Comment by peutetre | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peutetre | Hacker News Reader

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> Agent Smith: "Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at it’s beauty, it’s genius? Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious. Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization which is of course what this is all about. Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time."

> the peak of your civilization

The more I think of it, the more I think this time was the actual peak of civilization (from a westerner's point of view). The Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Nagano in 98, when the world was singing the Ode to Joy was that peak moment for me [0]. After that, it went all downhill.

[0] https://youtu.be/7aGNei01fzQ?feature=shared&t=6290

So many posts mention years '98 & '99 as the "peak of civilisation". Them being years of my birth, these mentions & my experiences, enforce in me the feeling that I was born into a falling civilisation.

Not that I do not enjoy the vision of passing the stick from organic creatures, made by happenstance, to purpose built machines. But as a human, I do miss the endless opportunities of the 2000s chaos and I feel like they were better times than todays monitored, calculated, cold life under cameras & microphones.

After at least 25 years exposed to various civilizational cycle and "Fall of Western Civilization" memes, I still don't know whether it's bullshit or not. And I'm regrettably far enough from Gen Z that it's hard to judge how they're doing.

All we can do is to try our best within the time we're allotted.

Recency bias. You were alive then and likely those were your formative years. If you were a Gen Z-er, you'd think that the "actual peak" were very different.

Previously, the “good old days” were the 1950’s before it all went “downhill”. I’m sure the 1890’s were someone’s golden age before electricity ruined everything.

There's a good skit about this: https://youtu.be/hc6VP7Qp-Y8

La Belle Époque… someone needs to see Midnight in Paris. ;-)

Perhaps a bit earlier, in 1971 where we all could drink Coke in harmony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2msbfN81Gm0

For a very long time I thought the peak moment was 2001-09-11, an instant before the first plane touched the first tower.

Edit: date

Did you mean 2001-09-11?

yes.

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