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Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

One thing young people don't understand (probably because they didn't experience it) was that the introduction of LSD to engineers and other technical people was a revelation and very inspiring. The mindset back then was formal and rules based. LSD taught people to think outside of the box. We now live in a world that has benefited from that thinking and also a world in which a lot of people have taken LSD and it's old news. It's hard to capture the excitement of that time.

It's the transition or inflection point that was inspiring, like movie goers in the 1930's who were only used to black and white movies going to see Wizard of Oz and being amazed that it turned into color, something they had never seen. But it was much more profound than that because it felt possible to rewrite the world to be a better place if enough people took LSD. Nobody feels that way today.

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There’s a great documentary available on YouTube just called “Hippies” or similar. One of the main things I took from it was how earnest those young people were about trying to find a better way of living than their parents. They’d seen how neurotic and stressed the typical 50s existence had made their family and wanted something better for themselves.

We brush over how remarkable it was that they even recognised that and tried to do something different. Even those who didn’t take part got at least some sense of it through the music and art of the time.

Doesn’t every generation of young people do this? Rebel at least a little against their parent’s way of life to attempt to make their own lives better by their own measure.

Sure a little mind altering experience can be an inspiration to some, but it’s not at all unique or required for young people to want change.

Good question but I'm struggling to come up with any examples.

Religion, the authority of parents/elders, finding a mate and building and supporting a family; these were powerful forces for hundreds of years and people snapped to them pretty reliably. Until the 60's.

I'm not a historian so it's very likely there are counterexamples I'm not thinking of.

> Religion, the authority of parents/elders, finding a mate and building and supporting a family; these were powerful forces for hundreds of years and people snapped to them pretty reliably. Until the 60's.

Yup you’re not a historian and missing very much of the social development that happened for example, between 1850 and 1930. A lot of basic freedoms people don’t even think about when developed in these times.

An example of things not being the same is Christmas which was a drunken party in the Middle Ages through until mid 19th century and the modern family centered Christmas was basically created by Charles dickens with a Christmas Carol and still it wasn’ta widespread generally celebrated holiday until the post-WWII prosperity and class equality in the 1950s.

A lot of what you might think of as “things which were always like this” from the 50s was actually people seeking normalcy post war adopting conservative “traditional” lifestyles which were actually quite different than the past.

> An example of things not being the same is Christmas which was a drunken party in the Middle Ages through until mid 19th century and the modern family centered Christmas

Not sure why you are being downvoted, there are still plenty of places in rural Europe where, after a family dinner, the burning of a Yule in the village centre is pretty much an excuse for the whole village to get drunk together.

Where are some of these places? I want to go to there.

There are probably more but the ones I've been to were in Iceland (Þrettandinn), in Portugal (Madeiros de Natal), and in Latvia (Bluķa vilksana). They all had the same vibe even though quite a part in geography, a celebration to get together outside in peak winter and burn giant logs to get warm.

Are you a historian?

Your example is orthogonal to the GP's question of every generation always rebelling against the previous generation.

Christmas is just one holiday, specific to Christianity, and not really representative of religion broadly in terms of daily rituals, beliefs, and practices.

My parents will endlessly criticize me for wondering if a menial home task is worth doing and when. Mum works extremely hard at her job (in-person & remote split), and goes back to her house to spend all her free time doing chores. She'll even do work in unscheduled hours on the weekend when she's bored. She's very much bound to being busy. I am not this person. I've talked to her about how she seems stressed, and that she should decide when to do chores. Not "see a chore, go do it" - which is great initiative - but decide if that chore can wait a day or 2 and would make sense being done with another.

My dad is less like my mom, but he'll give me hell about this shit and call me lazy. My parents don't recognize the free time they have and fill it with obligations. I'd rather spend 1 day doing all the chores than filling my 3-day Christmas weekend with them and never relaxing.

They look down at the few possessions and responsibilities I keep. I'm happier and I can't share that. They'll never see it.

And then confusingly enough in the mid 1980s those same people who took the LSD were 45 year old Reagan voters.

honestly so confusing

Because a lot of them became Christian after the excesses of the drug and sexual revolutions.

Sorry, do you mean a lot of them became Christian, or "Christian", i.e. Republicans?

I know a lot of people who after crashing and burning became "born again Christians" and started voting Republican.

Story checks out, much to my dismay.

To be fair though the hippies were the counterculture. Reagan voters were the silent majority.

I’d like to think that as long as there are new people, LSD will never be “old news”? Certainly new people are born into a word that has been influenced by psychedelics, but for regularly functioning people, your day-to-days are still pretty square with plenty to explore outside the box. It’s easy to get caught in routines and inertia, getting used to things is what humans are sort of best at, and society still demands this of us one way or another.

I certainly believe that. There's still a lot of value in taking a few psychedelic trips and research is showing they might even be therapuetic for depressed people. That was the case for me. But for people without depression there's still value in taking a look at and questioning the belief systems you were raised in to see if there's anything you might change to make an improvement.

It appears that the pre-requisite to benefit from LSD inspiration is still a formal education in some specialty with a thorough understanding of fundamentals of that specialty in order to achieve some revolutionary breakthrough.

I get the impression that a customer-facing employee might not get the same level of impact other than, maybe, in an aspect of personal life.

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