Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

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>I often ask people: “if you could be 20-years old in 1991 or 2021, which would you pick?” An incredible number of people pick ‘91. Some people even ask to go back to the seventies.

There's a podcast by Jason Feifer (was called Pessimists Archive) where the repeated theme across many episodes is the recurring fallacy of the "good ole days": https://www.jasonfeifer.com/build-for-tomorrow/

E.g. you ask today's generation and they say the "good old days" was 1991; but if you ask those in 1991 what the good old days were, they wouldn't say "right now!" ... they'd say 1970s. And if you ask those in 1970s... they'd say... (you get the point).

So the conclusion is either...

- the true good old days after connecting the survey across centuries was actually the prehistoric cave man days of hunting & gathering

... or ...

- every generation repeats the rose-colored glasses narrative because we bias the past with positive memories and the bias the present with negative current events

I was 20 in 1991 in Europe. I was flying regularly without any flygskam. The USSR was just falling and we were all sure it was an unmitigated good (we still didn't know that the Russians will die by scores and see their life expectancy drop like a rock); Germany was just reunited and we thought the EU was a great project, not a bureaucratic monster working for the oligarchy; Hell, I even believed there were nice guys and bad guys in the Yugoslavian wars. I probably even believed that voting counted. Future was bright, and open. Year 2000 was still ahead, with its wonders.

My mother was 20 in 1968, and it was the good old days. They believed the revolution was around the corner. Present was somewhat grim, but future was bright; in her years of political activity she saw the pill come, abortion rights, women rights enhanced, the end of dictatorships in Spain and Portugal, the end (in civilised countries) of death penalty, the crumbling of USSR.

My children are in their 20s; my son refuses to learn to drive because cars are evil and he doesn't want to own one, ever, because they're bad; he's hell-bent of enjoying the now because he's pretty sure that there is no future, except climate catastrophe, incessant wars, and electronically-enhanced surveillance; he thinks that democracy is a complete scam and he forgets to vote if I don't nag him weeks in advance. He's just as disillusioned as I am, but 27 years younger.

So I think the picture is more complex. The global direction of evolution is much more important than the objective starting point.

I'm extremely interest the general feeling and views societies had in the past: how they perceived the present and the future, as a whole.

Objectively life has become better and more comfortable for the vast majority of humans since then (Hans Rosling does a beautiful job of exploring this).

But I do think that perceptions and feelings matter, and even though material wellbeing is a prerequisite to that, so is also the general feeling and view that those around you hold, and in many ways I feel we've gone backwards in that.

> but if you ask those in 1991 what the good old days were, they wouldn't say "right now!"

Is this sourced? In Europe, 1991 was when the Soviet union fell. Sure, in many now-ex-USSR countries 1991 wasn't the best of times because the collapse wasn't very well managed. But in West, suddenly the impeding doom of nuclear war near disappeared overnight.

2021 has ... exciting climate events and Covid.

edit. What is the soundtrack of 2021? In 1991 it supposedly was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4RjJKxsamQ . TIL the year ended with band donating bunch of royalties from the single to Gorbachev 10 days before he resigned and the USSR disappeared. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_of_Change_(Scorpions_song...

I'm old enough to remember 1991, even if I wasn't in the workforce then, and IIRC the mood then was kinda depressed. We were in the midst of a recession. We'd just come off the hangover of the first Gulf War. Nobody really knew what the fall of the Soviet Union would mean for America, and there were real fears about nukes falling into the wrong hands. Grunge was the hot new music, and pop culture was all about Gen-X alienation.

If you asked then what the good old days were, they'd probably say 1988. There's a reason Bush 1 was the only 1-term president between 1980 and 2020. Things didn't start perking up until around 93-95 with the WWW.

A 3rd option is society (or parts of society) can go through rough patches where 30 years before year X was better than year X + 30. Trajectories for different populations within the society can differ themselves and so individuals will have varying answers.

Alternatively, it's a bit of Future Shock

I grew up in the 90s, & maybe I'd do better as a 20 year old in 1991 rather than 2031 (too young to say 20 in 2021; I've succeeded already close enough to there), but I'd rather grow up in the 2000s than grow up in the 80s

There's a kind of arbitrage, where if I could take my technical abilities from 2010 back to 1990, I'd probably do pretty well. I'm not so sure about taking those abilities to 2030. So you need to frame your question more clearly: at what age does the time travel occur? For simplicity I assume the only age you've given: 20. If it's about when we're born, then that's a completely different human being

The most charitable option is that it’s simply a great pleasure to imagine retreading familiar years. Due to human limitations, those years are the ones we grew up in.

That explanation has the benefit that it doesn’t need to counter-assert against daydreamers that things are getting better, worse, or staying the same.

That's one of the themes in the film Midnight in Paris. (Yes, it's a Woody Allen film.)

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