.
The internet brings the world to our fingertips but it makes real life connections more difficult and increasingly rare. It is no wonder people pop Xanax like candy when they are flooded with stories and images of how horrible humanity really is on a live stream 24 hours a day. I guess you can see your relatives via Instagram and Facebook but back in the day you could see them…by actually seeing them.
Unfortunately we don’t live in the 80s and we can’t go back. We are never going to recover what was lost. That leaves us with dwelling in the here and now, no matter how much it sucks. Nostalgia still serves a purpose and that purpose should be to fill us with a white hot rage over what was stolen from us, a rage directed at those who orchestrated it and those who stood mutely by while it was done. The horrific shit show we are living in is not the result of an organic change to the nation, it is the result of an intentional plan to rot from within the foundations of Western civilization and replace it with a Marxist society with a small elite ruling the rest. We know who these schemers are. It isn’t blacks or mestizos, they are just tools and pawns being used and while it can be tempting to focus on them and their seemingly endless acts of violence, we must remember that behind every George Floyd or Ma’Khia Bryant there is a cabal of elites who created the environment that made them and then set them loose.
Our best days are behind us and the bright future we should have had was taken from us. I remind myself of this as much as you, make sure you remember who is ultimately behind this. Those are the ones who need to be dealt with when that time comes.
Sorry but your claim about women being happier before ? I don't know of any, including my mom and all the females relatives. Not one, they were all deeply unhappy. The men were only unhappy and fared much better. However, the remedy pushed forward by the Elites did not help one bit as we all can see. If you do a quick search on the big names of the movement from the 60's-70's you'll no doubt notice an interesting trend as they all belong to the same group…. The radical bunch running around today are all insane and I despise them all. There were other avenues to fix the problems but they were not explored, not put forward as the plan was to destroy Christian Whites families. In addition, there was so much more money to come in thru taxation of all kinds. A win-win for the evil-doers in charge.
Different circles I guess, the women I knew all seemed pretty happy and they certainly were happier than women today who almost universally seem depressed and angry.
I'm glad you had a different experience.
I am so old I remember when the internet was going to be a force for freedom. That was what, 20 years ago? good god, at this point I realize it should all go away. I mean all of it, every single thing from the last 40 odd years. There has literally been no useful advancements in most of that time. (working affordable fuel injection for cars being an exception). I would happily go back to 1980 ish. (maybe further, but i"m not that old, Gen X).
Luckily given our current trajectory, potable running water is going to be a big problem very quickly (which I am going to miss) along with electricity. Given that tech runs on electricity and electricity does not in fact come out of the wall………..
That is the glaring flaw in the crypto as a currency in SHTF, if the internet stops working, where is your bitcoin?
The mistake of happiness versus ephemeral and immediate pleasure.
Very true, many think pleasure is the same as happiness, or better yet contentment.