18 ms·

I think you're way off base. It's called rosy retrospection, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection.

by noud 4y ago

I think you're way off base. It's called rosy retrospection, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection. As you already mentioned in your comments, you're judging the past disproportionately more positive that the present. If you really want to know if everything is declining, try measure it everyday for the next five years. For example, every day, rate your personal well being, track how (un)happy you are with the current software, how much you pay to your landlords and subscriptions, how many mistakes the police makes, the weather, everything, ... After 5 years you'll have a good idea if things actually got worse than they are now. Sure, some things will get worse, but definitely not everything, and some things will even be better than they are now.

counttheforks 4y ago
[flagged]
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  It's quite possible not to be able to answer "did x happen" but to still be interested in the question "will x happen".
- guerrilla 4y ago
  People don't usually get rate limited for opinions. It's usually for breaking the rules, personal attacks, intentionally trolling and that kind of stuff. If you're not doing any of that or are willing to change you could email him and work it out.
  - mdkdkso 4y ago
    [flagged]
s1gnp0st 4y ago
When faced with a sinusoid, humans seem to extrapolate exponentials in both directions. Take the business cycle, where the good times appear to approach a "new paradigm!" just before a large correction, and the bad times seem like they'll never end.
- gallopingcomp 4y ago
  Exactly this, and this is a general pattern. This is reminiscent of my previous struggles with cyclothymia[1], for example. Furthermore, the perception of impending calamity was contributing to the stress and worsened the symptoms further. (I wonder if there is an analogy to be drawn here as well, but I suspect this part is much less generalizable.) At the same time, it makes sense for people to have heightened awareness of "the bad times": each cycle represents added stress to the system, and with a heightened probability of calamity (eg. becoming insolvent / suffering a mental health emergency). [1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17788-cyclothymia https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17788-cycloth...
- DasCorCor 4y ago
  The business cycle is not a sinusoid. It’s a fractal. It’s chaotic and oddly correlated. Also, sinusoids are exponentials. ;)
  - pineaux 4y ago
    Oh! could you elaborate on this? To me even the name "business cycle" hints towards a cyclical/periodical movement. Sinusoids are not exponentials, sinusoids are periodical. They seem exponential for a short while though. The growthfactor also declines at some point. Could you elaborate on why you think its fractal?
    - aoki 4y ago
      It's a joke, sinusoids are sums of exponentials when you're talking about complex functions [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_formula#Relationship_to_trigonometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_formula#Relationship...
Beaver117 4y ago
[flagged]
- mouse_ 4y ago
  [flagged]
- dinkleberg 4y ago
  You need to read up on the definition of gaslighting. That is a nasty accusation and inaccurate.
  - AnonCoward42 4y ago
    Telling people that the reality is not what they see and they imagine things, is - so to speak - the definition of gaslighting. Gaslighting might be hyperbole and surely I made it a bit more pointed, however I see how his post can be seen as gaslighting.
    - operatingthetan 4y ago
      Gaslighting by definition requires ill intent or manipulation and you are conveniently ignoring that. In your version pretty much any internet disagreement is gaslighting.
      - AnonCoward42 4y ago
        > Gaslighting by definition requires ill intent or manipulation and you are conveniently ignoring that. You cannot determine or know ill intent, so it's not really helpful as a property. > In your version pretty much any internet disagreement is gaslighting. Disagreement alone does not suffice. You need to tell the other person that what they see is not real and/or that they imagine things. But as I said, it's a bit exaggerated, however it's not so farfetched either.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
somethoughts 4y ago
This is just personal but anytime I feel similar to the OP, I watch something by Hans Rosling [1] or Anna Rosling [2]. Although 10 and 5 years old respectively, I feel the general sentiment is still true - that human progress is slow, in the background and might be ebbing and flowing in your specific sub-population. And when compared to the present, media narrative driven present its hard to see the improvements happening across the global population. It helps me put stuff in perspective - of course mileage may var (and maybe it's just helping me delude myself into getting out a funk but it works!). [1] Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo [2] See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income - Anna Rosling Rönnlund https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw
- ignoramous 4y ago
  Reminds me of this tweet by Derek Thompson (writer at The Atlantic): In 2022, we: - Reversed organ death in pigs - Made the first embryo from stem cells - Made a pan-influenza vaccine - Saw the beginning of time - Got best-ever results from cancer & obesity therapy trials - Maybe cracked the case of multiple sclerosis From: https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1600864770751860737 https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1600864770751860737 (https://archive.is/pi95L https://archive.is/pi95L)
  - mouse_ 4y ago
    Yeah and we developed the most efficient graphene nanotube batteries that never degrade!! Sorry, I'm not buying it anymore. More than likely, none of that is going to help me or anyone I know from struggling just a little more each year.
    - bboygravity 4y ago
      This makes 0 sense to me.
      - lbotos 4y ago
bmitc 4y ago
Do you have some data that says this is off base besides some general Wikipedia concept? The OP reported direct observations.
- roland35 4y ago
  Direct observations? It seemed like anecdotes to me! Crime can certainly increase in some areas but I think overall we are down from decades ago
- treis 4y ago
  >Seems like everything is subscription model and you have to pay N times to access something thats only worth 1-3x . Eg: I Netflix for a couple hours a month. At the price for 4k access I can almost go out to a theatre. Video games are all trending to subscription models. I just learned the other day that the PS4 games I got with my subcription to PSN all are locked because I stopped subscribing (nearly 50 games) . So I paid them like $125 for access to these games for 24 months, and now I cannot play any of them? At least I still own NES/SNES/N64 Game cartridges that will never lock me out This one is wrong. If this were the SNES era to play 50 games the best you could do is rent for $3 to play for a couple nights. That's $150 (more like $300 in today's dollars) which is more than they paid for unlimited access to the games. To match that they'd have not much choice other than retail for $50 a pop, $2,500 for all of them, or $5,000 in today's dollars. Used for maybe half that with effort. HBO was more expensive when it launched in the 80s and that doesn't count the base cable subscription fee. I pay much less for the 2-3 streaming services that I use than my parents paid for cable when I was growing up. That alone is undeniably better. Plus you can do things like buy any Disney DVD used for $2 pop plus a flat $3 shipping on ebay. No way that happens in the VCR days. Not to mention that used DVD players are practically free vs a couple hundred for a vcr player.
  - maerF0x0 4y ago
    Interesting points. I do remember FF3 selling for nearly $100 Canadian. I guess I feel shafted paying $5 a month to get b list games for only so long as I keep paying $5 a month in perpetuity. The eventual sum of this is approaching infinity or something like 1500-2000 for my remaining life expectancy. Versus on steam you can sometimes buy great games for $10-20, albeit your betting steam will exist in the future to distribute the game to you.
wesapien 4y ago
This reminds of a classic Late Night with Conan O'Brien episode when Louis C.K. was the guest. He is very right. We adopt to the new normal so fast. We need more people feeling gratitude. It is tough since modernity is focused on consumption.
- wesapien 4y ago
  Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U
  - tome 4y ago
    The few minutes before the clip starts were great too, but sadly I've never been able to find them since I first watched them.
zackees 4y ago
[dead]
dcminter 4y ago
Also known as "G.O.D." ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_old_days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_old_days
amelius 4y ago
People are getting less social, probably because of social media. That's not something you can do away with seeing the past in a more rosy way. Because in the past people had to interact to get through life.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Social media might play a part but I'd argue it's not the biggest one. It's urban sprawl, car dependency and now remote work. People are being isolated in boxes out in the suburbs surrounded by no points of interest or areas to hang around. The most important thing for socialization is to just have physical proximity to other people in shared spaces, be that a park, office, school, club, etc. If anything, social media is just enabling people to sit in their boxes longer while still getting some form of socialization.
goodpoint 4y ago
Not at all. Many problems pointed out are real in some areas, but the never ending techo-optimism of HN cannot handle that.
LtWorf 4y ago
> It's called rosy retrospection Explain this then: https://www.thelocal.se/20230127/ten-terrifying-stats-about-sweden-from-the-hit-book-girig-sverige/ https://www.thelocal.se/20230127/ten-terrifying-stats-about-... Numbers talk. At least here in sweden rich are richer and everyone else is poorer.
- tga_d 4y ago
  Sure, there are dozens of metrics by which the world is getting objectively worse in ways that have very real human and ecological costs. But OP didn't cite any of those. They did, however, complain that the minimum wage worker who made their burger didn't express remorse for forgetting the ketchup.
MikeBattaglia 4y ago
There are some pretty clear indications that the derivative of civilization is strongly negative at the moment, particularly if you live in Europe. Actually, the fact that people are supposed to pretend things are OK, while everyone over there is possibly a few steps away from being drafted into war, is another sign that things have headed in the wrong direction in exactly the manner OP is suggesting.
- pjam 4y ago
  What are these clear indications (beside the potential draft point)?
- davedx 4y ago
  “Everyone” in Europe is definitely not a few steps from being drafted into war. This is ridiculous polemics.
  - courgette 4y ago
    Also, what a fun draft that would be. What Western Europe country could realistically support and train a large uptick in reluctant new recruits? You need a backbone of experienced military professional and infrastructure to do that ( eg : France used to have a lot of military center to host / train people. Those have been abandoned in the late 90s )
- AndreasHae 4y ago
  > everyone over there is possibly a few steps away from being drafted into war Why do you think so? Might be different in Eastern Europe, but as a Central European I think it’s quite unlikely that a direct conflict is going to happen.
  - cudgy 4y ago
    There already is a direct conflict. Wake up and get your head out of the sand.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
achr2 4y ago
There is a danger to assigning this term blindly, as it is almost a form of 'rosy ignorance'. We are certainly in an extreme period of societal volatility, and it is absolutely appropriate to examine the causes.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mihaaly 4y ago
* Also people like to argue the validity of other's view for the sake of projecting truth-knowing with cursory wisdome like if there was one truth. Spiced with life path couching on own initiative as an extra.
jraines 4y ago
I’m always a little stunned when this (and many sibling comments) is almost always the first response to something like this. It’s probably generally true, and an appropriate response to the most dire decline narratives or things easily disproven by stats . . . But like also: really? None of this resonates with you on a personal level? If yes are you that distrustful of your own anecdata? If no: I hypothesize that you got significantly wealthier over the last decade and spent accordingly to choose/manage your surroundings, and/or live in a blessed location with a healthy friend/family group and a healthy relationship to social media. I think all of these are outliers to majority experience. It sometimes feels like there’s a Panglossian Gaslighting Society operating in threads like this.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  >If yes are you that distrustful of your own anecdata? Hackernews is approaching the topic in a very characteristic way but depression is an important phenomenon that manifests to the individual as, among other things, worsening negative appraisals of everything. So do the consequences of poor fiscal and monetary policy. Funny how we use the same word for both.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ben_w 4y ago
  > None of this resonates with you on a personal level? Not really, no. Don't get me wrong, 5 years ago I was in the UK, I moved to Berlin towards the end of 2018. Visiting the UK again last December… it felt very broken. But it was the same kind of broken that I saw in Portsmouth when I was a child. And Berlin still feels as good as it did on my first visit. Landlords being greedy? Sure. That's one of the things Marx and (from what little I've read of him) Adam Smith agreed on. People are loud? I'm remembering a neighbour in my mid-terrace place in Sheffield in 2009-10, the husband and wife yelled at each other every night loud enough I could hear the words. I'm remembering a biker housemate in Cambridge who openly discussed the motorcycles with illegal loud exhausts. I'm remembering the stories in my childhood about illegal raves being shut down. Worker apathy, that's hard to gauge. Could therefore believe it if it came with evidence stronger than an anecdote. Software development looks like it's much the same combination of fads, technical debt, and Peter Principles as it ever was. But that's anecdotes, the proof is in the pudding, and everything is more stable and less crashy than I remember — while I think that Apple's UI peaked a decade ago, that's mainly because I am deeply nostalgic for skeuomorphic UI. Subscription models: well, if you don't like them, don't get them. We're getting Netflix for one month of the year because that's enough to watch what we want, and there's plenty of others with different stuff we can watch later. I'm not going to get a Photoshop subscription, but I did buy Pixelmator, and if that hadn't existed I'd have used GIMP. The police? BLM started in 2013, the word "woke" originated in 1938 in the lyrics to a song about racial injustice in the legal system. I have become very cynical about the legal system as a whole, but for very different reasons: if you were fully enforce all the traffic laws the only people who would be allowed to drive would be people like me who don't, if you fully enforced the drug laws you'd bankrupt whichever country you were in, and so on. But none of this is new, as evidenced by Sir Patrick Stewart's stories about his father. For rich grifters, I suggest Robert Maxwell. He's… mostly forgotten. Fraudsters often are, so the question should be: what's the fraud rate in your country? Everything is poison? I grew up with acid rain (solved), a hole in the ozone layer (getting better), indoor public smoking (banned in the UK, doesn't seem to be here in Berlin), asbestos (banned), and leaded petrol (banned). Do we still have problems? I assume so! But they don't appear to be worse, rather they appear to be milder.
Schnitz 4y ago
probably combined with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic
syzarian 4y ago
There are obvious examples in history where it really is getting worse and then things get better. How do you know that Rosy Retrospection applies in this case?
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Pick an actual measure and look at real data vs vague feelings. Or like they pointed out, at least compare feelings recorded at the time vs current feelings vs memories of past feelings.
  - syzarian 4y ago
    And how does that help the feeling the poster has now? Of course in hindsight it will be known if things are as bad as the poster thinks. Why state the obvious that in the future it will be known if this present time was as bad as some thought? And the question I asked remains unanswered: How does noud know that rosy retrospection is what the poster is experiencing?
    - maerF0x0 4y ago
      I actually read a religious based book on anxiety once that said (secularized) "look at all the hard situations you've gone through and how you felt about them vs how you actually fared. Perhaps you could temper your current mood about the present in light of the difference between how things felt vs how they turned out." It's not absolutely most rational point, survivor bias and all, but it does have a point about not being excessively negative/anxious.
politician 4y ago
Counter-example: A significant subset of people on HN agree that Google search is deteriorating.
LAC-Tech 4y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Gigachad 4y ago
  No it's completely right, it's called "outsider perspective". It's hard for OP to realize they are not making an accurate observation. If you want to really work out if things are in decline, instead of finding some vague feeling of what it used to be like vs now, actually measure something? Loud motorbikes weren't invented last year, and crime isn't higher today than it was 20 years ago.
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    I think it's harder for other people to accept that certain things can and will decline, or that history has ebbs and flows for any dimension you care to measure, and is not just linearly getting better. "You're just imagining it bro" is a rationalisation that lets people cling on to the Eternal Progress narrative.
- operatingthetan 4y ago
  What in their comment was manipulation?
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    They responded to "Here's some things I've noticed" with "You're old and you're imagining it".
    - operatingthetan 4y ago
      That's not manipulation and they didn't say either of those things. It does not appear that you are responding in good faith.
coding123 4y ago
Everyone claims stuff like this. Or they say that "kids these days" and quote archimedes or plato or something... But just seriously watch leave it to beaver and then watch any modern tv show and compare the "disrespect". Even if people have been saying "kids these days" for 1000 years, that does NOT mean things haven't been changing for 1000 years for the worse.
User23 4y ago
Just because a thing has a name doesn't mean it's true. In many ways the past was better than the present. For example in 1965 a single average wage earner could afford a 15 year mortgage for a nice house in a nice neighborhood. And don't even get me started on architecture. There's no rosy colored glasses there. Contemporary five over ones are abominable.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  For a very large chunk of the population, life is much better today than it was in 1965. Ask the average person in a 3rd world country which has now lifted out of poverty since then or someone who didn't live the straight white ideal 1965 scenario. And even for people who did live the best possible situation of 1965, we are no longer poisoning everyone with lead and asbestos in the way we were back then. As well as many things we consider absolute requirements like air conditioning being considered an optional luxury back then.
  - User23 4y ago
    > Ask the average person in a 3rd world country which has now lifted out of poverty Who did the lifting?
- vinaypai 4y ago
  If by "everyone" you mean white males.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
rakkhi 4y ago
Stop doom scrolling. Find the things that actually matter to you and take steps you can to improve them. Have the wisdom to accept what you can't change.
pnutjam 4y ago
Pick up the book "Knockemstiff" for a good perspective on how bad things used to be. Things are better then they have ever been, but we all have a responsibility to continue improvement instead of tearing it down to rebuild it (worse).
taf2 4y ago
Great idea - I can tell you mine personally is 25% better over the last year because of my migraine medicine. I have one extra day a week to be among the living. Sure I have some days where I’m a little bit off but I still remember just how bad it was. Also I can drink and experience a hangover like a normal person. Hangovers are easy no big deal just kind of off days.
jerome-jh 4y ago
I agree with the OP over the last 5 years. I think he/she's right and it is not an effect of being depressed or what. Over the last 5 years, wealth distribution, general wellness, world order, SW reliability have all declined. There are data points for some of those items but no all of course. For SW reliability, I include: buggy websites, product requiring cloud access making them intrinsically less reliable and less trustworthy, the services needlessly requiring authentication making credential theft wide spread and spam/scam campaigns more likely to succeed, companies pulling the rug under paying customers feet, dark patterns...
winternett 4y ago
The world has been very dependent on tech for a long time now. We've had many companies that dominated tech and now they have a stranglehold on pretty much every aspect of life and business. I think a major component to societal decline can be linked to the effects of social media and ill willed corporate and consumerist influence on everything around us, coupled with the on-going social and economic conflicts (war etc) being driven by egotistical personalities that have also been an enduring problem worldwide. As the Internet grows, greed and ego are consuming resources that were previously share across many prior... There is only the illusion of success played out by people (many of them are trust-fund-driven nepo-babies), as web sites. social and dating apps. and many other prominent online schemes are now simply lottery games that rarely pay out even after years of careful participation. Our ability to climb economically is under great threat by greed of far more wealthy people than us. The future looks grim as long as we keep letting the wrong greedy personalities win... We really need to stop giving that a pass.

by noud 4y ago

counttheforks 4y ago

[flagged]

lazyasciiart 4y ago
It's quite possible not to be able to answer "did x happen" but to still be interested in the question "will x happen".
guerrilla 4y ago
People don't usually get rate limited for opinions. It's usually for breaking the rules, personal attacks, intentionally trolling and that kind of stuff. If you're not doing any of that or are willing to change you could email him and work it out.
- mdkdkso 4y ago
  [flagged]

s1gnp0st 4y ago

When faced with a sinusoid, humans seem to extrapolate exponentials in both directions. Take the business cycle, where the good times appear to approach a "new paradigm!" just before a large correction, and the bad times seem like they'll never end.

gallopingcomp 4y ago
Exactly this, and this is a general pattern. This is reminiscent of my previous struggles with cyclothymia[1], for example. Furthermore, the perception of impending calamity was contributing to the stress and worsened the symptoms further. (I wonder if there is an analogy to be drawn here as well, but I suspect this part is much less generalizable.) At the same time, it makes sense for people to have heightened awareness of "the bad times": each cycle represents added stress to the system, and with a heightened probability of calamity (eg. becoming insolvent / suffering a mental health emergency). [1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17788-cyclothymia https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17788-cycloth...
DasCorCor 4y ago
The business cycle is not a sinusoid. It’s a fractal. It’s chaotic and oddly correlated. Also, sinusoids are exponentials. ;)
- pineaux 4y ago
  Oh! could you elaborate on this? To me even the name "business cycle" hints towards a cyclical/periodical movement. Sinusoids are not exponentials, sinusoids are periodical. They seem exponential for a short while though. The growthfactor also declines at some point. Could you elaborate on why you think its fractal?
  - aoki 4y ago
    It's a joke, sinusoids are sums of exponentials when you're talking about complex functions [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_formula#Relationship_to_trigonometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_formula#Relationship...

Beaver117 4y ago

[flagged]

mouse_ 4y ago
[flagged]
dinkleberg 4y ago
You need to read up on the definition of gaslighting. That is a nasty accusation and inaccurate.
- AnonCoward42 4y ago
  Telling people that the reality is not what they see and they imagine things, is - so to speak - the definition of gaslighting. Gaslighting might be hyperbole and surely I made it a bit more pointed, however I see how his post can be seen as gaslighting.
  - operatingthetan 4y ago
    Gaslighting by definition requires ill intent or manipulation and you are conveniently ignoring that. In your version pretty much any internet disagreement is gaslighting.
    - AnonCoward42 4y ago
      > Gaslighting by definition requires ill intent or manipulation and you are conveniently ignoring that. You cannot determine or know ill intent, so it's not really helpful as a property. > In your version pretty much any internet disagreement is gaslighting. Disagreement alone does not suffice. You need to tell the other person that what they see is not real and/or that they imagine things. But as I said, it's a bit exaggerated, however it's not so farfetched either.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]

somethoughts 4y ago

This is just personal but anytime I feel similar to the OP, I watch something by Hans Rosling [1] or Anna Rosling [2]. Although 10 and 5 years old respectively, I feel the general sentiment is still true - that human progress is slow, in the background and might be ebbing and flowing in your specific sub-population. And when compared to the present, media narrative driven present its hard to see the improvements happening across the global population. It helps me put stuff in perspective - of course mileage may var (and maybe it's just helping me delude myself into getting out a funk but it works!). [1] Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo [2] See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income - Anna Rosling Rönnlund https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw

ignoramous 4y ago
Reminds me of this tweet by Derek Thompson (writer at The Atlantic): In 2022, we: - Reversed organ death in pigs - Made the first embryo from stem cells - Made a pan-influenza vaccine - Saw the beginning of time - Got best-ever results from cancer & obesity therapy trials - Maybe cracked the case of multiple sclerosis From: https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1600864770751860737 https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1600864770751860737 (https://archive.is/pi95L https://archive.is/pi95L)
- mouse_ 4y ago
  Yeah and we developed the most efficient graphene nanotube batteries that never degrade!! Sorry, I'm not buying it anymore. More than likely, none of that is going to help me or anyone I know from struggling just a little more each year.
  - bboygravity 4y ago
    This makes 0 sense to me.
    - lbotos 4y ago

bmitc 4y ago

Do you have some data that says this is off base besides some general Wikipedia concept? The OP reported direct observations.

roland35 4y ago
Direct observations? It seemed like anecdotes to me! Crime can certainly increase in some areas but I think overall we are down from decades ago
treis 4y ago
>Seems like everything is subscription model and you have to pay N times to access something thats only worth 1-3x . Eg: I Netflix for a couple hours a month. At the price for 4k access I can almost go out to a theatre. Video games are all trending to subscription models. I just learned the other day that the PS4 games I got with my subcription to PSN all are locked because I stopped subscribing (nearly 50 games) . So I paid them like $125 for access to these games for 24 months, and now I cannot play any of them? At least I still own NES/SNES/N64 Game cartridges that will never lock me out This one is wrong. If this were the SNES era to play 50 games the best you could do is rent for $3 to play for a couple nights. That's $150 (more like $300 in today's dollars) which is more than they paid for unlimited access to the games. To match that they'd have not much choice other than retail for $50 a pop, $2,500 for all of them, or $5,000 in today's dollars. Used for maybe half that with effort. HBO was more expensive when it launched in the 80s and that doesn't count the base cable subscription fee. I pay much less for the 2-3 streaming services that I use than my parents paid for cable when I was growing up. That alone is undeniably better. Plus you can do things like buy any Disney DVD used for $2 pop plus a flat $3 shipping on ebay. No way that happens in the VCR days. Not to mention that used DVD players are practically free vs a couple hundred for a vcr player.
- maerF0x0 4y ago
  Interesting points. I do remember FF3 selling for nearly $100 Canadian. I guess I feel shafted paying $5 a month to get b list games for only so long as I keep paying $5 a month in perpetuity. The eventual sum of this is approaching infinity or something like 1500-2000 for my remaining life expectancy. Versus on steam you can sometimes buy great games for $10-20, albeit your betting steam will exist in the future to distribute the game to you.

wesapien 4y ago

This reminds of a classic Late Night with Conan O'Brien episode when Louis C.K. was the guest. He is very right. We adopt to the new normal so fast. We need more people feeling gratitude. It is tough since modernity is focused on consumption.

wesapien 4y ago
Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U
- tome 4y ago
  The few minutes before the clip starts were great too, but sadly I've never been able to find them since I first watched them.

zackees 4y ago

[dead]

dcminter 4y ago

Also known as "G.O.D." ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_old_days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_old_days

amelius 4y ago

People are getting less social, probably because of social media. That's not something you can do away with seeing the past in a more rosy way. Because in the past people had to interact to get through life.

Gigachad 4y ago
Social media might play a part but I'd argue it's not the biggest one. It's urban sprawl, car dependency and now remote work. People are being isolated in boxes out in the suburbs surrounded by no points of interest or areas to hang around. The most important thing for socialization is to just have physical proximity to other people in shared spaces, be that a park, office, school, club, etc. If anything, social media is just enabling people to sit in their boxes longer while still getting some form of socialization.

goodpoint 4y ago

Not at all. Many problems pointed out are real in some areas, but the never ending techo-optimism of HN cannot handle that.

LtWorf 4y ago

> It's called rosy retrospection Explain this then: https://www.thelocal.se/20230127/ten-terrifying-stats-about-sweden-from-the-hit-book-girig-sverige/ https://www.thelocal.se/20230127/ten-terrifying-stats-about-... Numbers talk. At least here in sweden rich are richer and everyone else is poorer.

tga_d 4y ago
Sure, there are dozens of metrics by which the world is getting objectively worse in ways that have very real human and ecological costs. But OP didn't cite any of those. They did, however, complain that the minimum wage worker who made their burger didn't express remorse for forgetting the ketchup.

MikeBattaglia 4y ago

There are some pretty clear indications that the derivative of civilization is strongly negative at the moment, particularly if you live in Europe. Actually, the fact that people are supposed to pretend things are OK, while everyone over there is possibly a few steps away from being drafted into war, is another sign that things have headed in the wrong direction in exactly the manner OP is suggesting.

pjam 4y ago
What are these clear indications (beside the potential draft point)?
davedx 4y ago
“Everyone” in Europe is definitely not a few steps from being drafted into war. This is ridiculous polemics.
- courgette 4y ago
  Also, what a fun draft that would be. What Western Europe country could realistically support and train a large uptick in reluctant new recruits? You need a backbone of experienced military professional and infrastructure to do that ( eg : France used to have a lot of military center to host / train people. Those have been abandoned in the late 90s )
AndreasHae 4y ago
> everyone over there is possibly a few steps away from being drafted into war Why do you think so? Might be different in Eastern Europe, but as a Central European I think it’s quite unlikely that a direct conflict is going to happen.
- cudgy 4y ago
  There already is a direct conflict. Wake up and get your head out of the sand.
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achr2 4y ago

There is a danger to assigning this term blindly, as it is almost a form of 'rosy ignorance'. We are certainly in an extreme period of societal volatility, and it is absolutely appropriate to examine the causes.

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mihaaly 4y ago

* Also people like to argue the validity of other's view for the sake of projecting truth-knowing with cursory wisdome like if there was one truth. Spiced with life path couching on own initiative as an extra.

jraines 4y ago

I’m always a little stunned when this (and many sibling comments) is almost always the first response to something like this. It’s probably generally true, and an appropriate response to the most dire decline narratives or things easily disproven by stats . . . But like also: really? None of this resonates with you on a personal level? If yes are you that distrustful of your own anecdata? If no: I hypothesize that you got significantly wealthier over the last decade and spent accordingly to choose/manage your surroundings, and/or live in a blessed location with a healthy friend/family group and a healthy relationship to social media. I think all of these are outliers to majority experience. It sometimes feels like there’s a Panglossian Gaslighting Society operating in threads like this.

whatshisface 4y ago
>If yes are you that distrustful of your own anecdata? Hackernews is approaching the topic in a very characteristic way but depression is an important phenomenon that manifests to the individual as, among other things, worsening negative appraisals of everything. So do the consequences of poor fiscal and monetary policy. Funny how we use the same word for both.
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ben_w 4y ago
> None of this resonates with you on a personal level? Not really, no. Don't get me wrong, 5 years ago I was in the UK, I moved to Berlin towards the end of 2018. Visiting the UK again last December… it felt very broken. But it was the same kind of broken that I saw in Portsmouth when I was a child. And Berlin still feels as good as it did on my first visit. Landlords being greedy? Sure. That's one of the things Marx and (from what little I've read of him) Adam Smith agreed on. People are loud? I'm remembering a neighbour in my mid-terrace place in Sheffield in 2009-10, the husband and wife yelled at each other every night loud enough I could hear the words. I'm remembering a biker housemate in Cambridge who openly discussed the motorcycles with illegal loud exhausts. I'm remembering the stories in my childhood about illegal raves being shut down. Worker apathy, that's hard to gauge. Could therefore believe it if it came with evidence stronger than an anecdote. Software development looks like it's much the same combination of fads, technical debt, and Peter Principles as it ever was. But that's anecdotes, the proof is in the pudding, and everything is more stable and less crashy than I remember — while I think that Apple's UI peaked a decade ago, that's mainly because I am deeply nostalgic for skeuomorphic UI. Subscription models: well, if you don't like them, don't get them. We're getting Netflix for one month of the year because that's enough to watch what we want, and there's plenty of others with different stuff we can watch later. I'm not going to get a Photoshop subscription, but I did buy Pixelmator, and if that hadn't existed I'd have used GIMP. The police? BLM started in 2013, the word "woke" originated in 1938 in the lyrics to a song about racial injustice in the legal system. I have become very cynical about the legal system as a whole, but for very different reasons: if you were fully enforce all the traffic laws the only people who would be allowed to drive would be people like me who don't, if you fully enforced the drug laws you'd bankrupt whichever country you were in, and so on. But none of this is new, as evidenced by Sir Patrick Stewart's stories about his father. For rich grifters, I suggest Robert Maxwell. He's… mostly forgotten. Fraudsters often are, so the question should be: what's the fraud rate in your country? Everything is poison? I grew up with acid rain (solved), a hole in the ozone layer (getting better), indoor public smoking (banned in the UK, doesn't seem to be here in Berlin), asbestos (banned), and leaded petrol (banned). Do we still have problems? I assume so! But they don't appear to be worse, rather they appear to be milder.

Schnitz 4y ago

probably combined with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic

syzarian 4y ago

There are obvious examples in history where it really is getting worse and then things get better. How do you know that Rosy Retrospection applies in this case?

Gigachad 4y ago
Pick an actual measure and look at real data vs vague feelings. Or like they pointed out, at least compare feelings recorded at the time vs current feelings vs memories of past feelings.
- syzarian 4y ago
  And how does that help the feeling the poster has now? Of course in hindsight it will be known if things are as bad as the poster thinks. Why state the obvious that in the future it will be known if this present time was as bad as some thought? And the question I asked remains unanswered: How does noud know that rosy retrospection is what the poster is experiencing?
  - maerF0x0 4y ago
    I actually read a religious based book on anxiety once that said (secularized) "look at all the hard situations you've gone through and how you felt about them vs how you actually fared. Perhaps you could temper your current mood about the present in light of the difference between how things felt vs how they turned out." It's not absolutely most rational point, survivor bias and all, but it does have a point about not being excessively negative/anxious.

politician 4y ago

Counter-example: A significant subset of people on HN agree that Google search is deteriorating.

LAC-Tech 4y ago

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Gigachad 4y ago
No it's completely right, it's called "outsider perspective". It's hard for OP to realize they are not making an accurate observation. If you want to really work out if things are in decline, instead of finding some vague feeling of what it used to be like vs now, actually measure something? Loud motorbikes weren't invented last year, and crime isn't higher today than it was 20 years ago.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  I think it's harder for other people to accept that certain things can and will decline, or that history has ebbs and flows for any dimension you care to measure, and is not just linearly getting better. "You're just imagining it bro" is a rationalisation that lets people cling on to the Eternal Progress narrative.
operatingthetan 4y ago
What in their comment was manipulation?
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  They responded to "Here's some things I've noticed" with "You're old and you're imagining it".
  - operatingthetan 4y ago
    That's not manipulation and they didn't say either of those things. It does not appear that you are responding in good faith.

coding123 4y ago

Everyone claims stuff like this. Or they say that "kids these days" and quote archimedes or plato or something... But just seriously watch leave it to beaver and then watch any modern tv show and compare the "disrespect". Even if people have been saying "kids these days" for 1000 years, that does NOT mean things haven't been changing for 1000 years for the worse.

User23 4y ago

Just because a thing has a name doesn't mean it's true. In many ways the past was better than the present. For example in 1965 a single average wage earner could afford a 15 year mortgage for a nice house in a nice neighborhood. And don't even get me started on architecture. There's no rosy colored glasses there. Contemporary five over ones are abominable.

Gigachad 4y ago
For a very large chunk of the population, life is much better today than it was in 1965. Ask the average person in a 3rd world country which has now lifted out of poverty since then or someone who didn't live the straight white ideal 1965 scenario. And even for people who did live the best possible situation of 1965, we are no longer poisoning everyone with lead and asbestos in the way we were back then. As well as many things we consider absolute requirements like air conditioning being considered an optional luxury back then.
- User23 4y ago
  > Ask the average person in a 3rd world country which has now lifted out of poverty Who did the lifting?
vinaypai 4y ago
If by "everyone" you mean white males.
- deleted 4y ago
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rakkhi 4y ago

Stop doom scrolling. Find the things that actually matter to you and take steps you can to improve them. Have the wisdom to accept what you can't change.

pnutjam 4y ago

Pick up the book "Knockemstiff" for a good perspective on how bad things used to be. Things are better then they have ever been, but we all have a responsibility to continue improvement instead of tearing it down to rebuild it (worse).

taf2 4y ago

Great idea - I can tell you mine personally is 25% better over the last year because of my migraine medicine. I have one extra day a week to be among the living. Sure I have some days where I’m a little bit off but I still remember just how bad it was. Also I can drink and experience a hangover like a normal person. Hangovers are easy no big deal just kind of off days.

jerome-jh 4y ago

I agree with the OP over the last 5 years. I think he/she's right and it is not an effect of being depressed or what. Over the last 5 years, wealth distribution, general wellness, world order, SW reliability have all declined. There are data points for some of those items but no all of course. For SW reliability, I include: buggy websites, product requiring cloud access making them intrinsically less reliable and less trustworthy, the services needlessly requiring authentication making credential theft wide spread and spam/scam campaigns more likely to succeed, companies pulling the rug under paying customers feet, dark patterns...

winternett 4y ago

The world has been very dependent on tech for a long time now. We've had many companies that dominated tech and now they have a stranglehold on pretty much every aspect of life and business. I think a major component to societal decline can be linked to the effects of social media and ill willed corporate and consumerist influence on everything around us, coupled with the on-going social and economic conflicts (war etc) being driven by egotistical personalities that have also been an enduring problem worldwide. As the Internet grows, greed and ego are consuming resources that were previously share across many prior... There is only the illusion of success played out by people (many of them are trust-fund-driven nepo-babies), as web sites. social and dating apps. and many other prominent online schemes are now simply lottery games that rarely pay out even after years of careful participation. Our ability to climb economically is under great threat by greed of far more wealthy people than us. The future looks grim as long as we keep letting the wrong greedy personalities win... We really need to stop giving that a pass.