random thought of mine, but I think we are going to get a lot midlife crisis's and fight club/american beauty style movies like in the 90's when everyone got depressed about spending their lives in cubicals and living in the suburbs. idk maybe I'm too high rn but this feels like it's gonna be a thing
It's the same dread no matter what youth is "wasted" on. Every single book by a middle aged guy references this in one way or another lol.
Unsatisfactory youth and life in general is exasperated by the society we live in which is also going nowhere and rewards jobs and people who keep the stagnation going, so no matter what we "choose" to spend our time on it'll feel wasted as time goes on because we are part of a society that is doing that.
Just make as many friends as you can and keep people you care about close, any attempt to engage with the society at large is not worthwhile unless you've got that is my point.
Previous generations were also wasting their lives in front of screens, they were just bigger and less portable back then.
Yeah, but there's a Skinner box in everyone's pockets now, that's more intense
Yeah but the difference is that previous generations had an alternative to wasting their lives in front of screens, it was called "going outside"
I've been extremely online for my entire life and I will tell you that they probably feel this way already and will eventually learn to suppress it
i don't mind aging myself so I'll admit to being one of the annoying kids in the whole "eternal september" thing in 1993. I was part of the first influx of "normal" people onto the internet, whereas before it had largely been computer science students or hobbyists in their basement. So I've been staring at screens connected online just about as long as that's been a feasible thing to do.
i don't regret a single goddamn moment and I would do it all again if given the chance :gigachad:
It dawned on me earlier that because computers have only reached complete dominance within the past few decades there hasn’t been a generation that’s gone the start of their career to their retirement staring at computers yet. Even smaller for the time where computers have been dominant in both the workplace and as our almost sole leisure time. Should be coming up on it real soon tho. That can’t be healthy right?
Looks at how programmers are now
:side-eye-2: oh shit oh fuck
Not everyone is ignoring things, they just see the empire crumble from the same screens that brought them people to see it with.
Yeah, they said that about TV, film, plays, literacy, oral tales...it's fine.
It turns out that the real thing causing existential dread all along was capitalism.
Nah bud, capitalism doesn't help but in the end it's caused by the fact of death, it's part of the human condition, and learning to come to terms with it is the foundation of the last stage of life. Literally the first written fiction we have is about existential dread. Gilgamesh, Job, the fate of Achilles in the Iliad although existential dread isn't the entire focus of the work, etc.
It's part right in that we'll feel existential dread, but that's just a part of being mortal and conscious.
This "grass could have been greener" stuff is mostly as useful and informative as "could have been born rich I guess." Barring the past year and a half we have always had the ability to put down our shit and go do stuff outside but the thing is that a whole lot of "living real life" fucking sucks. Like, yuppies in the nineties daydreamt about digging wells in Africa to Make Things Meaningful because they were well off enough to not be breaking their fucking backs hauling heavy shit in a warehouse or even just getting screamed at by customers in the retail workplace. Before the pandemic I'd see my friends maybe twice monthly in person and basically every other day on the internet and that worked out great. Planning shit is hard. You should hug your friends when you get a chance but being online is generally a blessing compared to the alternative, not a curse.
Yeah. This sort of reads like the shit I saw 30 years ago, "You're going to wish you hadn't spent all your time with your nose shoved in a book".
"Living Real Life" always seems to involve doing what the speaker thinks is engaging and not doing what the speaker finds dull, pedantic, and fruitless. Athletes telling you to hit the gym and play more sports. Business guys telling everyone to be entrepreneurs. Engineers telling everyone to learn to code. Religious types scolding agnostics. Activists bemoaning political apathy.
You should hug your friends when you get a chance but being online is generally a blessing compared to the alternative, not a curse.
It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it enables people to remain overly isolated. On the other, it offers a means of communication and community that couldn't exist without the tech.
Parasocial relationships are kinda bad, aktuly. But engaging with people you'd never otherwise meet and holding on to friendships that would have dissolved with distance can be good.
haha, yeah, in 15 years, absolutely, in the medium term future
tho people were probably saying shit like "the kids are spending all their time around the bonfire listening to stories!" in the stone age
I already regret playing video games all throughout high school and purposely left pc/ps4 at home for uni
