10 ms·

Why does culture get less happy year after year?

47 points by hn-0001 4y ago

rossdavidh 4y ago
Missing the obvious hypothesis: people in the past had real problems, like living through a war (by fighting in it or having it fought where you were, not by seeing it on TV), or the Great Depression, or other real, actual threats to life and limb. Something happy was a counterbalance. Now, if you're a member of a pampered elite able to work at movies/TV/other mass media for a living (for each one who can, many try and cannot finagle their way into that industry for lack of connections), you make it "dark and gritty" to cover up for the fact that you don't really know anything about real suffering.
- bowtie109 4y ago
  War breeds connection and community. Many of the greatest minds in the world came from these wars. Hemingway, St. Francis of Assisi, Konstantin Batyushkov, Whitman are some who are top of mind for me today. What other great thinkers were breed in war environments?
  - throwaway_4ever 4y ago
    Orwell and Wittgenstein
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      How much of Wittgenstein is importantly a consequence of the war?
- superchroma 4y ago
  or perhaps it's because the world is falling apart and we're on a solid trajectory to make it worse, and unlike a war, it's not something easy to bounce back from?
  - gedy 4y ago
    Sounds like a self fulfilling prophecy though.
  - henriquez 4y ago
    It’s probably because car headlights and grilles become squintier and angrier every year. People drive too much and everywhere they look is angry car faces.
    - ginko 4y ago
      We need more Twingos.
    - superchroma 4y ago
      oh, yeah, that's what it was.
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      Is'a "good" idea: it implies a proposal of a model according to which people absorb acritically more and more, subliminally, iow process the input stimula less and less. The poster points an accusing finger against passivity. Bravo.
  - juanci_to 4y ago
    Let's be fair, humanity has been saying that everything is falling apart for centuries. There's in the front page a post that's named: "A brief history of nobody wants to work anymore"¹ that shows registers from as early as 1894 of media saying "Nobody wants to work anymore". Even the classic "Kids these days" can be tracked back to 624 BCE². Socrates said too something along those lines: «The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.» [1](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32161426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32161426) [2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_these_days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_these_days)
- spaetzleesser 4y ago
  I agree. My dad had to fight in WW2 at 17, got shot twice, almost lost a leg, had to leave their home with nothing. My mom spent a lot of nights in a bunker while bombs were falling, they had to watch for fighter planes shooting at them while working on the fields during the day. The generations that grew up in the west after WW2 have seen nothing in comparison. I think people like the idea of overcoming suffering so these days they exaggerate a lot of things.
- corrral 4y ago
  I frankly feel kinda great in a crisis. The more serious, the better. All the dumbest parts of my brain shut down and I do what has to be done. Squeamishness, fear, anxiety, second-guessing, rumination—all shoved in a closet and the door slammed. Gotta be an acute crisis I can do something about, though. "Climate change" or whatever doesn't trigger that state. If not for being pretty happy with being alive and having a body that's not broken and logically knowing how fast those things can change, I'd probably be really into extreme sports.
  - bowtie109 4y ago
    Does climate change cause you anxiety? I feel the helplessness of it also leads to feelings of hopelessness (sadnees cynical).
    - corrral 4y ago
      Almost everything in the news is either gonna trigger anxiety or nothing. Outrage, maybe. That's about it. Farther away from local news, the more true that is. Luckily, keeping up with that stuff day-to-day or even week-to-week is pretty pointless, so easy to avoid. The knowledge of all those problems just goes on the pile of shit that I can't possibly deal with, so just have to try not to think about, along with things like existential dread, the fact that my living the way I do (so, like a normal developed-world person) is probably indirectly causing misery for someone somewhere (The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is, like much good speculative fiction, not about a fictional place but rather our current world), my hunch that cosmic horror probably comes about as close to capturing the nature of our existence and place in the universe as anything does (if only metaphorically), all that and the rest of the unhelpful crap that's probably true and real but also not especially actionable short of "kill yourself, or else devote yourself body and soul monk-/batman-like to some cause all the time every day, probably to no real effect except personal satisfaction".
      - soco 4y ago
        That's exactly the point of those news: to trigger the viewer. That's all they care about. Now that we pile up on those anxieties or whatever, not the news channel's problem.
- Alex3917 4y ago
  > people in the past had real problems, like living through a war [...] Something happy was a counterbalance I would posit the opposite, that gritty content resonates more each year due to American's lifestyles being less subsidized by those abroad.
- uncomputation 4y ago
  It’s not so much they were “real” problems, as they were acute problems. Acute problems - bad guy with gun - are easier to portray on screen than chronic problems. Anyone who thinks we don’t have real problems anymore and this is the end of history has their head in the sand. But it’s more difficult to visualize. How do you make a war flick out of climate change? How do you make an action thriller from wealth inequality? Even Covid, I mean I don’t know of any influential movies inspired by the Spanish Flu. Some “dark and gritty” does suffer from a true lack of maturity on the point of the screenwriter - Zac Snyder does not have the writing talent to support his darkness without it seeming cheesy and silly - but a lot of it - Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight - very much does touch on the real suffering of the modern era: terrorism, surveillance, class divisions.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  While I think there is correlation here, I think a better arugment would be for the cyclical nature of art. When society goes one way art may go another. (or at times the same way, I doubt it's a 180 relationship) > Now, if you're a member of a pampered elite able to work at movies/TV/other mass media for a living Hasn't this always been true? I can't imagine a time in history when plays/literature/music has been more accessible to the working class.
- unmole 4y ago
  We are the fortunate ones Who've never faced opression's gun We are the fortunate ones Imitations of rebellion We acted it out We wear the colors Confined by the things we own We're not without We're like each other Pretending we're here alone https://youtu.be/OCy5461BtTg https://youtu.be/OCy5461BtTg
bowtie109 4y ago
Watching television / using the computer isolates us from real meaningful human connections and causes depression / cynical world view. It is often hard to have meaning or purpose in the world and hard to interact with others in a real life meaningful way. As the internet and media continue to be front and center in our life depression and sadness are inevitable.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mojuba 4y ago
Isn't it because depression and anxiety were taboo topics then? I think these topics have been normalized only relatively recently. Even in the 1980s none of the superstars would come out and admit they are suffering depression (Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson come to mind). Or a more recent "coming out" by Sinead O'Connor that she's in deep depression was a complete shock to me (and to many). I couldn't even watch her video in full, was so painful to see her saying those things. So I think it's more about the "coming out" and normalization of the darker side of human nature, which was always there of course, just wasn't OK to talk about out loud, at work or on stage and especially if you are a celebrity.
- danjoredd 4y ago
  True, but I also think the romanticization of depression is a factor as well. Just look at "Doomer" culture on the internet, or "black pill" types. Watch one of those videos on youtube, and all of a sudden you get a deluge of those types of vids. That is what I fear for future generations. When depression is seen as an aesthetic, some people(mostly teenagers) try to identify with it and accidentally end up depressed for real. For most people, it is more complex than that. However this is a trend that I worry about.
  - vitiral 4y ago
    You can (and IMO should) disable youtube suggestions based on your past browsing. You can also have it only store 3 months worth of tracking (in case you ever turn the suggestions back on). It definitely lowers the quality of the suggestions... but that's kind of the point.
    - godshatter 4y ago
      I take it one step farther and only watch YouTube in a private session and don't log in. When the recommendations get strange, I close the window and open a new one.
      - vitiral 4y ago
cafard 4y ago
Do you mean, Why can't we have happy writers like Samuel Beckett?
kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
Older culture was happier? Check out some 1970s movies and music.
sudosteph 4y ago
I'm of the opinion that most of the "dark, gritty" stuff we keep seeing in media just boils down to standard trend-chasing and market pressures to continue to use existing IPs. The cheesy, feel-good stuff from the 60s has already been done, so the darker stuff, especially when it's a darker take on those same characters, is still somewhat subversive to most viewers. When artists can't get real novelty, subversiveness is at least still generally respectable. Eventually, as the audience gets tired of this and it gets done to death, it will shift. Maybe not to the happy-go-lucky stuff, but I think surreal and absurdist humor is still fertile ground (see shows like: Nathan For You, The Review, Informercials, Corporate, American Vandal), and could be another future avenue for continuing to exploit existing IPs. As for the general happiness of the population decreasing, I think that's mostly unrelated to the media trend. Economic troubles (low wages, housing unaffordability), societal strife, and social media all seem like obvious causes. However, Movies and TV are still generally viewed as an escape to most people, so while they reflect greater trends to some degree, I don't think they're as tied to it as the author may expect.
- vitiral 4y ago
  A very measured take. I was personally of the opinion it was because we don't experience "real" problems today (mentioned by another commenter), but this is at least an equally plausible explanation for the media trends. Well done!
tomgp 4y ago
Feels like theres some cherry picking going on. eg whilst “the power rock of the ‘80s is… incredibly cheerful’ the 80s also played host to Joy Division and Suicidal Tendencies neither of whom exude incredible cheer (though the angst is expressed very differently). Similarly the cheerful rock’n’roll of the 1950s might be contrasted with the mournful blues and jazz which spawned it. Or what about the 50s novels of Richard Yates pretty bleak stuff compared with the life affirming tone of best selling contemporary novelists such as John Green and Becky Chambers.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  The 80's also had some of the darkest horror and dystopian sci-fi that we've seen in popular culture. Interesting in the article he never mentions Seinfeld or Peanuts as those were turning points into more realistic or less sympathetic characters for their genres (tv comedy and comics respectively) edit as I'm still reading: "The one note today’s entertainment strikes is the depressive tone" is an eye roll level of reductionism. I'd be curious how the reduction in influence in religion has played a roll as well. The FCC rules on what you could say in TV/radio used to be downright archaic, and I think religion espouses this idea that good people are happy and everything turns out ok in the end because god.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  Painting phenomena with gross partial strokes is very easy if one myopically does not consider roots: if you follow the structure of paths behind the outcomes there are different expressions (modulated by personalities) of recognizable instances, more significant than "a mood".
kstenerud 4y ago
People looked happy in movies and TV because that's simply how it was done. One of the things that made shows like The Simpsons and Married With Children so revolutionary was their rebellion against this artificial happiness, peeling away the veneer to show the dysfunction that was always lurking beneath. This "peeling away of layers" defined much of the 90s, and eventually led to a kind of one-upmanship to see who could be the grittiest, the most provocative, the most extreme. There's a similar revolution brewing at the moment in Japanese TV with the release of shows like The Naked Director.
vehemenz 4y ago
I don't know. Even if this anecdotal narrative has any merit, I'd still take doom-and-gloom over the recent infantile direction of popular music and film. Thankfully there's some decent TV still.
nano9 4y ago
Not sure if this is a frame of reference effect, or maybe just a local minimum, but alternative/rock music from the early 00s was extremely depressing compared to the modern stuff (which seems to have settled into an abstract/esoteric niche). I have sometimes wondered why it seemed like depression was "cool" in the late 90s/early 00s. For instance, if you look up the lyrics for Chevelle - Send The Pain Below, you'd quickly realize such a song would set off a bunch of red flags in 2022, yet this was a song played daily on the radio.
- sudosteph 4y ago
  What is considered alternative/rock these days? I followed alternative rock in the 00's, and then the indie rock scene through the early 2010s, but it seems like rock in general has dropped off significantly. I'd be happy to be wrong though. Russian post-punk (Molchat Doma) is the only "new" thing I've been familiarized with, and it does seem pretty depressing (not that I can understand the lyrics though). As for the aughts being so depressing, I'd imagine the popularity of the emo scene was a big factor in that.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Indie rock still exists, but rock music in general seems like a spent force that's been overshadowed by hip-hop, pop, and electronic music, for now. There's still plenty of alternative music, they just don't get as much radio play as they did in past decades. Plenty of those bands are still putting out new music. Interpol just released a new album, Arcade Fire did in the last few months, ditto Foals, Metric, Bloc Party. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are releasing one in September.
kokanator 4y ago
Not having life and limb threats in our day to day lives does not mean our mind will not go seeking threats. Our mind will find/create a threat to arrive at some kind of balance. And, having no way to actually to react to a 'threat' our minds will terrorize us. Though it is true the speaking of anxiety and depression has been normalized, there is a substantial non-linear spike in these maladies in our modern times that cannot be reconciled just with normality. Just take, for instance, what the 'threats' in social media are doing.[0] The saying, 'all things are relative' applies here. If you have never experienced a true threat to your life, actually continuous threat and/or actual bodily harm, threats to your food or shelter then social media might be the meanest worst thing you have ever seen and thus a true terror to you. [0] https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Haidt%20Testimony.pdf https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Haidt%20Testi...
briga 4y ago
The 50s were a sort of golden era for North America, it really did seem like opportunities were boundless for a while there. An average family could expect to own their own home and a car in the suburbs. The cities weren't as grossly over-crowded as they are now. California only had a quarter of the population it does today, just imagine how much more pleasant that must have been. There was no social media. No quick and easy access to mood-altering drugs. A culture that valued long-term committed relationships. There were no 24/7 new networks broadcasting minute-to-minute updates on the latest mass shooting or climate catastrophe. Certainly there were still issues back then, but maybe we've just made culture less happy over time. When I look at culture today it's hard for me to imagine where do we go from here.
- hericium 4y ago
  > No quick and easy access to mood-altering drugs LSD was synthetized in 1938, its psychedelic potential discovered in 1943 and it was used both by psychiatry and for spiritual/recreational purposes through the 50s and 60s until Nixon started "war on drugs".
- groby_b 4y ago
  Ask black and queer people how golden the 50's were. Or women. It was a culture that "valued" long-term relationships to the extent that they were Ok with the relationship completely destroying individuals. And it had an implicit nod to at least men seeking release value outside the relationship, as long as it was discreet. It had a large amount of mind-alterning drugs - alcohol. Barbiturates. Valium. The latter two prescribed excessively if you deviated in any way from the norm. It was OK with performing lobotomies on people to have them perform within norm. There were almost no news except what was officially approved. You'd mostly lose contact with friends who moved more than a few miles away - long distance contact through mail is hard. Housework was hard manual labor, because there were little affordable tools. (They were just starting to become normal). In terms of performing arts, it was a wasteland because the vast majority of cities didn't have the size to support art scenes. I could go on. But what I'd really like to say is: Both the picture you paint, and the one I paint, are likely overemphasizing certain characteristics. In that, we generalize way too much. Happiness is individual, not cultural. Culture is tribal, not general. And more importantly, culture is what we make of it - and so imagining where to go from here very much becomes "where do you want it to go, and what can you do about that"
vitiral 4y ago
In the Hindu mythology there is the concept of Kali, or the ultimate suffering and pain. Rather than being evil, Kali is worshiped because without her (or at least the _idea_ of her) we could not truly experience happiness. This is based on a (religious) psychological idea that to enjoy anything you must have the really terrible awfulness there in the back of your mind, as something that could spring out from the corners. Something like that anyway. Horror films and dark stories make everyday life feel more enjoyable. Or they could, if we can take things in that light.
buescher 4y ago
There's a book. It's called The Birth of Tragedy. On the one hand, Nietzsche is pretty persuasive that, basically, tragedies are the highest form of drama. So, one would expect ambitious artists to want to tell stories with realistic characters and without happy endings. (Stories with happy endings are comedies.) On the other hand, the ambition to create tragic drama, or at least attain its status, gets dumbed down and applied imitatively in "dark and gritty" takes on pop culture.
nr2x 4y ago
“why was 2007 such a good year for teenagers?” Because smart phones were about to ruin their lives.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  You mean the Great Recession was about to ruin their parents'.
uncomputation 4y ago
I agree with some other commenters; this is a lot of cherry picking. You could just as easily compare Nosferatu (1922) with Blade (1998) with Twilight (2008) and ask why culture gets happier and less serious as time goes on, “aren’t we all becoming like Brave New World???” Comparing Adam West’s Batman with today’s Batman is just lazy. They’re apples and oranges at this point: different genres, different climates (today the more “fun” stuff is Marvel), different film technology. And if we want to get into it, it’s not “depression” that’s trendy; it’s realism. 60’s Batman dealt with all the same “dark” themes as current Batman: mafia, crime, trauma and grief, etc. But the visual portrayal was different because it was a “comic book” before comic books adaptations were commonplace blockbusters. That doesn’t mean all of 1960s cinema is somehow a comic book movie. Hello: Psycho (1960), Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966).
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  To chime in about how the article is cherry picking rather than doing deeper analysis: Dark and gritty superhero deconstruction was a product of the '80s and maybe early '90s, and then the '00s had the gritty reboot/reimagining trend for TV shows and movies in general. You also had a lot of prestige drama doing gritty realism with complex, dark antihero male protagonists starting in that era, which kicked into high gear in the '10s. Sopranos to Breaking Bad. Also shows where society was the gritty complex realistic antihero. The Wire to Game of Thrones. I wouldn't say contemporary culture is any more unhappy than that era, it's just harder to read because there's no GOT type "event" series that everyone is watching right now. Maybe there will be a new cultural phenomenon, or maybe with this glut of streaming content, there won't be. (And if we look at blockbuster films, so many of them are shiny happy Disney-MCU fare, which are definitely not dark and gritty.) It just feels like right now we have a huge array of choices. When presented with that variety, it's really hard to say that it's generally more or less happy. I do wonder what will replace comic books as the dominant subgenre of pop entertainment. I was hoping we'd get a reconstruction trend with comics like Astro City or Kingdom Come getting adapted, but in writing the previous section, I realized there's no need. For every dark and gritty realistic The Boys, there's multiple Disney+ shows. Batman is a character who's inherently going to have darkness. The majority of superhero comic screen media is escapist and optimistic, and this not-study is cherry-picking.
photochemsyn 4y ago
If you go back past the 1950s-1960s TV era to the early 20th century, there's quite a bit of the dark and gritty stuff. The movie "Metropolis" (1927, Fritz Lang) is a fairly dystopian work, for example. A lot of popular writing from that era has a similar flavor. By that measure, the 50s and 60s were an unhealthy aberration, a one-sided positivity culture similar in style to fascist and communist propaganda regimes that never mentioned the negative aspects of those systems. I personally like William Gibson's take on this, from Gernsback Continuum: > "But the couple in front of me lived in it, and they frightened me. They were the children of Dialta Downes's '80s-that-wasn't; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world." > "Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them thronging the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars. It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda."
boredumb 4y ago
American pop culture has nearly transitioned entirely from entertainment into agitprop. The pervasive unhappiness is by design.
mym1990 4y ago
The Monitoring the Future graph shows a pretty good uptick in youth happiness up until 2009/2010 and then we basically see a precipitous drop ever since. I would say the initial introduction of social media was pretty awesome(as a 90s) kid. As time went on it has become a cesspool(now my adult view)...and from what I have heard, it isn't great for the younger generation. Happiness is ultimately a pretty subjective matter, no less when trying to compare across many generations.
beardyw 4y ago
And that Shakespeare - a lot of his stuff is pretty dark.
mdp2021 4y ago
Very curious coincidence, an article just appeared at OurWorldInData.org - and by very Max Roser: 'The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better - We need to see that [these three statements] are all true to see that a better world is possible' https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better Proposed example: "4.3% of children globally - 5.9mil/year - die before the age of 15; BUT: in the past it was 50%; YET: in the EU the current value is 0.45% [HENCE: progress is possible, goals are available]". ...Which is more times relevant: difficulties are increasingly topical, but complications in dealing with them are in public conscience, and an approach to make them increasingly present is explainable in more branches of said conscience.
- medvezhenok 4y ago
  While true, this likely has nothing to do with the happiness experienced in western culture. Short term happiness comes from things that release dopamine/oxytocin: (1) Drugs, (2) Sex, (3) Cuddling (4) Video games... etc Long term [personal] happiness usually comes from self-actualization (I am doing meaningful work and am competent at it) and having an upward sloping trajectory in life (i.e. things were worse for me before, but they're getting better and they will be better in the future). It's affected by expectations (i.e. did things turn out better than I expected). It can also come from having meaningful relationships with other people. Modern society: (1) Sets high expectations of what is achievable which sets people up for disappointment for what they will actually achieve (2) Reduces in person connections due to a lot of work being more solitary/computer work and people interacting with the physical world less (3) Does not highlight the "bright future" of tomorrow (and specifically how things will improve if you live in a western nation) (4) Lots of people end up choosing whether to do meaningful work or get paid well - meaningful work rarely pays appropriately (teachers, nurses, etc. even things like nuclear engineers being paid less than frontend software developers for ex.). Partly this is due to bad incentives and cost of capital that is too low (i.e. software/finance has gotten disproportionately "fat" relative to it's contribution to social well-being. Higher interest/hurdle rates would solve some of this)
chmod600 4y ago
The real world is a lot less dramatic than it was in the past in many ways. A movie about chasing the love of your life down at the airport right before they board would be solved with a text message and some emoji instead. A movie about everyone going off to war would instead be droning some people from far away. Even getting droned is less dramatic... no chase or fight or glory, just one second there and the next second not. The war in Ukraine would be implausible as a modern movie (An evil villian attacks with tanks and blows up schools to rebuild some mythical empire? Uh, sounds dated and cliche.) So drama in movies is now mostly due to people making unnecessary drama. And has anyone else noticed that political dramas are almost always about what people say and never what they do?
medvezhenok 4y ago
Short term happiness comes from things that release dopamine/oxytocin: (1) Drugs, (2) Sex, (3) Cuddling (4) Video games... etc Long term [personal] happiness usually comes from self-actualization (I am doing meaningful work and am competent at it) and having an upward sloping trajectory in life (i.e. things were worse for me before, but they're getting better and they will be better in the future). It's affected by expectations (i.e. did things turn out better than I expected). It can also come from having meaningful relationships with other people. Modern society: (1) Sets high expectations of what is achievable which sets people up for disappointment for what they will actually achieve (2) Reduces in person connections due to a lot of work being more solitary/computer work and people interacting with the physical world less (3) Does not highlight the "bright future" of tomorrow (and specifically how things will improve if you live in a western nation) (4) Lots of people end up choosing whether to do meaningful work or get paid well - meaningful work rarely pays appropriately (teachers, nurses, etc. even things like nuclear engineers being paid less than frontend software developers for ex.). Partly this is due to bad incentives and cost of capital that is too low (i.e. software/finance has gotten disproportionately "fat" relative to it's contribution to social well-being. Higher interest/hurdle rates would solve some of this)
smitty1e 4y ago
There is joy in wisdom and truth. But Postmodernism tells us there is no truth, and that PoMo folly has corroded the culture thoroughly. Reject folly and pursue wisdom. Proverbs 5:18 - Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth.

47 points by hn-0001 4y ago

Missing the obvious hypothesis: people in the past had real problems, like living through a war (by fighting in it or having it fought where you were, not by seeing it on TV), or the Great Depression, or other real, actual threats to life and limb. Something happy was a counterbalance. Now, if you're a member of a pampered elite able to work at movies/TV/other mass media for a living (for each one who can, many try and cannot finagle their way into that industry for lack of connections), you make it "dark and gritty" to cover up for the fact that you don't really know anything about real suffering.

bowtie109 4y ago
War breeds connection and community. Many of the greatest minds in the world came from these wars. Hemingway, St. Francis of Assisi, Konstantin Batyushkov, Whitman are some who are top of mind for me today. What other great thinkers were breed in war environments?
- throwaway_4ever 4y ago
  Orwell and Wittgenstein
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    How much of Wittgenstein is importantly a consequence of the war?
superchroma 4y ago
or perhaps it's because the world is falling apart and we're on a solid trajectory to make it worse, and unlike a war, it's not something easy to bounce back from?
- gedy 4y ago
  Sounds like a self fulfilling prophecy though.
- henriquez 4y ago
  It’s probably because car headlights and grilles become squintier and angrier every year. People drive too much and everywhere they look is angry car faces.
  - ginko 4y ago
    We need more Twingos.
  - superchroma 4y ago
    oh, yeah, that's what it was.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    Is'a "good" idea: it implies a proposal of a model according to which people absorb acritically more and more, subliminally, iow process the input stimula less and less. The poster points an accusing finger against passivity. Bravo.
- juanci_to 4y ago
  Let's be fair, humanity has been saying that everything is falling apart for centuries. There's in the front page a post that's named: "A brief history of nobody wants to work anymore"¹ that shows registers from as early as 1894 of media saying "Nobody wants to work anymore". Even the classic "Kids these days" can be tracked back to 624 BCE². Socrates said too something along those lines: «The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.» [1](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32161426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32161426) [2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_these_days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_these_days)
spaetzleesser 4y ago
I agree. My dad had to fight in WW2 at 17, got shot twice, almost lost a leg, had to leave their home with nothing. My mom spent a lot of nights in a bunker while bombs were falling, they had to watch for fighter planes shooting at them while working on the fields during the day. The generations that grew up in the west after WW2 have seen nothing in comparison. I think people like the idea of overcoming suffering so these days they exaggerate a lot of things.
corrral 4y ago
I frankly feel kinda great in a crisis. The more serious, the better. All the dumbest parts of my brain shut down and I do what has to be done. Squeamishness, fear, anxiety, second-guessing, rumination—all shoved in a closet and the door slammed. Gotta be an acute crisis I can do something about, though. "Climate change" or whatever doesn't trigger that state. If not for being pretty happy with being alive and having a body that's not broken and logically knowing how fast those things can change, I'd probably be really into extreme sports.
- bowtie109 4y ago
  Does climate change cause you anxiety? I feel the helplessness of it also leads to feelings of hopelessness (sadnees cynical).
  - corrral 4y ago
    Almost everything in the news is either gonna trigger anxiety or nothing. Outrage, maybe. That's about it. Farther away from local news, the more true that is. Luckily, keeping up with that stuff day-to-day or even week-to-week is pretty pointless, so easy to avoid. The knowledge of all those problems just goes on the pile of shit that I can't possibly deal with, so just have to try not to think about, along with things like existential dread, the fact that my living the way I do (so, like a normal developed-world person) is probably indirectly causing misery for someone somewhere (The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is, like much good speculative fiction, not about a fictional place but rather our current world), my hunch that cosmic horror probably comes about as close to capturing the nature of our existence and place in the universe as anything does (if only metaphorically), all that and the rest of the unhelpful crap that's probably true and real but also not especially actionable short of "kill yourself, or else devote yourself body and soul monk-/batman-like to some cause all the time every day, probably to no real effect except personal satisfaction".
    - soco 4y ago
      That's exactly the point of those news: to trigger the viewer. That's all they care about. Now that we pile up on those anxieties or whatever, not the news channel's problem.
Alex3917 4y ago
> people in the past had real problems, like living through a war [...] Something happy was a counterbalance I would posit the opposite, that gritty content resonates more each year due to American's lifestyles being less subsidized by those abroad.
uncomputation 4y ago
It’s not so much they were “real” problems, as they were acute problems. Acute problems - bad guy with gun - are easier to portray on screen than chronic problems. Anyone who thinks we don’t have real problems anymore and this is the end of history has their head in the sand. But it’s more difficult to visualize. How do you make a war flick out of climate change? How do you make an action thriller from wealth inequality? Even Covid, I mean I don’t know of any influential movies inspired by the Spanish Flu. Some “dark and gritty” does suffer from a true lack of maturity on the point of the screenwriter - Zac Snyder does not have the writing talent to support his darkness without it seeming cheesy and silly - but a lot of it - Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight - very much does touch on the real suffering of the modern era: terrorism, surveillance, class divisions.
mikkergp 4y ago
While I think there is correlation here, I think a better arugment would be for the cyclical nature of art. When society goes one way art may go another. (or at times the same way, I doubt it's a 180 relationship) > Now, if you're a member of a pampered elite able to work at movies/TV/other mass media for a living Hasn't this always been true? I can't imagine a time in history when plays/literature/music has been more accessible to the working class.
unmole 4y ago
We are the fortunate ones Who've never faced opression's gun We are the fortunate ones Imitations of rebellion We acted it out We wear the colors Confined by the things we own We're not without We're like each other Pretending we're here alone https://youtu.be/OCy5461BtTg https://youtu.be/OCy5461BtTg

bowtie109 4y ago

Watching television / using the computer isolates us from real meaningful human connections and causes depression / cynical world view. It is often hard to have meaning or purpose in the world and hard to interact with others in a real life meaningful way. As the internet and media continue to be front and center in our life depression and sadness are inevitable.

deleted 4y ago

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mojuba 4y ago

Isn't it because depression and anxiety were taboo topics then? I think these topics have been normalized only relatively recently. Even in the 1980s none of the superstars would come out and admit they are suffering depression (Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson come to mind). Or a more recent "coming out" by Sinead O'Connor that she's in deep depression was a complete shock to me (and to many). I couldn't even watch her video in full, was so painful to see her saying those things. So I think it's more about the "coming out" and normalization of the darker side of human nature, which was always there of course, just wasn't OK to talk about out loud, at work or on stage and especially if you are a celebrity.

danjoredd 4y ago
True, but I also think the romanticization of depression is a factor as well. Just look at "Doomer" culture on the internet, or "black pill" types. Watch one of those videos on youtube, and all of a sudden you get a deluge of those types of vids. That is what I fear for future generations. When depression is seen as an aesthetic, some people(mostly teenagers) try to identify with it and accidentally end up depressed for real. For most people, it is more complex than that. However this is a trend that I worry about.
- vitiral 4y ago
  You can (and IMO should) disable youtube suggestions based on your past browsing. You can also have it only store 3 months worth of tracking (in case you ever turn the suggestions back on). It definitely lowers the quality of the suggestions... but that's kind of the point.
  - godshatter 4y ago
    I take it one step farther and only watch YouTube in a private session and don't log in. When the recommendations get strange, I close the window and open a new one.
    - vitiral 4y ago

cafard 4y ago

Do you mean, Why can't we have happy writers like Samuel Beckett?

kwertyoowiyop 4y ago

Older culture was happier? Check out some 1970s movies and music.

sudosteph 4y ago

I'm of the opinion that most of the "dark, gritty" stuff we keep seeing in media just boils down to standard trend-chasing and market pressures to continue to use existing IPs. The cheesy, feel-good stuff from the 60s has already been done, so the darker stuff, especially when it's a darker take on those same characters, is still somewhat subversive to most viewers. When artists can't get real novelty, subversiveness is at least still generally respectable. Eventually, as the audience gets tired of this and it gets done to death, it will shift. Maybe not to the happy-go-lucky stuff, but I think surreal and absurdist humor is still fertile ground (see shows like: Nathan For You, The Review, Informercials, Corporate, American Vandal), and could be another future avenue for continuing to exploit existing IPs. As for the general happiness of the population decreasing, I think that's mostly unrelated to the media trend. Economic troubles (low wages, housing unaffordability), societal strife, and social media all seem like obvious causes. However, Movies and TV are still generally viewed as an escape to most people, so while they reflect greater trends to some degree, I don't think they're as tied to it as the author may expect.

vitiral 4y ago
A very measured take. I was personally of the opinion it was because we don't experience "real" problems today (mentioned by another commenter), but this is at least an equally plausible explanation for the media trends. Well done!

tomgp 4y ago

Feels like theres some cherry picking going on. eg whilst “the power rock of the ‘80s is… incredibly cheerful’ the 80s also played host to Joy Division and Suicidal Tendencies neither of whom exude incredible cheer (though the angst is expressed very differently). Similarly the cheerful rock’n’roll of the 1950s might be contrasted with the mournful blues and jazz which spawned it. Or what about the 50s novels of Richard Yates pretty bleak stuff compared with the life affirming tone of best selling contemporary novelists such as John Green and Becky Chambers.

mikkergp 4y ago
The 80's also had some of the darkest horror and dystopian sci-fi that we've seen in popular culture. Interesting in the article he never mentions Seinfeld or Peanuts as those were turning points into more realistic or less sympathetic characters for their genres (tv comedy and comics respectively) edit as I'm still reading: "The one note today’s entertainment strikes is the depressive tone" is an eye roll level of reductionism. I'd be curious how the reduction in influence in religion has played a roll as well. The FCC rules on what you could say in TV/radio used to be downright archaic, and I think religion espouses this idea that good people are happy and everything turns out ok in the end because god.
mdp2021 4y ago
Painting phenomena with gross partial strokes is very easy if one myopically does not consider roots: if you follow the structure of paths behind the outcomes there are different expressions (modulated by personalities) of recognizable instances, more significant than "a mood".

kstenerud 4y ago

People looked happy in movies and TV because that's simply how it was done. One of the things that made shows like The Simpsons and Married With Children so revolutionary was their rebellion against this artificial happiness, peeling away the veneer to show the dysfunction that was always lurking beneath. This "peeling away of layers" defined much of the 90s, and eventually led to a kind of one-upmanship to see who could be the grittiest, the most provocative, the most extreme. There's a similar revolution brewing at the moment in Japanese TV with the release of shows like The Naked Director.

vehemenz 4y ago

I don't know. Even if this anecdotal narrative has any merit, I'd still take doom-and-gloom over the recent infantile direction of popular music and film. Thankfully there's some decent TV still.

nano9 4y ago

Not sure if this is a frame of reference effect, or maybe just a local minimum, but alternative/rock music from the early 00s was extremely depressing compared to the modern stuff (which seems to have settled into an abstract/esoteric niche). I have sometimes wondered why it seemed like depression was "cool" in the late 90s/early 00s. For instance, if you look up the lyrics for Chevelle - Send The Pain Below, you'd quickly realize such a song would set off a bunch of red flags in 2022, yet this was a song played daily on the radio.

sudosteph 4y ago
What is considered alternative/rock these days? I followed alternative rock in the 00's, and then the indie rock scene through the early 2010s, but it seems like rock in general has dropped off significantly. I'd be happy to be wrong though. Russian post-punk (Molchat Doma) is the only "new" thing I've been familiarized with, and it does seem pretty depressing (not that I can understand the lyrics though). As for the aughts being so depressing, I'd imagine the popularity of the emo scene was a big factor in that.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Indie rock still exists, but rock music in general seems like a spent force that's been overshadowed by hip-hop, pop, and electronic music, for now. There's still plenty of alternative music, they just don't get as much radio play as they did in past decades. Plenty of those bands are still putting out new music. Interpol just released a new album, Arcade Fire did in the last few months, ditto Foals, Metric, Bloc Party. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are releasing one in September.

kokanator 4y ago

Not having life and limb threats in our day to day lives does not mean our mind will not go seeking threats. Our mind will find/create a threat to arrive at some kind of balance. And, having no way to actually to react to a 'threat' our minds will terrorize us. Though it is true the speaking of anxiety and depression has been normalized, there is a substantial non-linear spike in these maladies in our modern times that cannot be reconciled just with normality. Just take, for instance, what the 'threats' in social media are doing.[0] The saying, 'all things are relative' applies here. If you have never experienced a true threat to your life, actually continuous threat and/or actual bodily harm, threats to your food or shelter then social media might be the meanest worst thing you have ever seen and thus a true terror to you. [0] https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Haidt%20Testimony.pdf https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Haidt%20Testi...

briga 4y ago

The 50s were a sort of golden era for North America, it really did seem like opportunities were boundless for a while there. An average family could expect to own their own home and a car in the suburbs. The cities weren't as grossly over-crowded as they are now. California only had a quarter of the population it does today, just imagine how much more pleasant that must have been. There was no social media. No quick and easy access to mood-altering drugs. A culture that valued long-term committed relationships. There were no 24/7 new networks broadcasting minute-to-minute updates on the latest mass shooting or climate catastrophe. Certainly there were still issues back then, but maybe we've just made culture less happy over time. When I look at culture today it's hard for me to imagine where do we go from here.

hericium 4y ago
> No quick and easy access to mood-altering drugs LSD was synthetized in 1938, its psychedelic potential discovered in 1943 and it was used both by psychiatry and for spiritual/recreational purposes through the 50s and 60s until Nixon started "war on drugs".
groby_b 4y ago
Ask black and queer people how golden the 50's were. Or women. It was a culture that "valued" long-term relationships to the extent that they were Ok with the relationship completely destroying individuals. And it had an implicit nod to at least men seeking release value outside the relationship, as long as it was discreet. It had a large amount of mind-alterning drugs - alcohol. Barbiturates. Valium. The latter two prescribed excessively if you deviated in any way from the norm. It was OK with performing lobotomies on people to have them perform within norm. There were almost no news except what was officially approved. You'd mostly lose contact with friends who moved more than a few miles away - long distance contact through mail is hard. Housework was hard manual labor, because there were little affordable tools. (They were just starting to become normal). In terms of performing arts, it was a wasteland because the vast majority of cities didn't have the size to support art scenes. I could go on. But what I'd really like to say is: Both the picture you paint, and the one I paint, are likely overemphasizing certain characteristics. In that, we generalize way too much. Happiness is individual, not cultural. Culture is tribal, not general. And more importantly, culture is what we make of it - and so imagining where to go from here very much becomes "where do you want it to go, and what can you do about that"

vitiral 4y ago

In the Hindu mythology there is the concept of Kali, or the ultimate suffering and pain. Rather than being evil, Kali is worshiped because without her (or at least the _idea_ of her) we could not truly experience happiness. This is based on a (religious) psychological idea that to enjoy anything you must have the really terrible awfulness there in the back of your mind, as something that could spring out from the corners. Something like that anyway. Horror films and dark stories make everyday life feel more enjoyable. Or they could, if we can take things in that light.

buescher 4y ago

There's a book. It's called The Birth of Tragedy. On the one hand, Nietzsche is pretty persuasive that, basically, tragedies are the highest form of drama. So, one would expect ambitious artists to want to tell stories with realistic characters and without happy endings. (Stories with happy endings are comedies.) On the other hand, the ambition to create tragic drama, or at least attain its status, gets dumbed down and applied imitatively in "dark and gritty" takes on pop culture.

nr2x 4y ago

“why was 2007 such a good year for teenagers?” Because smart phones were about to ruin their lives.

Apocryphon 4y ago
You mean the Great Recession was about to ruin their parents'.

uncomputation 4y ago

I agree with some other commenters; this is a lot of cherry picking. You could just as easily compare Nosferatu (1922) with Blade (1998) with Twilight (2008) and ask why culture gets happier and less serious as time goes on, “aren’t we all becoming like Brave New World???” Comparing Adam West’s Batman with today’s Batman is just lazy. They’re apples and oranges at this point: different genres, different climates (today the more “fun” stuff is Marvel), different film technology. And if we want to get into it, it’s not “depression” that’s trendy; it’s realism. 60’s Batman dealt with all the same “dark” themes as current Batman: mafia, crime, trauma and grief, etc. But the visual portrayal was different because it was a “comic book” before comic books adaptations were commonplace blockbusters. That doesn’t mean all of 1960s cinema is somehow a comic book movie. Hello: Psycho (1960), Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966).

Apocryphon 4y ago
To chime in about how the article is cherry picking rather than doing deeper analysis: Dark and gritty superhero deconstruction was a product of the '80s and maybe early '90s, and then the '00s had the gritty reboot/reimagining trend for TV shows and movies in general. You also had a lot of prestige drama doing gritty realism with complex, dark antihero male protagonists starting in that era, which kicked into high gear in the '10s. Sopranos to Breaking Bad. Also shows where society was the gritty complex realistic antihero. The Wire to Game of Thrones. I wouldn't say contemporary culture is any more unhappy than that era, it's just harder to read because there's no GOT type "event" series that everyone is watching right now. Maybe there will be a new cultural phenomenon, or maybe with this glut of streaming content, there won't be. (And if we look at blockbuster films, so many of them are shiny happy Disney-MCU fare, which are definitely not dark and gritty.) It just feels like right now we have a huge array of choices. When presented with that variety, it's really hard to say that it's generally more or less happy. I do wonder what will replace comic books as the dominant subgenre of pop entertainment. I was hoping we'd get a reconstruction trend with comics like Astro City or Kingdom Come getting adapted, but in writing the previous section, I realized there's no need. For every dark and gritty realistic The Boys, there's multiple Disney+ shows. Batman is a character who's inherently going to have darkness. The majority of superhero comic screen media is escapist and optimistic, and this not-study is cherry-picking.

photochemsyn 4y ago

If you go back past the 1950s-1960s TV era to the early 20th century, there's quite a bit of the dark and gritty stuff. The movie "Metropolis" (1927, Fritz Lang) is a fairly dystopian work, for example. A lot of popular writing from that era has a similar flavor. By that measure, the 50s and 60s were an unhealthy aberration, a one-sided positivity culture similar in style to fascist and communist propaganda regimes that never mentioned the negative aspects of those systems. I personally like William Gibson's take on this, from Gernsback Continuum: > "But the couple in front of me lived in it, and they frightened me. They were the children of Dialta Downes's '80s-that-wasn't; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world." > "Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them thronging the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars. It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda."

boredumb 4y ago

American pop culture has nearly transitioned entirely from entertainment into agitprop. The pervasive unhappiness is by design.

mym1990 4y ago

The Monitoring the Future graph shows a pretty good uptick in youth happiness up until 2009/2010 and then we basically see a precipitous drop ever since. I would say the initial introduction of social media was pretty awesome(as a 90s) kid. As time went on it has become a cesspool(now my adult view)...and from what I have heard, it isn't great for the younger generation. Happiness is ultimately a pretty subjective matter, no less when trying to compare across many generations.

beardyw 4y ago

And that Shakespeare - a lot of his stuff is pretty dark.

mdp2021 4y ago

Very curious coincidence, an article just appeared at OurWorldInData.org - and by very Max Roser: 'The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better - We need to see that [these three statements] are all true to see that a better world is possible' https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better Proposed example: "4.3% of children globally - 5.9mil/year - die before the age of 15; BUT: in the past it was 50%; YET: in the EU the current value is 0.45% [HENCE: progress is possible, goals are available]". ...Which is more times relevant: difficulties are increasingly topical, but complications in dealing with them are in public conscience, and an approach to make them increasingly present is explainable in more branches of said conscience.

medvezhenok 4y ago
While true, this likely has nothing to do with the happiness experienced in western culture. Short term happiness comes from things that release dopamine/oxytocin: (1) Drugs, (2) Sex, (3) Cuddling (4) Video games... etc Long term [personal] happiness usually comes from self-actualization (I am doing meaningful work and am competent at it) and having an upward sloping trajectory in life (i.e. things were worse for me before, but they're getting better and they will be better in the future). It's affected by expectations (i.e. did things turn out better than I expected). It can also come from having meaningful relationships with other people. Modern society: (1) Sets high expectations of what is achievable which sets people up for disappointment for what they will actually achieve (2) Reduces in person connections due to a lot of work being more solitary/computer work and people interacting with the physical world less (3) Does not highlight the "bright future" of tomorrow (and specifically how things will improve if you live in a western nation) (4) Lots of people end up choosing whether to do meaningful work or get paid well - meaningful work rarely pays appropriately (teachers, nurses, etc. even things like nuclear engineers being paid less than frontend software developers for ex.). Partly this is due to bad incentives and cost of capital that is too low (i.e. software/finance has gotten disproportionately "fat" relative to it's contribution to social well-being. Higher interest/hurdle rates would solve some of this)

chmod600 4y ago

The real world is a lot less dramatic than it was in the past in many ways. A movie about chasing the love of your life down at the airport right before they board would be solved with a text message and some emoji instead. A movie about everyone going off to war would instead be droning some people from far away. Even getting droned is less dramatic... no chase or fight or glory, just one second there and the next second not. The war in Ukraine would be implausible as a modern movie (An evil villian attacks with tanks and blows up schools to rebuild some mythical empire? Uh, sounds dated and cliche.) So drama in movies is now mostly due to people making unnecessary drama. And has anyone else noticed that political dramas are almost always about what people say and never what they do?

medvezhenok 4y ago

Short term happiness comes from things that release dopamine/oxytocin: (1) Drugs, (2) Sex, (3) Cuddling (4) Video games... etc Long term [personal] happiness usually comes from self-actualization (I am doing meaningful work and am competent at it) and having an upward sloping trajectory in life (i.e. things were worse for me before, but they're getting better and they will be better in the future). It's affected by expectations (i.e. did things turn out better than I expected). It can also come from having meaningful relationships with other people. Modern society: (1) Sets high expectations of what is achievable which sets people up for disappointment for what they will actually achieve (2) Reduces in person connections due to a lot of work being more solitary/computer work and people interacting with the physical world less (3) Does not highlight the "bright future" of tomorrow (and specifically how things will improve if you live in a western nation) (4) Lots of people end up choosing whether to do meaningful work or get paid well - meaningful work rarely pays appropriately (teachers, nurses, etc. even things like nuclear engineers being paid less than frontend software developers for ex.). Partly this is due to bad incentives and cost of capital that is too low (i.e. software/finance has gotten disproportionately "fat" relative to it's contribution to social well-being. Higher interest/hurdle rates would solve some of this)

smitty1e 4y ago

There is joy in wisdom and truth. But Postmodernism tells us there is no truth, and that PoMo folly has corroded the culture thoroughly. Reject folly and pursue wisdom. Proverbs 5:18 - Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth.