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> If you missed them, you had to wait a year. This is literally the intro section to Chuck Klosterman's Nineties - about the number of people who watched Seinf

by gopalv 4y ago

> If you missed them, you had to wait a year. This is literally the intro section to Chuck Klosterman's Nineties - about the number of people who watched Seinfeld and those that missed it, just missed it. > There's a quality bestowed through scarcity. There's a depth to scarcity, but your kids are going to watch way more things growing up than you did and you have no idea what that means for them. I get that you aren't able to pass on that "value the thing you hold, not the two you can get later" sort of commitment to a single thing. But that's valuing the only true scarce thing left in my life at least - my time and attention. I remember feeling the "post-scarcity" thing going to a library for the first time in the US. I used to buy books and read them, before I came to the US. Each book was a hard choice on whether to spend money on it or buy something else. I now decide to read through a book based on whether I want to spend the time, not the money. Unless I'm going to be immortal, there's no fixing that scarcity (and I get how young people/kids don't get that part at all - their life is endless from where they are). Maybe do a little better so that my 70s aren't spent in a bed, but in a park outdoors reading.

Waterluvian 4y ago
I really appreciate your response because it argues with my point and yet resonates with me. I think there's truth to what you're saying. Perhaps that "tradition" I'm seeking is, in a way, obsolete, and my kids are faced with an entirely different (and maybe better) problem: what to spend their time on? I'll add one thing this made me think of: when I was a kid, my family computer and Game Boy had a fixed number of games. Getting a new game was a big deal. I took it seriously and I scraped the fun out of every game thoroughly. Once I got to college and got some money, I ended up with the "I have ten thousand Steam games and I don't feel motivated to stick with any of them" problem. Not totally sure it's related, but I thought of that.
- blooalien 4y ago
  > … "I ended up with the "I have ten thousand Steam games and I don't feel motivated to stick with any of them" problem." For my own personal instance of that exact problem, I've chosen to install a limited number of games at a time which fit into my current set of interests in gaming, and choose from among those when I feel like playing a game, until each has been thoroughly explored and enjoyed to it's fullest before uninstalling that one or two specific fully-explored game(s) to replace with another. Works for me … YMMV.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  My younger sibling and I are quite far apart age wise and we grew up on other sides of this divide. When I grew up, families would buy VHS tapes for kids or record shows and kids were known to watch the same shows over and over again. Everyone in my cohort has memories of watching that one movie or that one show so many times that their parents were utterly sick of it (and of messing up a recording of the last episode of their favorite show.) My sibling grew up in the age of rental DVDs and Youtube and the idea of running out of content to them was laughable. But as children we were both limited by our mental development, time, and attention spans. My sibling just watched the same Youtube video over and over just like I watched the same VHS tape over and over again. As much as material conditions change, humans tend to stay the same.

by gopalv 4y ago

Waterluvian 4y ago

I really appreciate your response because it argues with my point and yet resonates with me. I think there's truth to what you're saying. Perhaps that "tradition" I'm seeking is, in a way, obsolete, and my kids are faced with an entirely different (and maybe better) problem: what to spend their time on? I'll add one thing this made me think of: when I was a kid, my family computer and Game Boy had a fixed number of games. Getting a new game was a big deal. I took it seriously and I scraped the fun out of every game thoroughly. Once I got to college and got some money, I ended up with the "I have ten thousand Steam games and I don't feel motivated to stick with any of them" problem. Not totally sure it's related, but I thought of that.

blooalien 4y ago
> … "I ended up with the "I have ten thousand Steam games and I don't feel motivated to stick with any of them" problem." For my own personal instance of that exact problem, I've chosen to install a limited number of games at a time which fit into my current set of interests in gaming, and choose from among those when I feel like playing a game, until each has been thoroughly explored and enjoyed to it's fullest before uninstalling that one or two specific fully-explored game(s) to replace with another. Works for me … YMMV.
Karrot_Kream 4y ago
My younger sibling and I are quite far apart age wise and we grew up on other sides of this divide. When I grew up, families would buy VHS tapes for kids or record shows and kids were known to watch the same shows over and over again. Everyone in my cohort has memories of watching that one movie or that one show so many times that their parents were utterly sick of it (and of messing up a recording of the last episode of their favorite show.) My sibling grew up in the age of rental DVDs and Youtube and the idea of running out of content to them was laughable. But as children we were both limited by our mental development, time, and attention spans. My sibling just watched the same Youtube video over and over just like I watched the same VHS tape over and over again. As much as material conditions change, humans tend to stay the same.