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Catastrophic? People managed to have kids long before computers and cheap photos. They were happy with the tens of good pictures a year they managed to get on film.



I am sure they will survive but it would be huge loss and emotional shock.

It is like saying losing electricity forever should not be catastrophic event, people were living happily without it for 1000s of years.


Electricity makes significant differences to quality of life and you’re talking about having 100 pictures of your kids instead of 10,000 being “a huge loss and emotional shock”. That’s frankly pathetic.

There are many people I know alive today (including myself) that don’t obsess over a day by day photo chronology of their children that you will probably never look at 90% of. Yet we all use electricity significantly every day.

Describe how 10,000 photos of your child is on par with access to electricity?

That’s some addict logic right there.


I don't want the 10,000 photos, just the 30 good ones like my parents had. If all my digital photos disappeared, I'd be left with the random selection I happen to have printed, which is not as select as the photos my parents took of me.


> Describe how 10,000 photos of your child is on par with access to electricity?

It is not. Electricity is just an example, probably a bad one. I would take it over photos any day.

But I am sure there are some modern conveniences that are really important to you while for others they are not as important. If you lose access to those conveniences, you will feel greatly emotional whether anger, sadness or some other emotion. And most people will sympathize with you and a few people will think that it is pathetic to obsess over whatever it is. And they will repeat same old cliche, "back in the days".

Just because it is not important to you, it does not mean it is "pathetic" if it is important to someone else.

I used to work in consumer-facing tech support shop where we mostly troubleshoot computers. I saw too many people crying in public because they lost all their data including photos of their kids. And only thing they cared about was for us to recover the photos. And if we recovered photos even if only a few, people would cry with joy. They brought us cakes, cookies, and other things as gifts. And if we failed, some people had almost mental breakdown.

Based on while probably small sample size, I do think feeling distress over loss of photos would be a normal reaction for majority of humans.


You’re basing it literally on a sample of people that overtly cared.


Yes exactly.

It was a common trope in Holland when I was young. When people were asked what they'd bring if the house were on fire... The photos.




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