12 ms·

I wonder how much the effects vary between different professions. I'm in my 40s. Incredibly old for HN standards. And yet, I feel no nostalgia for the "good ol

I wonder how much the effects vary between different professions. I'm in my 40s. Incredibly old for HN standards. And yet, I feel no nostalgia for the "good ol' times." I mean, don't get me wrong I'm sure there's a lot of things that set me apart from newer generations -- I don't get Snapchat at all ;) -- but I don't see me being happier by being put in a house set up to look and feel like the 90s/80s. Is it maybe because we as programmers tend to be less prone to be stuck to the past? Just wondering

samastur 9y ago
No, it's you. I'm 43 and while I don't see myself as particularly nostalgic either, I have plenty of colleagues who are. I have no idea how we compare to general population.
- medill1919 9y ago
  I'm 55. I'm nostalgic, but also forward seeking. There were certainly things about the 70's and 90's that were better than now. Not sure I'd want to go back though. I'd rather change the future...
  - ido 9y ago
    The best thing about 15 years ago was that my body was 15 years younger. Missing their youth probably has more to do with missing any particular specific cultural artifact of the time.
    - cableshaft 9y ago
      For me it's: I miss my youth and health, and I'd love to be able to go back just so I could have the time and energy to work on the things I'd like to work on now. I am still making things, it's just more difficult now. But video games are a hell of a lot better now than they were back then. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild? The Witness? Life is Strange? Persona 5? So, so good. And there's nothing stopping me from playing the old games when I feel like it (except having the time). Also I wouldn't mind having another replay of my high school and college years with the confidence that I have now. A lot of my experiences with women would have gone a lot more positively then if my attitude and approach then were the same as it is now (Well, in the past five years. I'm in a solid relationship now). I wouldn't want to replay the sitting around a classroom or schoolwork part of it though.
- Splatter 9y ago
  I'm 55 and not nostalgic at all. Weirdly, I can hardly stand to listen to music of my teenage years because it puts me in a pretty sour mood -- and I was quite successful and happy as a teenager and in my early 20's. Just yesterday I competed in the open division of a regional racquetball tournament and in a month in a half I'll compete in the open division in a regional powerlifting meet. The is not a humble-brag as much as to contrast this to the vast majority of the folks my age with whom I hang out. Moreover, I'm heavily invested in growing intellectually which seems a contrast to many of my peers. These folks have largely, though not all of them, adopted the "I'm too old" mentality to try to compete or grow in athletics or in intellectual pursuits. The point is that this article, I believe, tends to comport with reality: many people begin to accept an easing of their personal standards and drive for growth because they're "too old" to not continue to push and compete.
  - Bakary 9y ago
    At my first job, my boss, who was in his seventies at the time, told me that once people get to a certain age, societal expectations of sharpness decrease rapidly. According to him, this led to many people eagerly taking up the mindset you describe. Maybe your peers never really had the personal standards you thought they had in the first place, and simply stopped trying once the peer pressure eased up and they got a good excuse to lay around? This type of pressure is often met with scorn as something we are too good for. In my case however, it really helped me become a better version of myself over time.
ido 9y ago
Maybe you're not old enough? When you're 80 you may miss the heydays of your 40s when you were at the peak of your career (and possibly family life). There are probably a lot of 30-somethings for which their teenage high-school years were the best years of their lives (I know several, I'm 34 myself and prefer my present to my past), so the right age for nostalgia is probably a very individual thing.
- askafriend 9y ago
  I think for people who don't stagnate and continue to progress throughout their lives, nostalgia will be limited. People who peaked in High School (for example) and stagnated in life afterwards will probably tend to look back on their past years with fondness. I see this with people in the town that I grew up in who couldn't get out. After High School, they largely languished in the same town and haven't really done much with their lives since. I see them talking about past years and High School with far more regularity than the more successful people I know. The successful people on the other hand - they bring up the future more than they bring up the past. That's probably because they have something to look forward to on the trajectory they're on - it's a mental state, a mindset. Now this is a very simplistic version of my observations but it's what I've seen so far. I'd love for people to bring in some kind of science to this theme that I've observed. My observations could certainly be isolated and wrong but from conversations I've had with other friends from similar smaller towns, they've reported observing similar things.
  - Bakary 9y ago
    Your observations strike me as all too accurate due to my own anecdotal experience. I've tasted both sides of the coin. After leaving a phase of torpor that lasted years and started taking life into my own hands, my mindset completely changed to the point where my past self feels almost alien. The effect nostalgia had on my daily life essentially went from a driving force to a non-factor.
    - ido 9y ago
      I would still add the disclaimer that you may simply not be old enough- after recent experiences with my elderly & currently very sick father. When you get older your body wears out, even if you take care of it. You may not notice it as an active 40 year old but you definitely will as a 70 year old. Other things like culture and values change around you and you can't always keep up, causing the feeling that "the world is going to hell". Maybe your field was doing great 20-30 years ago and is now on a downward trajectory (again you can't always plan for that decades in advance). It doesn't have to be that way but getting old at some point does suck for most people, some earlier than others.
jackfoxy 9y ago
I'm considerably older, and I too have no nostalgia for the past, but I certainly have a broader view on many tech topics than my younger colleagues. A couple of days ago I was explaining to a couple how at one time the line printer was the primary output for users, no monitor of any kind. This made separate characters for line feed and carriage return important, in that you could program with them to create better (but still very primitive) graphics. But today is certainly the golden age of software engineering. I'm still excited about many things, and learned about a significant new area of interest to me just a couple weeks ago.
aswanson 9y ago
Same here, same age range. I miss nothing about the 80s or 90s except not investing in the right skills or stocks earlier. Today is full of far more potential and choice, imo.
guelo 9y ago
As a 40s hacker/entrepreneur what I miss most from the 90s was the feeling of having a vast unexplored frontier with endless possibilities ahead of us even for the little guys. These days, with the web and mobile revolutions maturing, it feels like the 5 or so giant tech monopolies have locked up most of the future potential. But maybe that feeling is part of having an older mentality.
- ianai 9y ago
  On the contrary, I see at least social as being open for distruption. FB did displace myspace after all. Google, Apple, and Microsoft, though, seem pretty safe.
  - lisper 9y ago
    I think Apple jumped the shark quite a while ago. I would love to ditch my Macs, but the problem is that as much as Macs suck, everything else sucks more. If someone built something that Just Worked the way Macs did back in the Snow Leopard days I would replace all of my Macs immediately. And I think this is possible starting with Linux as a base. Linux has come a long, long way since 1993. I just bought a couple of Raspberry Pis and I get the same exciting this-is-the-start-of-something-really-cool vibe from them as I did from my first Apple II back in 1980.
    - p49k 9y ago
      I think iOS 11 is an example of Apple realizing that they need to take a step back and focus on the "it just works" aspect of their mission. There are dozens of small fixes that I've wanted for years that they've finally fixed, all in one release. Haven't had the chance to look at High Sierra, but I'm hoping it's the same there.
      - ianai 9y ago
        All of their products used to behave much more synergistically. There was a real feel when you bought an iPod and hooked it up to your iMac that the two popped together. Now, an iPad barely ever needs to even touch a Mac or even PC. The technology is at the point where it ought to be possible to offload display/UI tasks to an iPad - but you can't in an integrated way. They really need to tie their whole product lines together again (through synergistic features).
Swizec 9y ago
I'm turning 30 this year. Not old at all, but just old enough to not be young. I don't feel nostalgia, what I do feel is envy for the younger. Especially those younger than me that I feel are more successful than I. Not in the "Ugh, fuckers" way, but in the "God damn it if I knew then what I know now or at least listened to the people who did know, I could be that ultra successful young hotshot! I had all the opportunities and I didn't take them for various reasons. Grargh!" Not sure if that's what feeling old feels like but I certainly feel a level of "Poop, there's def less time ahead of me for all the shit I want(ed) to do than there used to be"
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  >>Not in the "Ugh, fuckers" way, but in the "God damn it if I knew then what I know now or at least listened to the people who did know, I could be that ultra successful young hotshot! I had all the opportunities and I didn't take them for various reasons. Grargh!" Eh, the types of success we envy is mostly a matter of luck. Being born to a family with means and connections, being good-looking, being at the right place at the right time, etc. Obviously if you actually knew back then what you know today, you would buy lots of bitcoin and Tessa stock. But in terms of "soft" knowledge, I'd say you would probably end up in a similar place.
m_fayer 9y ago
I'm 33, young-ish but I still have some nostalgia for the early days of the internet. I miss the lightness and innocence, when viruses had silly graphics and at worst screwed up one computer. When the biggest internet companies were still frivolous and playful and inconsequential. Today tech has gotten heavy. Hackers work for organized crime and espionage, ruin lives, and cost the world countless billions. Tor and Bitcoin would have felt badass back in the day. Now they are used to dodge totalitarian regimes and to run black markets that are spreading untraceable opiates throughout middle America. And the iconic internet companies now shape the world, for better or worse. Tech has arrived and I wouldn't roll back the clock, but I am sad that there's so little lightness left.
noonespecial 9y ago
I'm about that age as well. I had a pretty rough entry into adulthood thanks to my school peers. Being a "geek" was tough in those decades. I harbor no nostalgia for that hot mess. So there's one more reason a lot of older folks on here might not be quite as stuck on the past as most. Watching my son sling 'duinos and rock NodeJS on his raspis and not get bullied for it is sweet. The golden age is now.
- photojosh 9y ago
  Yes! It's true for my kids too, although I'm guessing mine are a tad younger. It's interesting to try to put a finger on when computers became "cool". I suspect it's only with the rise of the smartphone, as even video games were seen as a tad nerdy in the mid-2000s.
BatFastard 9y ago
As a developer who is almost 60, and the father of two budding developers. I can't image a better time to EVER have lived. The technological landscape is amazing, new things in tech, biotech, materials, and just human understanding of ourselves. I don't feel old because I am excited about everyday and what adventures it will bring. I can still beat the twenty year olds in speed chess, though my twitch reactions are not fast enough to keep up in the modern FPS's. The trick is to challenge yourself everyday in mental, physical, and spiritual ways. Having great kids helps with that!
- penpapersw 9y ago
  > "I can't image a better time to EVER have lived." I dunno. The other day, my wife and our 5 children and I were all having a relaxing evening together as a family in the living room, and something my 4 year old daughter said accidentally set off Siri who said "sorry I didn't catch that" and my daughter said "never mind" and we all had a good laugh. Then my daughter said "I love you, Siri." My heart sank. I'm probably not giving enough context to explain it, but she seemed to genuinely think Siri was a real (and neglected) person in the family.
  - BatFastard 9y ago
    And in a few years Siri will probably be a sibling intelligence. I do believe our new computer overlords will be kind to us ;-)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
samer66 9y ago
Your outlook will change in your 50s for sure, things will get punishingly clearer then.
technofiend 9y ago
I'm only nostalgic for retro-technology because it's what got me into the field. I might boot up a copy of SIMH and run a DEC PDP-11 image of RSTS/E or the like just to see it again and wonder at the fact I have control over a simulation of a machine I lusted over and learned so much from. That usually lasts about 1/2 an hour and then I'm on to learning something new. The novelty and innovation is what makes this industry so much fun. I can't imagine ever growing tired of it. In terms of "good old times" I just lament the fact kids today don't have the unstuctured freedom to explore the physical world like we did. People today (from my perspective) have very different perceived risk than older folks.
- sizzle 9y ago
  I implore you to try the Microsoft Hololens. It changed my life, AR is the future!
- ryandrake 9y ago
  I agree with your last point--it's a real shame my kid will never have the experience of getting on her bicycle at 7AM, exploring a 10-20 mile radius all day without a call phone and GPS, and being trusted to return by sundown. I'd have no objection to allowing it, but every nosy ninny in the area would call 911 at the mere sight of an unaccompanied kid roaming the neighborhood.

samastur 9y ago

No, it's you. I'm 43 and while I don't see myself as particularly nostalgic either, I have plenty of colleagues who are. I have no idea how we compare to general population.

medill1919 9y ago
I'm 55. I'm nostalgic, but also forward seeking. There were certainly things about the 70's and 90's that were better than now. Not sure I'd want to go back though. I'd rather change the future...
- ido 9y ago
  The best thing about 15 years ago was that my body was 15 years younger. Missing their youth probably has more to do with missing any particular specific cultural artifact of the time.
  - cableshaft 9y ago
    For me it's: I miss my youth and health, and I'd love to be able to go back just so I could have the time and energy to work on the things I'd like to work on now. I am still making things, it's just more difficult now. But video games are a hell of a lot better now than they were back then. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild? The Witness? Life is Strange? Persona 5? So, so good. And there's nothing stopping me from playing the old games when I feel like it (except having the time). Also I wouldn't mind having another replay of my high school and college years with the confidence that I have now. A lot of my experiences with women would have gone a lot more positively then if my attitude and approach then were the same as it is now (Well, in the past five years. I'm in a solid relationship now). I wouldn't want to replay the sitting around a classroom or schoolwork part of it though.
Splatter 9y ago
I'm 55 and not nostalgic at all. Weirdly, I can hardly stand to listen to music of my teenage years because it puts me in a pretty sour mood -- and I was quite successful and happy as a teenager and in my early 20's. Just yesterday I competed in the open division of a regional racquetball tournament and in a month in a half I'll compete in the open division in a regional powerlifting meet. The is not a humble-brag as much as to contrast this to the vast majority of the folks my age with whom I hang out. Moreover, I'm heavily invested in growing intellectually which seems a contrast to many of my peers. These folks have largely, though not all of them, adopted the "I'm too old" mentality to try to compete or grow in athletics or in intellectual pursuits. The point is that this article, I believe, tends to comport with reality: many people begin to accept an easing of their personal standards and drive for growth because they're "too old" to not continue to push and compete.
- Bakary 9y ago
  At my first job, my boss, who was in his seventies at the time, told me that once people get to a certain age, societal expectations of sharpness decrease rapidly. According to him, this led to many people eagerly taking up the mindset you describe. Maybe your peers never really had the personal standards you thought they had in the first place, and simply stopped trying once the peer pressure eased up and they got a good excuse to lay around? This type of pressure is often met with scorn as something we are too good for. In my case however, it really helped me become a better version of myself over time.

ido 9y ago

Maybe you're not old enough? When you're 80 you may miss the heydays of your 40s when you were at the peak of your career (and possibly family life). There are probably a lot of 30-somethings for which their teenage high-school years were the best years of their lives (I know several, I'm 34 myself and prefer my present to my past), so the right age for nostalgia is probably a very individual thing.

askafriend 9y ago
I think for people who don't stagnate and continue to progress throughout their lives, nostalgia will be limited. People who peaked in High School (for example) and stagnated in life afterwards will probably tend to look back on their past years with fondness. I see this with people in the town that I grew up in who couldn't get out. After High School, they largely languished in the same town and haven't really done much with their lives since. I see them talking about past years and High School with far more regularity than the more successful people I know. The successful people on the other hand - they bring up the future more than they bring up the past. That's probably because they have something to look forward to on the trajectory they're on - it's a mental state, a mindset. Now this is a very simplistic version of my observations but it's what I've seen so far. I'd love for people to bring in some kind of science to this theme that I've observed. My observations could certainly be isolated and wrong but from conversations I've had with other friends from similar smaller towns, they've reported observing similar things.
- Bakary 9y ago
  Your observations strike me as all too accurate due to my own anecdotal experience. I've tasted both sides of the coin. After leaving a phase of torpor that lasted years and started taking life into my own hands, my mindset completely changed to the point where my past self feels almost alien. The effect nostalgia had on my daily life essentially went from a driving force to a non-factor.
  - ido 9y ago
    I would still add the disclaimer that you may simply not be old enough- after recent experiences with my elderly & currently very sick father. When you get older your body wears out, even if you take care of it. You may not notice it as an active 40 year old but you definitely will as a 70 year old. Other things like culture and values change around you and you can't always keep up, causing the feeling that "the world is going to hell". Maybe your field was doing great 20-30 years ago and is now on a downward trajectory (again you can't always plan for that decades in advance). It doesn't have to be that way but getting old at some point does suck for most people, some earlier than others.

jackfoxy 9y ago

I'm considerably older, and I too have no nostalgia for the past, but I certainly have a broader view on many tech topics than my younger colleagues. A couple of days ago I was explaining to a couple how at one time the line printer was the primary output for users, no monitor of any kind. This made separate characters for line feed and carriage return important, in that you could program with them to create better (but still very primitive) graphics. But today is certainly the golden age of software engineering. I'm still excited about many things, and learned about a significant new area of interest to me just a couple weeks ago.

aswanson 9y ago

Same here, same age range. I miss nothing about the 80s or 90s except not investing in the right skills or stocks earlier. Today is full of far more potential and choice, imo.

guelo 9y ago

As a 40s hacker/entrepreneur what I miss most from the 90s was the feeling of having a vast unexplored frontier with endless possibilities ahead of us even for the little guys. These days, with the web and mobile revolutions maturing, it feels like the 5 or so giant tech monopolies have locked up most of the future potential. But maybe that feeling is part of having an older mentality.

ianai 9y ago
On the contrary, I see at least social as being open for distruption. FB did displace myspace after all. Google, Apple, and Microsoft, though, seem pretty safe.
- lisper 9y ago
  I think Apple jumped the shark quite a while ago. I would love to ditch my Macs, but the problem is that as much as Macs suck, everything else sucks more. If someone built something that Just Worked the way Macs did back in the Snow Leopard days I would replace all of my Macs immediately. And I think this is possible starting with Linux as a base. Linux has come a long, long way since 1993. I just bought a couple of Raspberry Pis and I get the same exciting this-is-the-start-of-something-really-cool vibe from them as I did from my first Apple II back in 1980.
  - p49k 9y ago
    I think iOS 11 is an example of Apple realizing that they need to take a step back and focus on the "it just works" aspect of their mission. There are dozens of small fixes that I've wanted for years that they've finally fixed, all in one release. Haven't had the chance to look at High Sierra, but I'm hoping it's the same there.
    - ianai 9y ago
      All of their products used to behave much more synergistically. There was a real feel when you bought an iPod and hooked it up to your iMac that the two popped together. Now, an iPad barely ever needs to even touch a Mac or even PC. The technology is at the point where it ought to be possible to offload display/UI tasks to an iPad - but you can't in an integrated way. They really need to tie their whole product lines together again (through synergistic features).

Swizec 9y ago

I'm turning 30 this year. Not old at all, but just old enough to not be young. I don't feel nostalgia, what I do feel is envy for the younger. Especially those younger than me that I feel are more successful than I. Not in the "Ugh, fuckers" way, but in the "God damn it if I knew then what I know now or at least listened to the people who did know, I could be that ultra successful young hotshot! I had all the opportunities and I didn't take them for various reasons. Grargh!" Not sure if that's what feeling old feels like but I certainly feel a level of "Poop, there's def less time ahead of me for all the shit I want(ed) to do than there used to be"

enraged_camel 9y ago
>>Not in the "Ugh, fuckers" way, but in the "God damn it if I knew then what I know now or at least listened to the people who did know, I could be that ultra successful young hotshot! I had all the opportunities and I didn't take them for various reasons. Grargh!" Eh, the types of success we envy is mostly a matter of luck. Being born to a family with means and connections, being good-looking, being at the right place at the right time, etc. Obviously if you actually knew back then what you know today, you would buy lots of bitcoin and Tessa stock. But in terms of "soft" knowledge, I'd say you would probably end up in a similar place.

m_fayer 9y ago

I'm 33, young-ish but I still have some nostalgia for the early days of the internet. I miss the lightness and innocence, when viruses had silly graphics and at worst screwed up one computer. When the biggest internet companies were still frivolous and playful and inconsequential. Today tech has gotten heavy. Hackers work for organized crime and espionage, ruin lives, and cost the world countless billions. Tor and Bitcoin would have felt badass back in the day. Now they are used to dodge totalitarian regimes and to run black markets that are spreading untraceable opiates throughout middle America. And the iconic internet companies now shape the world, for better or worse. Tech has arrived and I wouldn't roll back the clock, but I am sad that there's so little lightness left.

noonespecial 9y ago

I'm about that age as well. I had a pretty rough entry into adulthood thanks to my school peers. Being a "geek" was tough in those decades. I harbor no nostalgia for that hot mess. So there's one more reason a lot of older folks on here might not be quite as stuck on the past as most. Watching my son sling 'duinos and rock NodeJS on his raspis and not get bullied for it is sweet. The golden age is now.

photojosh 9y ago
Yes! It's true for my kids too, although I'm guessing mine are a tad younger. It's interesting to try to put a finger on when computers became "cool". I suspect it's only with the rise of the smartphone, as even video games were seen as a tad nerdy in the mid-2000s.

BatFastard 9y ago

As a developer who is almost 60, and the father of two budding developers. I can't image a better time to EVER have lived. The technological landscape is amazing, new things in tech, biotech, materials, and just human understanding of ourselves. I don't feel old because I am excited about everyday and what adventures it will bring. I can still beat the twenty year olds in speed chess, though my twitch reactions are not fast enough to keep up in the modern FPS's. The trick is to challenge yourself everyday in mental, physical, and spiritual ways. Having great kids helps with that!

penpapersw 9y ago
> "I can't image a better time to EVER have lived." I dunno. The other day, my wife and our 5 children and I were all having a relaxing evening together as a family in the living room, and something my 4 year old daughter said accidentally set off Siri who said "sorry I didn't catch that" and my daughter said "never mind" and we all had a good laugh. Then my daughter said "I love you, Siri." My heart sank. I'm probably not giving enough context to explain it, but she seemed to genuinely think Siri was a real (and neglected) person in the family.
- BatFastard 9y ago
  And in a few years Siri will probably be a sibling intelligence. I do believe our new computer overlords will be kind to us ;-)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

samer66 9y ago

Your outlook will change in your 50s for sure, things will get punishingly clearer then.

technofiend 9y ago

I'm only nostalgic for retro-technology because it's what got me into the field. I might boot up a copy of SIMH and run a DEC PDP-11 image of RSTS/E or the like just to see it again and wonder at the fact I have control over a simulation of a machine I lusted over and learned so much from. That usually lasts about 1/2 an hour and then I'm on to learning something new. The novelty and innovation is what makes this industry so much fun. I can't imagine ever growing tired of it. In terms of "good old times" I just lament the fact kids today don't have the unstuctured freedom to explore the physical world like we did. People today (from my perspective) have very different perceived risk than older folks.

sizzle 9y ago
I implore you to try the Microsoft Hololens. It changed my life, AR is the future!
ryandrake 9y ago
I agree with your last point--it's a real shame my kid will never have the experience of getting on her bicycle at 7AM, exploring a 10-20 mile radius all day without a call phone and GPS, and being trusted to return by sundown. I'd have no objection to allowing it, but every nosy ninny in the area would call 911 at the mere sight of an unaccompanied kid roaming the neighborhood.