• ysjet@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      3 hours ago

      Unless you are gay or trans, then you’re pretty much viewed as very ‘beatable.’

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.worldEnglish
    91·
    20 hours ago

    I suggest “The Way We Never Were” by Coontz if anyone is inclined to read about the sort of manufactured history surrounding American society and particularly the family unit. In some ways the past was better, but we somehow managed to get rid of the good parts, make up parts that never happened, sidestep the bad, and make the present worse.

    • madcaesar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      20 hours ago

      The only good parts about the past is that families could be supported on a single income. Pretty much everything else was worse.

      • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.worldEnglish
        61·
        19 hours ago

        I’d suggest reading about it before making such a statement. Understand that the single income created its own problems. It kept women isolated thanks to the way postwar housing developed, kept them out of the workforce, dismantled their social network, resulted in suburbs that drove longer commutes, etc. women have had it hard in society for quite a while, but the separated family unit made it harder. These things also dismantled the “village” support network that people had, along with extended family and community that could help people.

        Yeah, the wealth that allowed the luxuries of a single family home in the ‘burbs was great, but it came at a price.

  • Emerald@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    19 hours ago

    This is why I love vaporwave. It romanticizes the past and criticizes it at the same time.

    • andros_rex@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      13 hours ago

      Hypnospace Outlaw is such a great work of pseudo historical fiction. (Or Digital: A Love Story if you want more 80’s than 90’s)

  • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    18 hours ago

    I wish I could go back to the late 80s briefly so I could listen to the morning radio show on CFNY , which was my first introduction to alternative music,while I did my hair like I used to when I was a kid before school, which was always quite a production. I’d like to hear “Song For Whoever” by the Beautiful South come out of my boom box just one more time. But that’s all.

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
    51·
    2 days ago

    Just about every time period sucks

    The only time period that was enjoyable was only enjoyed by a small portion of the global population at any one time

    Many people on this thread like to point out the 80s, 90s or early 2000s were great … it is true for only about maybe 10% of the global population … the rest were living with developing nations with very little and everyone still struggling like they always had

    The world has always been the same throughout history … I’m guessing about 70% of the population lived just enough to get by … 29% lived with absolutely nothing … and 1% lived with everything

    And it’s still the same today.

    • ☂️-@lemmy.mlEnglish
      352·
      1 day ago

      as someone from a developing nation, the good ol days were good because i was a kid.

      i think thats the theme here.

      • Miles O'Brien@startrek.websiteEnglish
        151·
        1 day ago

        on a boring, dumb, ugly planet in a boring, dumb, ugly universe.

        You were spot on with the species.

        Absolutely and in all ways incorrect about the planet, or universe.

  • Grimtuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    21 hours ago

    Reading through this thread I’ve realised that we just need to all keep emigrating to the places where it’s best every few years.

    We need a new thread for current and pay best places to live for now and any time travellers.

  • nandeEbisu@lemmy.worldEnglish
    142·
    1 day ago

    They mean the US in the 80s and 90s when we were burning through all of the goodwill and progress made in the prior half century.

    • RedFrank24@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      Good will? I mean I imagine there was some good will in the aftermath of WW2 but I’m not sure the Truman Doctrine caused a lot of good will.

      • nandeEbisu@lemmy.worldEnglish
        64·
        1 day ago

        Just out of curiousity, did you ever live in the 80s or 90s?

        I was a child throughout the 90s in the US, and I don’t think its just rose colored glasses. We didn’t have the internet as a whole, but government still mostly worked, we had a good chunk of the middle class left, the enshittification of everything being cheaply made in china hadn’t happened either, food wasn’t all hyper processed HFC’s outside of candy and stuff that is clearly junk food.

        I think there’s some objectively good stuff in that time period, and its not so long ago that you don’t have good medical science and can travel by car and have running water (in the developed world at least).

        • Duamerthrax@lemmy.worldEnglish
          81·
          23 hours ago

          The internet didn’t create new problems. It made it so the problems were visible. I know a bunch of nerds boomers and genXers who talk about how it use to be a mono culture, but really, you could only know the people in your own little corner.

          Did the internet and personal recording devices make police brutality worse or just more visible? I remember when teachers weren’t use to half their students having flip phones that could record audio and oh boy, the causal and not so causal racism directed at the students was insane.

        • kandoh@reddthat.comEnglish
          72·
          1 day ago

          Yeah I do remember, i remember how I needed three cans of coke for dinner because our parents cooked every piece of meat to the point of shoe leather. I remember being dirt poor during the economic slump in the early 90s and how that made all the dads super stressed at a time when you could still slap your kid around a little.

          Also Ronald Reagan winning all but one state, locking America into neoliberal economics for 40 years.

          Worse TV (on average), too many commercials.

          Lot more open racism, sexism, fatphobia.

          Being bored on the toilet.

          Shit sucked.

  • MudMan@fedia.io
    33·
    2 days ago

    This works on longer scales, but I have to be honest with you, I don’t know if me looking back at the late 90s and going “yeah, that went wrong at some point” is just my generation’s version of being nostalgic for a time where you were oblivious to the crappy stuff or a fairly objective assessment of modern world trends.

    I DID grow up in what amounted to a developing nation, several of my neighbors couldn’t read or write and I didn’t have a telephone or a VCR until well into the nineties, but also… you know, the post 9-11 period doesn’t seem like a particular uptrend for civilization, in hindsight.

      • merc@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        8·
        1 day ago

        Unless you were gay, or female, non-white or lived in Eastern Europe, Asia (minus Japan), India, Africa, South America or Central America.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          3 hours ago

          … Its still all downhill from here.

          I get what you’re saying, and you’re not wrong in that sense…

          But we are heading for / already in the … general collapse of modern technological society.

          Matrix code has too much technical debt?

          Real world has too much fragile complexity, too much accumulated and unavoidable environmental destruction, too many cheaply extracted and expended vital resources (leaving only the expensive to extract), and too many mouths to feed, who can only be fed with those now expensive vital resources as part of the food production system.

          The actuaries broadly agree with this scenario as well, though their timeline is a bit more optimistic.

          https://actuaries.org.uk/planetary-solvency

          50% collapse of world GDP in 2070 to 2100, as compared to right now.

          We overshot 1.5C last year.

          88% of the world’s coral reefs are bleached and basically permanently dead.

          Hansen’s latest climate papers are trying to explain why our climate models have been wrong… in the optimistic direction, fundamental climate sensitivity is actually greater than consensus.

          Antarctica melting faster than projections, Artic getting closer and closer to a Blue Ocean event, again faster than expected.

          We might have the AMOC collapse in the next 10 years.

          Etc.

  • Danquebec@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    15·
    1 day ago

    Often, when people learn that I love history, they ask me which time I’d prefer to live in.

    I always like the face of surprise they make when they hear my answer.

    “Today.”

        • Smee@poeng.linkEnglish
          1·
          8 hours ago

          Tomorrow is today and it’s not awful. It’s still a bit too slow though, what if I wished I lived next week - or heavens forbid, August 32., 2069?

  • over_clox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    181·
    2 days ago

    I had no significant outside world problems in the 90s and early 2000s.

    You could get repair manuals and replacement parts for practically anything, and you could even get away with blowing up ant beds in your yard with improv devices.

    Everything seemed to change after Hurricane Katrina though, like the flood waters wiped out all the ant beds I wanted to blow up… 😢

    • Akasazh@feddit.nlEnglish
      2·
      18 hours ago

      I was pretty depressed in that period, I didn’t know it at the time but my parents divorce had more impact than I realized. Only later did I find out that feeling bleak and gray and tired wasn’t a normal state of affairs.

      Yet I yearn for the idea that things were moving forward. I would have loved to have had my current mindset in that period. It’s been hard overcoming depression whilst neocons destroyed the mortality I was lead to believe in under the banner of Fukushimas ‘end of history’.

      But hey at least my own brain isn’t trying to sabotage me anymore and I’m in a relatively good place. So even when personally have my shit in order is essential to support the younger generations and fight the greedy swine who orchestrated the current state of affairs.