Hacker News Reader

Comment by fasterik | Hacker News Reader

I've come to the conclusion that nostalgia is almost never about the objective quality of something. It's about the associations we make between a certain time in our lives and the media/technology that surrounded us at the time. It's also filtered through selective memory, emphasizing the positive while ignoring the negative.

We're all afraid of dying and we all wish we were 25 years younger. That's how I translate nostalgia when I read it. By any objective metric, the world is better than it's ever been, technology is better than it's ever been, and it's all continuing to get better.

View on HN

I think the world really sucks in developed countries right now in a way that's hard to put your finger on. Optimism and enthusiasm is very low in young people right now. People's attention spans are shot. Kids in high school and college are less social than ever, barely date, and spend more and more time doomscrolling. Rising inequality, rise of far right politics, etc.

I get that the world is doing great by some basic metric like 'number of people starving', and that is fantastic. But the world really feels off to a growing number of people - me included - in modern America.

"the world is better than it's ever been, technology is better than it's ever been, and it's all continuing to get better."

Those guys in Sudan or blue whales beg to differ.

You can always point at bad things happening, no matter what time period you're in. You need to look at the graph over decades/centuries. Poverty, child mortality, literacy, standard of living, access to healthcare, etc. etc. are all better than they have ever been, even in the poorest places in the world.

I can't help thinking how those graphs conveniently ignore the damage such improvements have on the environment, on which they themselves depend. Damaged environments -> scarcity -> war. But I agree it's nice to have that happening away from home.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com