> The word modern has somehow become associated with “something better”… Well, that's because modern typically is better. Humans don't like problems, issues,

> The word modern has somehow become associated with “something better”… Well, that's because modern typically is better. Humans don't like problems, issues, inconveniences, accidents, or flaws. So many billions of us are constantly engaged in the enterprise of improving things. Or trying to, at least. Of course, this requires trying new approaches to create "modern" things. Trying new approaches is the definition of experimentation. And experimentation produces failures, usually more often than successes. So many modern things are in fact worse than the old things. But some new things are actually good, and these good things tend to rise in popularity and last. What's tricky is that even these modern+good things often seem bad at first because, well, they are kind of bad at first. They're too new to have had years of refinement and innovation. As the saying goes, when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. But this doesn't mean you throw away ships. It means you keep iterating on ships to make them better than previous generations. This is the process of modernization: Experimenting with a smorgasbord of new stuff, most of which sucks, but some of which is good, and yet still requires years of improvement to become great. The good things from the past that the author is praising were themselves modern at some point. Today they're just further along in the process of being refined and improved.