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Comment by bambataa | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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.

honestly so confusing

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