5 ms·
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 se
by 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 agoWar 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 agoOrwell and Wittgenstein
- mdp2021 4y agoHow much of Wittgenstein is importantly a consequence of the war?
- superchroma 4y agoor 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 agoSounds like a self fulfilling prophecy though.
- henriquez 4y agoIt’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 agoWe need more Twingos.
- superchroma 4y agooh, yeah, that's what it was.
- mdp2021 4y agoIs'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 agoLet'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)
- superchroma 4y agoWell, we've never had microplastics inside literally everything before, and I'm not too thrilled about it, and forever chemicals aren't too flash either. We get a pass for asbestos because the earth made it (thanks for nothing, gaia), and radiation because it goes away, but we've really taken the cake for worst idea with these things.
- InitialLastName 4y agoUsing lead everywhere well after we knew it was causing major damage was a pretty bad idea.
- mdp2021 4y agoYou are forgetting a very important thing: the ever-increasing power of misplaced technology - once upon a time ability for damage equaled to a rock or a stick, today... The "great responsibility" that should have accompanied the "great power" is dwarfed. Wisdom should needingly¹ increase more than power - of course this is not how things go. (¹I cannot find the term for the modality: not "deontically", not "absiologically"... The idea is "X, or you are in trouble".) So, "in the times of yore, civilization was falling apart". Today, it is with boosted damages.
- ASalazarMX 4y agoPeople will always find a way to feel pity for themselves, that absolves them of personal responsibility, and maybe attract some sympathy. Depression and sadness as a form of entertainment is very old. I wouldn't dare deny that many parts of the world are slowly approaching a tipping point, but even if the world was perfect, people will invent their own struggles. Seems like we instinctively crave challenges, and emotional challenges are the low hanging fruit.
- otikik 4y agoI bounced back from 3 wars yesterday, no sweat.
- spaetzleesser 4y agoI 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 agoI 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 agoDoes climate change cause you anxiety? I feel the helplessness of it also leads to feelings of hopelessness (sadnees cynical).
- corrral 4y agoAlmost 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 agoThat'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 agoIt’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 agoWhile 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 agoWe 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