My father put together a (vacuum tube) Heathkit tape recorder in the late 1950s and made recordings of my great grandparents (on both sides) in 1959 and 1960. They talked about their lives growing up, how they met, and some of the hardships they endured. They were probably 35-40 years younger than the gentleman in the video, but they also described a time before automobiles, electricity, radio, and telephones were commonplace.
I converted those recordings to MP3 about 15 years ago.
It's amazing how far we've come in such a short time.
I think being born around 1880 and living to 80+ would probably be the most change any human has ever seen over a lifetime in history. Many would have gone from pre-industrial revolution level tech in their personal lives growing up to seeing man go to the moon. Crazy to think about
We are living in more revolutionary times. The thing is, when you are inside the "evolution", you don't really notice it. If you are 30-50, just try to remember the old days (taxi-phone, early days of the Internet, no digital paperwork, libraries, etc...) and you'll notice a world of change.
I don't think anyone 80 years ago could have imagined that the computer games we have today would ever exist. Other things we did was science fiction long before we did it, like flying, self moving wagons, going to the moon, curing diseases, eliminating famine etc, but modern computer games wasn't even imaginable.
Different areas develop at different speeds. I figure lots of people more technologically devoid areas have been accelerated even faster more recently than the folks you talk about. My mother would be one. Vast numbers of Chinese I imagine.
I will give them a listen before doing so to be sure, but yeah, I'll do that. Both of my parents are dead now so I doubt there are any privacy issues remaining.
Exciting! I remember being captivated by an old man at a retirement home recollecting farm work with horses. I don’t remember what he said or how I came to be listening, but it might have been a primary school project or something.
I mean, depends where on earth you are, but my parents born in yugoslavia in the late 50s remember plowing with oxen, the first bw TV sets appeared in their village in the 60s or early 70s, there was no indoor plumbing or electricity when they were very little, they were transporting water in buckets on donkeys etc.
I visited Turkey in the early 2000s. It was not uncommon to be driving on a major, modern highway, crest a hill, and have to slam on the brakes because a donkey was pulling a farmer's cart in the middle of the road at 5 mph.
This was out in a rural area, but still. Major highway like an American interstate.
Ageing and declining population everywhere - already most developing countries from 90s have net negative population change, and it spreads to more and more countries.
Huge cities disappearing as remote working, automation, rising sea levels and mass migrations make most of them pointless.
Lots of civil unrest, mass migrations, new plagues and wars as the globalized economy collapses and disappointed voters choose new kinds of populism to save them.
Rich people moving to the few lucky countries that won on the global warming and now try to isolate. Everybody else fight for scraps.
Eventually population adjusts and stabilizes on much lower level and reproduction rates grow again as repopulation starts.
I can relate to that comment, as I feel the same way. So much that it causes me pain.
I have to constantly remind myself:
In chaos, all predictions are possible, solarpunk is just as likely as cyberpunk.
Everywhere you look, you see what you are looking for. If you are looking for death all you see is death, if you are looking for god, all you see is god.
> Rich people moving to the few lucky countries that won on the global warming and now try to isolate. Everybody else fight for scraps.
Which, if you follow the projections, will include entire Europe and North America. Seriously, read the IPCC report: impact of global warming in western world will be rather superficial, if not positive. It’s not them who is most negatively affected.
Oh, I know that. My point is that, contrary to what the comment I was responding to said, rich people in western world will not be moving anywhere. Rich Africans will indeed try to move to Europe/North America, but they already do, and would do so even without global warming happening.
At first this vision seems like a bleak contrast to the world of the film, until one remembers that the 25 years immediately following the making of this film were arguably the bloodiest in world history, containing the great depression, WWII, the holocaust, and huge famines in communist Russia and China.
Technocracy. We'll all live in small flats, every move monitored, resources 'correctly' allocated, quarterly 'health' shots, no cars, we'll see very little nature.
I think the future will be more diverse, and what you describe is probably one direction it will go. But there are also many other directions, like people living off grid aided by varying amounts of cheap technology, etc.
There is actually a lot of land left in the world (even in the US and Canada) if you want to take on the hardships of not interacting with society. Judging by what I see say on YouTube, a lot of people want this!
Similar to paleo and other alternative diets as a reaction against industrial farming and food production, there's already a lot of reaction against big tech and technocracy. I think / I hope this time it won't take 50+ years to "properly react". Both industries brought us some good things but we have to be critical about what to adopt.
Also I had a friend who did this near the California/Nevada border. Super cheap land if you don't care about electricity and plumbing!
Michigan and California are both extremely populated states -- but MOST of them by land area is very sparsely populated.
I'm sure someone here knows more, but I think it's obvious if you just drive 30, 60, or 120 minutes outside any city in the US. There is a lot of land. All of it is probably owned, but the owners are probably not doing anything with it, and would sell it for a fair price, which is low.
Hell there is even land in San Francisco if you've ever biked between San Francisco and South San Francisco. Again, it's owned, but it's not doing very much.
There are huge swathes of unpopulated land across the world.
However in many areas the local zoning rules prevent you building on them.
In Australia for instance, thousands of acres of Rural land have been rezoned as "Farming", which means that you can't build a house on less than 100 acres. And of course the only ones who benefit are the corrupt real-estate developers.
The future will be miserable, unless you live in China. In China, the future will arrive as planned as China will once again become the middle kingdom and be bestowed with the mandate of heaven. In the west, the 200 years of western industrial society will be regarded as a mistake that must be payed for dearly with carbon credits.
Jeez. You people catch nuance like a chainlink fence catches mosquitoes. I'm not saying that I buy into the "kill the old" thing. I'm just saying it's the natural evolution of our society. Aristocrats get gilded, serfs get grinded.
> We'll invent a rationale for that eventually. 20 years of retirement is just an unnecessary drain on the economy.
I
n the UK there's already some disdain for 'boomers' because they're getting state pensions and are quite likely to own several mortgage-free houses. Tax rises only affect those currently working so young people people get irked at having to pay more into a system where they're unlikely to get much out. It's not entirely unjustified but the assumption that 'boomer's got stuff for free isn't necessarily true.
It's a interesting development and worth watching.
The future will be sparsely distributed. The wealthy elite are modifying society such that only they will have the gilded science fiction future, and everyone else will be left to their own, probably ruled by Libertarian Warlords.
They'll find justification somehow. Like needing a security force to respond to various "concerns", or the "increasingly unstable situation" (at that point in time).
The whole philosophical core of libertarianism is to seek for a minimal set of rules and systems that doesn't evolve into warlordism or any other corrupt power structure. The idea is to maximize individual liberty and keep it that way.
"I would see anywhere from 10 to 20, hardly ever less than 10, sailing vessels down the (Hudson) river. Now I don't see more than one in three months.
Very few steamboats. Everyone went to New York then, if they wanted to go in the new style why, they take a steamboat. If they want to go cheap they go on one our river sloops."
One of the most incredible things to note here is that this was around the time planes were being invented, the first commercial airplane trip was just made few years earlier, and this a fairly rural interview of an elder so it's sane to think this person has never even seen an airplane.
Coincidentally, the original source has a longer version of the interview where he goes on to talk about railroads and airplanes immediately after the segment about the sailing vessels:
"Now the railroad is slow. Just now, this afternoon, going right up over here, I saw I guess a dozen aeroplanes..."
Commercial passenger airline service already existed when this was shot.
He lived quite near New York, just upstate a bit. We gather that from him seeing all of the river traffic to the city. He didn't seem phased at all by the motion picture camera and sound equipment. It's very likely that he had seen an airplane before. Not germane to what he said, but likely.
In 1929, seeing plane in the air was commonplace in almost every country let alone New York state. Maybe not commercial passenger planes (they were still a rarity), but mail planes were complete commonplace. Also, cropdusters. Also, barnstormers visited literally every village once a year or so.
My grand-grandmother told me that she first saw a plane in the air in 1914 when WWI started (she lived with her parents in what is now easternmost Belarus). When the war and the Revolution ended, they became somewhat of a rarity for the next decade or so, but not extreme rarity.
Yes! It sounds like something straight out from a movie. It sounds scripted. It's fascinating that people just spoke like that, I don't know, with more... soul?
It probably is scripted to an extent. Someone linked to outtakes where it's clear they had the subject say the same line multiple times, so it's clear the conversation wasn't entirely off-the-cuff.
If all you need is to be intelligible to the (same, small group of) people you see every day, then a local, short-lived argot will suffice.
If you're talking to people in the next village, town, state, country, continent, and/or planet over, regularly, you're going to need a more stable form of spoken comms, and coordinated evolution is more challenging.
Much as small island populations tend to evolve and diverge more rapidly than large continental ones.
Hi, as someone who has a very limited knowledge in the English language, I'd be very curious to see the old farm's talk be rewritten with modern way of speaking/word choice? I'll appreciate it!
I tried to rewrite it below in what I think would be a modern colloquial way. (This is a difficult question because some things might be different based on region or social class, not just because of the time when it was recorded.)
Quite a few years ago, I'd rather not say exactly how many, but, well, I was born in the first half of last century, so you can guess how old I am.
And now I'm in the, eh, pretty far along in the next century.
Oh yeah. We live in a world of change.
The trees are just like they were when I was a boy, only bigger.
The sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
But when I was a boy, we didn't have the telegraph and we didn't have a telephone.
Of course, none of the electric lights, or any of the other stuff that's popped up to annoy us, or help us.
The good old days had a lot of good things, you guys shouldn't think you're somehow living in the best time in the history of the world.
We're safe, but it's no better than what our parents had, and I don't think it's much better than what our grandchildren will have.
Yep, that's Hudson over there. Nice little city.
Well, I remember very well, looking out my window. I'd see anywhere from 10 to 20, almost never less than 10, sailboats on the river. Now I don't see more than one every three months.
Very few steamboats. Whenever anybody went to New York then, if they wanted to go the modern way, they'd take a steamboat. If they wanted to go cheap, they'd go on one of those river sloops.
Do you know what work is? You don't? Well, work's doing something you have to do. When you're doing something you want to do, like to do, that's play.
And now I exercise a little, but I don't call it work. I don't call this work. This is play. You see how nice that is?
Very, very difficult question. I tried to do a more drastic rewrite and got stumped.
A lot of what makes him sound old is the subject matter. I don't think I've heard the word "steamboat" more than two or three times in my whole life.
Another thing that made it tricky is that a lot of what he says sounds totally normal for modern American English, it's just a little... poetic? The bit about fathers and grandchildren would fit right into a modern speech or essay, for example. I might find it odd coming from a friend in casual conversation though.
There's something about the way he sees his place in the world too. He's a part of it, not a separate thing in it, if that makes sense. That perspective is something that I think has become rare.
Great question. Made me think quite a bit about how context-dependent language is, and the myriad ways just a few sentences can communicate so much more than their literal meaning.
>> Another thing that made it tricky is that a lot of what he says sounds totally
>> normal for modern American English, it's just a little... poetic? The bit about
>> fathers and grandchildren would fit right into a modern speech or essay,
>> for example. I might find it odd coming from a friend in casual conversation though.
Oh, I had the same feeling. And guess what? From time to time, I got emails from people who write like that, and others are in other styles. Some write emails that are very "user-friendly" for non-native English speakers, some write poetic sentences.
You can’t just drop the lower bound. For example, on my fathers side, people born in 1850 are only four generations away. While my mothers side it’s nearly 6. My wife’s family is closer to eight or nine.
It's interesting to think about the possibilities... On one hand, wagon travel to the west didn't totally die off until the late 1890s, so the woman could easily be part of the greatest generation (WW2 generation) and the encounter could've happened quite recently. OTOH the earliest the encounter could've happened would be the end of the 1950s, and if it did happen that early that makes it plausible that her father traveled west at the peak of the Oregon Trail in the late 1840s to 1850s. It's mind blowing how much we've advanced in such a short time.
Presumably the father went West after the Civil War so maybe 1870s/1880s. So the woman was probably born around that time. (Young kids did travel out West on wagon trains though so could have been earlier.) Jet travel probably indicates at least 1960s but I'm guessing "elderly" means quite elderly so probably some time later.
An alternative perspective on "high mortality" is "strong selection pressure".
About half of all children born died before reaching the age of 20, and that mortality fell off tremendously with the 1st, 5th, and 10th years.
This chart gives life expectancy by age (rather than mortality), but you can largely infer the latter. Range is 1700--2013, though for most ages data are from 1850 onwards.
Still seems problematic to use 'life expectancy' at all to me, since the at birth and early years lines are still affected. Wouldn't it be better to show something like 'probability of living another ten years' (at birth/each of x years old)? I'm no statistician.
The age-adjusted concept is "life expectancy at year n".
That is precisely equivalent to "additional years of survival at year n plus year n".
The alternative notion I'd suggest is "anticipated mortality at year n for those born in year m". The latter would show a typical "bathtub" mortality curve, high initially, then lower, then climbing in late age.
Note too that the image I'd posted is literally a representation of survivorship bias: the longer an individual has survived, the longer they're likely to continue to survive.
> That is precisely equivalent to "additional years of survival at year n plus year n".
But that's (minus n) not what I suggested; it's not equivalent to the probability of living another ten years (say).
E.g. the life expectancy of five year olds (plus that they are five years old) is not sufficient information to determine how many of them (the probability one) will live to fifteen.
So ... "probability of surviving another 10 years" is different from life-expectency. It's a variant on mortality, though expressed over a 10 year period rather than a 1 year period.
For comparison, see the SSA's actuarial life tables. This gives 1-year mortality (both as percentage and as expected survivors per 100,000 lives) for each year of life from 0 to 119:
> What question are you trying to answer by looking at mortality probability?
Well, starting with the problem of 'life expectancy is biased by infant mortality', that it misleads people into thinking it was rare to live past 30 or whatever: stats like 'life expectancy at 20/30/etc.' are helpful.
I was just saying that I don't think 'life expectancy at x' when x is small is helpful, since in the limit we're back to where we started, and until x > end of relatively high risk, it suffers the same bias.
Looking at mortality probability would more directly show that early years are at risk, before it settles down and death is unlikely until old age. The old age curves (birth year is still the horizontal axis) would still show the truer change over time, but now so would the infant years.
You could even (/might need to) refine it to P{living another year} - P{having died within last year (or before)} or something.
I've heard this so much from my grandmother, who is turning 90 this month in fact. That's 1920s but that kind of thinking was still around. I remember when I was really young how my great grandmother used to talk and act. She was super funny sometimes.
I remember talking with my grandparents and they mentioned how when they were younger they remembered how it was a hot debate at the time as to whether or not toilets should go inside of a house.
Not that I am questioning it, but how do you prove the authenticity of these sorts of videos? Could just hire an actor with a good accent and do some post processing.
As someone else mentioned, it can be found in the USC (South Carolina) archives[0]. That university has a decent historical library, too. If you’re ever in the area, it’s worth a visit.
But that's just saying 'trust that someone else did' isn't it? I take the question to be, say USC discovers (thinks it's discovered) a new similar recording, what can it do to verify authenticity.
Even if was recorded at the time it claims to have been, it could still be an actor. The film reel companies were not above such things. It is very hard for me to take this at face value.
I was born in the 80s, but somehow my life didn't feel like much change happened, because the one constant of my life was to learn new things every few years.
It's mostly decor. There's so many more subdivisions and suburban areas, and the style of houses and interior spaces have really changed since the 1980s. A lot of things nowadays are made out of plastic that still would have been made out of metal in the 1980s (even more so in the 1950s). Case in point, today I went looking for a hose reel and nearly all the models were plastic pieces of crap. Plastic--a terrible material for outdoor work that will break in less than 5 years.
There have been many advancements in plastics and materials science. Metal has the problem is rust and weight, plastic has UV degradation, but I have seen situations that call for both.
Strongly disagree. The internet has totally replaced most previous industries. No aspect of daily ritual, be it education, work, play, language or chore is untouched and global media has altered the status quo for culture and commerce. Most of that in the last 20 years.
The farmer in this piece saw the beginnings of the industrial revolution. That had huge implications but it took a lot of time for those implications to reach the corners of the earth. These days, ideas and technology spread and compound much more rapidly.
Re: Last 20 years, I used to travel in the early noughties before mobile phones were everywhere and none of them had cameras. Wikipedia had barely begun, Google Maps didn't exist, many countries were without ATMs or card connectivity, I even carried TCs once. You you had to pay internet cafes for sporadic internet access. Now I can pay cashless in most places, there's crypto, mobile signals everywhere and global roaming data is a thing. I once got lost in rural India in ~2011, pulled out a laptop with mobile data, a satellite map and a 3D digital elevation model. That's ... superhuman by 1960 standards. And then there's machine translation/video conferencing/libgen/cloud services.
Yeah 1920-1970 saw lots of changes as well--perhaps as many net as 1970-2020. But if we talk about 20-25 years, I can guarantee you that dropping any reasonably plugged in person--of whatever age--from today into 1995 and tell them to do a job, shop for things, get information about something, etc. and it will be a pretty unsettling and frustrating experience. Certainly more so than the shift from 1970-1995.
1890-1940 was vast in terms of change. Electrification, long distance communication, automobiles, refridgeration ... just totally overwhelming compared with anything since then.
Batteries leading to mobile electronics. Fundamentally changed the nature of the industrial revolution from capital equipment to consumer products. Not to mention that all the domestic technology like clothes and dish washers, robotic vacuums, and modern AC were born in the post war period.
> long distance communication
Digital telecom (transistors, protocols, the internet, etc.). Telegraph and early radio versus the internet - IMO that's like comparing chemical rockets to a warp drive.
> automobiles
Ubiquitous air travel. What was once a months long trip for the middle class is now a day long trip for anyone who can save a thousand bucks. It's impossible to convey just how world changing that is.
> refridgeration
Biotech and genetic engineering leading to the green revolution increased our carrying capacity to over 7 billion. Globalization that allows us to have seasonal produce at any time of year.
> IMO that's like comparing chemical rockets to a warp drive
Warp drives don't exist.
I think you underestimate the impact of chemical rockets. And telegraphs.
The telegraph made it possible for information to travel around the world within a day. "It's impossible to convey just how world changing" it was.
> .. Globalization ...
Globalization dates from at least the East India Company.
Modern agriculture also requires a non-sustainable use of fossil fuels, destroys ecosystems to raise meat animals more cheaply, and generates huge monocultures tempting the next great blight. "Genetic engineering" also includes making farmers economically dependent on the patented seeds from a small number of seed companies.
Speaking of which, post-war air conditioning, combined with cheap power from fossil fuels, meant that millions could move to places like Phoenix or Los Vegas and live in houses with styles meant for, for example, Cape Cod, rather than local vernacular architecture like thick adobe walls. Gigatons of CO2 emissions, to maintain a certain style, and because tearing down forests for stick building is cheaper in the short term.
The problem with all these counterpoints is that they take an initial change eg. automobiles and offer a "more" version e.g. air travel.
At some point, it's just going to come down to a difference of opinion over which transformation(s) were more qualitative and which were more quantitative. Suffice it to say that I regard all of your counterpoints are quantitive changes, and all of my original points as qualitative.
I acknowledge that there are different opinions about this.
> The problem with all these counterpoints is that they take an initial change eg. automobiles and offer a "more" version e.g. air travel.
The same can be said for every one of your examples. Automobiles: horsepower, but more! Like, literally. Last time I saw a car ad, they used the word horsepower. A century later.
> At some point, it's just going to come down to a difference of opinion over which transformation(s) were more qualitative and which were more quantitative. Suffice it to say that I regard all of your counterpoints are quantitive changes, and all of my original points as qualitative.
What makes automobiles qualitative and airplanes quantitative? That sounds very hand wavy.
It is a bit hand wavy. To take the travel example ... it wasn't that long ago that only a tiny percentage of people would ever have considered a journey beyond what could be accomplished on horseback (or even on foot) with all supplies being carried (except perhaps water).
Over time various forms of "mass" transits steadily increased the ease (and thus possibility) of taking longer journeys, but always on a schedule decided by the transport operator.
The development of the automobile (and the infrastructure that it requires) eventually changed this to make it feasible for an automobile owner to undertake almost arbitrary journeys without reference to a transport operator's schedule, and without requiring relatively unusual levels of "explorer-ness" as would have been the case of foot and horse travel.
So there was an inflexion point somewhere at which independent long distance travel switched from being something done only by a tiny percentage of people to something that was quite accessible.
That (for me) is the qualitative change.
Air travel is the quantitative change layered on top of that, which makes the possible distances and destinations of such travel more expansive.
It's hard to say. Even before automobiles we had penny farthings and early bicycles, before that we had handcarts, and before even that we had animal-driven wagons. Likewise before electrification, humans were already using water power in the form of water wheels for everything from sawing wood to grinding flour. When I look back at history, I realize that humans have been innovating for millenia, so it's really hard to say if one thing was more "innovative" than another.
The first automobiles were less of a qualitative change from horses than the change to modern automobiles. They were less reliable than horses with more limited range.
The first versions of most technologies are typically less of a qualitative change over their precursors. Even with computers, that's largely true. I'd say that's rarely a sensible metric to use.
I remember an article where they interviewed someone who was 100 and asked him what was the biggest improvement in technology in his lifetime. He answered, "indoor plumbing," without hesitation.
Well, and you had the Industrial Revolution a bit before that.
Any of these 50 year periods brought pretty significant change depending upon where you lived and how much that change was either positive, negative, or didn't affect you as much.
There's also a whole backdrop of significant changes in medicine throughout the different periods which are pretty major if you were one of the people who would have died absent antibiotics or a polio vaccine or whatever.
I didn't have broadband at home in 1995 though probably had 28k bps or something like that over a phone line--which still charged per minute outside of you immediate set of exchanges. Not sure I had a cell phone. If I did it was for occasional use for specific purposes. And you didn't really have video on demand for another decade, at least. Very little ecommerce.
Certainly 1985 was even more all this; a lot of people didn't even have VCRs for time-shifting at that point or home PCs. Prior to joining a company that had an internal email system in 1986, I didn't even have email except in a very fragmentary way through organizations like CIS.
1200 would have been unbelievably fast in 85. Try 300 acoustic couplers. I was a student lab tech in my high school in 83 or 4. Being the ahole I was, I’d walk into the lab and whistle loudly fully knowing that everyone’s terminal would freak out with line noise. BofH indeed.
I have to disagree with your timeframes a bit at least for home PCs. I never had an acoustic coupler but I had a 1200 and subsequently faster modems starting in about 1983. I did use acoustic couplers on teletypes in the mid 1970s.
I'm not surprised that a high school computer lab would have been lagging by a few years. I'm guessing I was at a 1200 direct phone jack modem connection in 1985 (which would have been my first modem).
I probably had access to the Web from a Unix workstation by then. Had BBS systems and things like FTP earlier. At that point though, none of those things had any material effect on how I lived my day to day life (other than computer hobby-related). I think when I checked a few years ago, my first order from Amazon wasn't until sometime in the late 1990s, for example. And I don't recall using the Internet for anything really work related until around that time as well. If you want to go back a few more years to 1990, I doubt I had a cell phone yet.
Back in 1995, a movie called The Net was released. One scene near the beginning showed the main character ordering pizza online. I don't think any pizza chain had online ordering until later in the '90s.
Just rewatched that movie funnily enough. Yeah, most of what we think of as the Internet, or at least the Web, started to be in the consumer radar post-1995.
Not sure why the downvotes. Yes, even early 2000s was a different world traveling. Print everything out. Generally work off paper maps.
Even into the 2010s, ubiquitous GPS and things like restaurant search, especially internationally, weren't the seamless experience they (often) are today.
The internet completely changed the idea of preparing to go somewhere. As a kid, when I went somewhere, I would (with parents' help) look at the map for directions, bring my documents in a folio, and make sure I had all the documents on my way back. I have fond memories first reading maps then printing out directions to go driving. When I was going to college I spent the weekend before classes started trueing up the campus map with the reality on the ground. And of course, meeting up with people was all about setting a common time and just having faith that your friends/family would show up at that time. Oh and every time I'd take transit, I'd grab the transit route book, or stare at a wall of train lines for minutes to figure out which combination of lines I needed to go where.
Now when I need to go somewhere, I open up Google Maps and tell it where I want to go and what form of transport I'm using to get there and I have a route. My documents are on my phone and now my forms of payment are as well. If I'm meeting up with someone and they're running late, they usually let me know through a messaging app. All of this really changed the pace of going places and doing things, _especially_ travel. This all feels mundane to us, but try dropping a kid who grew up in the internet age to navigate without their Maps app, and the vast majority of them (especially the ones that aren't outdoorsy) would probably have a tough time.
I still rarely use Google maps or any map program when driving and only recently got to the point where that made things harder. I love technology and the internet but do not like mediating existence through a smartphone. But doing with out a smartphone is looking more and more difficult to do now.
Which means it's time to learn to install Lineage OS or something similar.
> The internet has totally replaced most previous industries.
Other than other media distribution and telecommunication industries, and some of retail, it hasn't replaced much. It has impacted lots, but impacting and replacing are very different.
Culturally, this isn’t really true. Culturally, we’re moving faster than we’ve ever moved. Trends change faster than ever before. To the point where it’s blurred because things never stick for very long like they did in the past. We move too fast now for anyone to keep up.
Yeah I think it's more true for some things than others. We went from Wright Brothers to moon landing in just 66 years time, but somehow commercial air travel today is slower than it was 50 years ago.
On the other hand, the boring automobile I drive every day is practically a spaceship compared to the death traps of the 1970s. And of course probably 90% of advances in computing have occurred since the early 1970s.
I was born in the 80s, and I feel like a freaking time traveler. But then, I grew up in an extremely rural part of colonial New England, and it was quite behind the times, even for the 1980s....most locals were part of a handful of families that pre-dated the revolutionary war and had never moved out of town. Now I'm in urban Southern California as a software engineer. I've been here over a decade, but upon reflecting on my growing-up, it feels like I've been flung at least half a century forward in time, if not more.
I don’t know if it’s only me but while growing up I was pretty excited about the future and technology advances but life back then was simple. Small things used to give lot of happiness, even though we did not had so many luxuries but was very content with what we had and that hope that future will be bright was enough to motivate you . However now thinking about the future makes me sad and how most of us (or may be just me) forgot that we have one life and it’s so precious.
Similar thought here. I don't know if it was the era or being relatively poor, but the big change in my life was giftgiving. You used to get a book or sweater or doodad and be wowed and thankful. As an adult it seems everyone has Amazon and everything they want, so what's to do but trade boring gift cards we don't need. How exciting.
I will say one thing I noticed and dislike about myself is how impatient and 'privileged' I've become. I mean, we used to order from Sears or Penney's catalogues as a kid and that stuff took weeks to arrive, and we were thrilled. Today it's all instant gratification. Amazon is a day late and we(I) act perturbed.
I like to watch this Louis CK clip, it really puts me back in place...for a while.
My mom was born in 1939 in France. She told me that she used to get an orange as her Christmas gift (nothing else). She would save her orange for a few days, looking forward to eating it. On the other hand her one brother would eat all of his immediately. I have an orange for lunch every day at work, partly because I like them but also to remind myself of this story and of how relatively good most of us have it these days.
I had some stories from my grandfather (born in 1910) usually around Christmas time, where he'd ... I guess it was complaining - complain we were too spoiled as kids. "When I was your age, I got an orange for Christmas, and I was happy with it!". It really put a damper on things, and... I can't help it that I'm growing up 60+ years later in an era and world where we get oranges cheap at a grocery store. It's just 'normal' - not my fault if he didn't have that 60 years earlier. And yeah, we do have it great in many ways today (and... not so great in others).
I regularly ask my grandmother (born 1918) about the past and how she experienced this and that.
Overall I think she had a relatively simple, but comfortable life. She remembers getting electricity in the 1940s. Before that, they had plenty other ways to provide lighting and heat, so it didn't matter much. The family wasn't rich, but never lacked anything.
Later in her life things got more busy with more travel, vacations, especially after retiring in the 1970s.
She's still very busy with activities every day, but the last couple of years with the pandemic and restrictions was tough. Now that things are getting back to normal, she's really relieved. Even a simple thing like going to the hair-salon makes her day.
Environmental devastation, at least in terms of footprint, is far worse, both in terms of space and noise. Water and processes are cleaner though. The weather is just fucked.
The glue for all communities is need. The less you need others, the less you need to compromise for others. It is a double edged sword though, on one hand you want the resiliency and security a tribe provides in order to make the gamble that can lead you to succeed, but on the other hand, individuals always have a goal of freedom and power for themselves so if they succeed they will no longer need the tribe (or at least as much), and hence there is no longer incentive to compromise for it.
> It's just 'normal' - not my fault if he didn't have that 60 years earlier.
I guess that's just societal progress, which is not only a good thing, but a great thing!
I read a while ago but can't find the source - the average person these days eats better than the King of France did a few hundred years ago... I think about that a lot
This was the case for my parents as well, and despite growing up in an age of abundance, there was still an orange in my stocking every Christmas morning. It's a nice tradition I think.
We don't really have it good though, simply because the universe doesn't work like that. There's no such thing as a free lunch and you're paying a price for all this "goodness".
> As an adult it seems everyone has Amazon and everything they want, so what's to do but trade boring gift cards we don't need. How exciting.
From one terrible gift-giver to another: Once you are no longer poor and the people around you also aren't poor and can afford the things they want, gift-giving becomes about knowing the person. What have they always wanted or needed, but wouldn't get for themselves?
When you distill gifts to a monetary exchange they lose all value. Know the person, show you care, share that you thought about them, that you put effort into their gift. Then gifts become magical and amazing once more.
Your mom appreciates a $600 weekend getaway with her son/daughter infinitely more than a $600 fancy bluetooth speaker.
As Ted Lasso said in a recent episode – the effort is the gift.
Good ideas. I think I like your 'experience' idea. I'm so fixated on things and everyone has 'things.' But experiences, like a spa treatment, massage, or getaway as you say, are things people are probably less likely to do for themselves. Especially if they involve yourself.
Not telling you like I'm teaching you something, I'm literally writing my line of thoughts after reading what you wrote - so thanks.
A relatively low cost but personally impactful gift is giving custom artwork. There are a lot of artists on Etsy and Reddit who make a living off of doing commissioned work.
You give them a reference picture or two, some details and you'll get amazing work back. My wife really likes Studio Ghibli movies and I got a poster done of our kids holding Totoro's hands. Friends looking like super heroes. Folks pets. Honestly really fun gifts to give.
You just have to put some effort into it. I keep an open mind to gifts all year long. Whenever I see something I think suits someone, I buy it and toss it in a big bin for the next birthday or Christmas. Sometimes things sit in the bin for eleven months but every person I give to is surprised by the gift and loves it.
I recently got a hard to find graphics card(GeForce 3080) and at work and friends got mad at me for not immediately opening it up and putting it in my computer.
I waited like 6+ months for it(to not pay scalper) and then when I had it. I waited another 1 or 2 weeks before installing it.
I've developed a weird habit of not opening things I've ordered for many days or even weeks.
Its not really intentional or I'm not fighting back any urges.
It does feel a bit therapeutic and it helps keep perspective on importance or value of things.
I'd definitely recommend people trying to disconnect the instant gratification for things that aren't immediately needed.
That’s true . That’s why I always get stuff which is relatively cheap but gives me immense happiness, like buying stickers, old books , tattoos (water)
Everyone is so relatively wealthy compared to even 20 years ago that it's hard to imagine what they lack that you could give them, but you view this massive increase in wealth as being itself the problem? ;)
Absolutely right, in aggregate we have never been this prosperous. Inequality is a good thing because it shows people take risks. "poverty" is no longer about not meeting your basic needs, it's about seeing your neighbor drive a Tesla.
You were a kid, everything seems magical then. As we get older the magic disappears. Happens to every generation. See for example how many people are nostalgic of (objectively worse) 80s, in countries that were much poorer than are today and had much worse living conditions.
I'm not sure that's completely true at least for me. There's multiple instances of new technology I first tried as an adult that seemed amazing, I didn't get online till my mid twenties and that was an amazing experience. Switching from my 8MHz Atari ST to an 800MHz PC happened at the same time and suddenly getting access to all these new games and new software was magical, I marvelled at all the little graphical and audio details games suddenly had. I got my first camcorder and digital cameras as an adult and thought they were great.
The magic started to wear off later when technology started feeling hostile. Instead of me being in charge, my technology started doing things against my wishes and I had no power to stop it. There's been this increasing sense of technology constantly pushing and clawing at my boundaries, trying to spy on my and report back from me unless I check a dozen options and even then it may not be enough. Technology updating itself when its inconvenient, or breaking itself, or installing stuff I didn't ask for, want or consent to.
There's also the fact that this creepy boundary pushing technology is feeling more and more mandatory and a built in part of society, so its becoming harder to avoid and the sense that 90% of people have just shrugged given up.
But even now in my 40s I occasionally find a gadget or bit of software that seems magical, so I don't think for me its an age thing.
I'm sure lots of people disagree and have a very different experience, but for me that's a big part of why technology has lost its magic.
The latest craze for 2021 kids is "pop it" game. We are just too old to be amazed by that. Do you think these kids will prefer living in 2050, working in a cubicle, facing midlife crisis, even though they are living through a pandemic now?
As for your view on technology, while many of us here share it, let's not forget how small HN crowd in general population is. Like you said, people shrugged, but most probably never even thought about it.
Depression is up, house prices to income ratios are much worse, education and healthcare costs are both way up while quality (measured by test scores and healthy life years) has barely changed, social connections and number of friends are down...
Just because you can now afford 10 computers rather than 1 (who would even want 10?) does not mean you are better off.
The 80's where pretty much fucked economically in a large part of the world. And the way Reagan fixed the American made things worse due to increased interest rates for countries highly indebted
Also when you are young you don’t know how much the world can suck.
There is also the fact that when you are young the world is your oyster, so many possibilities ahead. Then you get old, you are now over the hill, your life has pass you by, and you don’t really have much to look forward to except deteriorating health and death.
But it’s not all solely age dependent IMO. I think a 90s teen would be happier - or at least more excited - than today’s. While as a stupid kid you likely won’t pay attention to politics, at least not back then when all that stuff was “hidden” in stuffy newspapers, but you probably felt the more hopeful “end of the Cold War” zeitgeist. Things were looking up. Consumer computer technology was advancing at a neck breaking speed. Video games became mainstream and midway through turned 3D. The Internet and the Information Age with all its (overly) optimistic promises were upon us - while the negative effects never crossed our minds. We were all (supposedly) headed into an amazing future.
Today … I personally can’t find anything to be excited about.
I can never tell if this is just me or we have grown more jaded as a culture (maybe both). My drive for personal side projects has dwindled to nothing in the last two years. Also my optimism and enthusiasm around projects like self-driving cars, longevity drugs, and space-flight is gone as well. It is probably part of aging and a general shift in our society.
I am experiencing renewed optimism from materials technology lately. Graphene production is on the rise and the applications are huge. Mycelium is touted as the next plastic. Newer engineered woods like CLT hold a lot of promise as they get deployed into increasingly large projects. There are all kinds of smaller innovations with waterproofing, adhesives and insulation that are gradually being deployed and learned about by builders.
For my part, I took the step into ordering some kit for cardboard crafting just now. Modern wood glues(I am getting Elmer's Max) are unbelievably strong, and a pure shellac finish brushed on will add some rigidity and waterproofing which could be further enhanced through hydrophobic coatings. Corrugated cardboard itself is a limited material, but it's so easy to get and to work with - my first project will simply be to build a small workbench, and then I'll go from there. I have several ideas already planned.
Maybe you could try some new activities (with a low barrier to trying out), and find something that you never thought you'd like. We get into life-routines and they insulate us from discovering.
I lost all interest in TV programming, the kids got me a Roku and I already forgot it's plugged-in. My list of YTube channel bookmarks has grown by leaps since Covid. History is big!
Maybe I’m easily excited, but totally normal things still throw me.
For example, I’ve flown dozens of times but it’s still flipping amazing that we figured out how to get huge tubes of metal to FLY. At 30,000 feet in the air! And at 500 mph, too! It’s absolutely bananas.
Or that I can just pick up my phone and chat with a friend in Argentina, who’s like 8,000+ miles away, no problem.
Although I probably take that for granted more than flying. If it weren’t for having to deal with TSA at 6 am, I’d probably be like a giddy kid each time I fly.
When life is simpler it’s easier to parse hardships that are inherent and unavoidable, versus those that are foisted upon you by society. In our modern and bewildering world, it is much harder to differentiate and thus more depressing and painful.
He says, "well it's great", but the subtititles say, "we're safe". That itself could be interpreted as an interesting window into the mindset of our own society at the moment. People are absorbed in thoughts about turmoil and danger, and preoccupied with safe spaces, bullying, offense, and disgust. Yada yada, special snowflakes, something something.
Is there a reference for this to verify that this isn't just some historical reenactment? I'm trying to be more careful after I was once pranked by a friend who showed me a black and white video, claiming it was real, of people playing ping pong with nunchucks. I believed him at the time, but it was an ad campaign that someone on youtube had reposted to make it seems legit.
My son will be born any day now. My great aunt is 96, born in 1925, I believe. I intend to get them together, within the first few months. She's (slowly) losing her mental faculties but has agreed to some candid interviews for the kids. We've already got a bunch of great pictures and videos of her with our 2 year olds.
It's interesting to think that these people who might be 130 in 2150 could have a direct connection back to the 1920s.
I am not sure "primitive" is the right word. Compared to rural america of the XIX century perhaps. But compared to major cities in Europe, I don't think that our architecture or music are any less primitive than Haussmannian architecture, and Rossini's music. The language has certainly deteriorated. We have more technologies, we have more, cheaper stuff. But we not particularly more sophisticated.
Can't remember where I read this (David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest?), but in the 1930s, a nonagenarian Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) told a young lawyer, "young man, you are speaking to a man who once spoke to a veteran of the Revolution"; IIRC, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, the now-middle-aged lawyer spoke with Halberstam.
At the very least, we will have an accurate inference and convincing portrayal of a person’s reflections on life in 2150–whether they are still “alive” or not.
I converted those recordings to MP3 about 15 years ago.
It's amazing how far we've come in such a short time.