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freetime2 2 hours ago [-]
Many of these kids look a lot older than high school age to me - I'd guess mid or even late twenties for some.
> Retrospective aging is the perceptual illusion where people from past decades look significantly older in old photographs and videos than people of the same age do today
Vsauce did an interesting video about this a while back[1].
High school class of 1974 here. We loved the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the 60s, but we also were keenly aware of the impermanance of the hedonistic lifestyles of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.
Huarache1 2 hours ago [-]
High school class of 2020 here. We wish we could have the life our boomer forefathers did, but their life was so hedonistic, they destroyed ours by proxy.
GaryBluto 2 hours ago [-]
You wish you could be hedonistic, but you cannot because your “forefathers” were also?
missinglugnut 22 minutes ago [-]
In the economy of the 70s you could walk into a business with a high school diploma, ask for a job, and get offered enough pay relative to housing costs to save for a home.
Now you have to spend 4 years studying and go into debt to have a chance at that life. But aside from having a cash flow problem, you can't get caught doing anything a college admissions counselor or job recruiter doesn't like or the plan will fall apart. So don't break any laws, get filmed doing anything unsavory (and everyone has a recording device in their pocket), and expect to have gray hair before you get your feet under you financially--if that day ever comes.
Now regardless of who you blame for this economy (though I suggest you look at the age of the people in charge), it's striking how the only decent social safety nets in the US are for retirees. Baby boomers can get government healthcare, social security, along with more benefits/tax breaks at the state and local level. The young have to pay for their own educations, pay for their own healthcare, and then get taxed to pay for the older generations too.
One generation hollowed out the economy, voted to give benefits to themselves while cutting them for everyone else, and ran up debt at every level of government in the process. Now no one else can afford to live the life they did.
typeofhuman 41 minutes ago [-]
It's ironic considering how pleasure seeking that generation is but refuse to admit it here.
freetime2 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting. Can you give some examples of how boomers were more hedonistic than earlier/later generations, and how that destroyed your life? I'd be particularly interested to see how you feel boomers compare to your own generation with regard to hedonism?
I'm wondering if young people are really less hedonistic now, or if the types of hedonistic activies people engage in have just changed? Would you consider doomscrolling to be a form of hedonism, for example?
thin_carapace 1 hours ago [-]
considering that the big cliffs of western fertility coincide with major smartphone releases, you are comparing that which the young gentleman would have appreciated experiencing (shared human experience of pleasure), with the death of his opportunity to experience such. do you genuinely consider lying in bed alone on the phone for hours on end to be comparable to sex/drugs/rock n roll in any manner outside of resultant dopamine spiking?
sodapopcan 1 hours ago [-]
From what I understand, current younger generations won't dance because they are terrified of being recorded. I'm don't know how rampant this is, but if true it's really sad. Dancing poorly is one of life's greatest pleasures (and really good exercise too boot!). While I absolutely despise "generation wars," the smartphone really did a number on... well, all of us. I hope more people start to ditch them.
EDIT: I actually don't really know what Huarache1 is really talking about. I'm an elder millennial (Xenial, really) and we were plenty hedonistic, just a little safer about it, so it could be the case of younger people relegating anyone they deem old to be a "boomer." I think Millennials have a lot of blame on their shoulders for being so willing to make social media such a huge part of our lives.
underlipton 20 minutes ago [-]
>I think Millennials have a lot of blame on their shoulders for being so willing to make social media such a huge part of our lives.
Uh, it was heavily marketed towards us, too. And it was a godsend to those of us stuck at home in suburban hell, around the time when retailers and fast food joints stopped hiring teenagers and cars were becoming more expensive and harder to work on without a bunch of expensive tools.
sodapopcan 9 minutes ago [-]
> Uh, it was heavily marketed towards us, too.
Absolutely it was. It was also quite different in the beginning, though. Many people saw facebook as a photo-sharing site and a way to exchange stupid, public-facing messages. Remember a year or so after the news feed introduced and fb messaging was just becoming a thing (no dedicated app yet) and people started freaking out that their "private" messages were now public when really it was just stuff they had written on each others "walls" that in everyone's minds (with not fault to them) was private to their friend group?
> And it was a godsend to those of us stuck at home in suburban hell,
Very fair so ya, my life-long city-boyness is showing.
thin_carapace 1 hours ago [-]
in contemporary reality I have witnessed dance events where hundreds of young people filmed the deejay on their smartphones while a couple dozen danced at the back. if humans do not take the reins, our culture is already dead.
why are you blaming the kids who had their brains destroyed via algorithmic social media created by the generations above them? how did the kids ever stand a chance when they were given something stronger than drugs at an age before personality coalescing?
sodapopcan 47 minutes ago [-]
No need to be so confrontational. I also saw a bunch of your edits so full disclosure I'm trying reconcile what I read before with your edits so apologies if I get mixed up.
> you are blaming the kids who had their brains destroyed by your generation?
I'm curious as to what part of my post makes you think I'm blaming kids (today) when I explicitly said it's my generation that has a lot of blame. I thought I was pretty clear on that, going as far as to say I think generations ragging on each other is bullshit.
Non-tech people of my generation were also victims to a degree, though at the same time there were a lot, and I mean a LOT of us who HATED social media and avoided it for as long as they could. Unfortunately, I can't count myself as one of them.
You're also making the assumption that I'm sitting passively doing nothing about it. I don't do MUCH, but I have been removing a lot of tech from my life, and I talk about it with people, including younger people. I ditched my smartphone eight months ago, I give my money to as few big tech companies as possible (this includes all the "AI" companies), I don't use anything by Google other than YouTube, as well as some artist ventures. I know it's not much, but I'm a nobody. If you have any other ideas how I can do more, I'm open to listening.
Anyway, your experience at the DJ event is exactly what my Gen X'er friend was describing to me the other day (then I read about it online). She was at a work event and said the "older" folks were all dancing while the younger ones were standing around looking at their phones.
Oh, also my comment around "I hope things get better" is that I've heard that a lot of younger people are indeed ditching their phones and social media, but none that I know (and being 45 without children, I don't exactly interact very often with anyone younger than ~30).
EDIT: I think I got it, is it that I said "I think Millennials have a lot of blame on their shoulders" which makes I sound like I was blaming Gen Z and below? Really my intent there. That is the phenomena of assuming anyone successful and obviously adult is older than me and therefore, not part of my generation. In my mind, Zuck is like 10 years older than me when in reality he's three years younger.
thin_carapace 17 minutes ago [-]
I saw you identify as gen X then assign responsibility to the successor of gen X, this does not appear to have been the intended meaning, if generations raging on each other is bullshit then im not sure why generations were brought up at all. our culture is in its death throes, did you want that to happen a bit less confrontationally? it is rankling to watch older people milling about discussing the freedom of choice they love, while their successors are unavoidably forced into the opposite - subscriptions, social media, doom scrolling, ai, these choice deprivations are the default option now and avoiding them in favor of reality is extremely difficult for the avg joe. honestly you remind me of parents in your generation and how they ask their kids things instead of telling them things. for the record I'm also a nobody and I have plans to unfuck the youth even though the pursuit is likely futile thanks to global warming + the butterfly effect, u could come up with some plans too if u wanted ...
dmwood 1 hours ago [-]
Photo editor of a 1970 high school yearbook here. These are accurate reflections of MY memories too. Maybe it was a Yashica Mat I used...
WalterBright 3 hours ago [-]
Yup that all looks familiar!
If you want to see a realistic depiction of 1970s teens see the movie "Over The Edge". The plot is absurd, but it captured the way the teens looked and acted.
Interestingly, at the time kids carried oversized combs in their pockets (including the boys). The movie is the only one I've seen where the kids carried those combs.
Lovely pics, but no country as much as America idolizes and worships its adolescents..MTV, VH1, now instagram, tiktok and all that.. according to mass media we spend the rest 50 years of our lives trying to recapture that short youthful phase.. in reality for a lot people adolescence was a painful and thankfully short period from which you matured and and were able to appreciate adulthood.. nothing wrong with few gray hairs too
rurp 5 hours ago [-]
Near the end of high school a teacher said something that really struck me. She said that some people would look back on their high school years as the best time of their life, while others would slam that book shut and never look back. Not the most profound statement, but it really lit up my teenage brain.
High school was a really awkward period for me that was much more stressful than enjoyable. The idea that I could choose to never return to anything like that and have a completely different rest of my life was exhilarating to contemplate.
It turned out to be true. College was much better for me than high school; finishing college and becoming an adult was better than being in school at all. Everyone has different experiences but I doubt mine is all that rare, I think a lot of people have kind of a miserable time in high school before going on to figure out a life they enjoy. This pop culture idolization of the period does seem over the top to me as well.
spijdar 5 hours ago [-]
From my experience, it's possible to hate the high school/college years, but for them to also be comparably less terrible than what comes after, and so to look back at them with a strange kind of longing.
Like someone else in the thread said, they might have been miserable, but they had potential, options, future ambiguity. After a certain point, those narrow and solidify. A miserable past where the future wasn't set feels more glamorous than a miserable present railroaded into a miserable future.
jamesforestwest 5 hours ago [-]
I have mixed feelings about my teenage years. I wouldn't want to go back, but I can't say that adult life has turned out to be much better, or that I don't miss that time
jawilson2 5 hours ago [-]
I'm the opposite. I LOVED high school, and miss those friends dearly. I'm 45, and it has been difficult to find people that I gel with the same way, aside from my wife (who I started dating in high school). I miss being on the basketball team and marching band. I miss many of the teachers. I miss the 90s and no cell phones, and trolling AOL message boards. I miss being able to exist without the fear of having your life recorded, either by phones or government mass surveillance. I miss when it was accepted that Nazis were the bad guys, and Canada wasn't on fire and making the air quality in Chicago horrific every summer.
College was a great experience too, and I made some great friends, but I really focused on graduating in engineering so I slowly became the party-pooper, and in grad school my wife and I moved in together, got married, so it was a completely different life experience. Now my focus is on work and getting my 3 kids into good colleges.
I sometimes dream about being in high school again, or taking my kids back with me to see what life was like pre-cell phones. I wouldn't say that high school was the best part of my life, but it is a chapter I reminisce about and wish I could revisit occasionally.
"I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anybody?" - Stephen King, Stand By Me
xp84 5 hours ago [-]
Idk, I get it. Even as someone who hated being a teen, I’m glad that I can, with maturity, see the positives of that time period. We miss being young because we miss having so many potential options in life, having simpler feelings and opinions, and having so little actual responsibility. Like, for those of us over 40, doing homework for an hour or two a day felt like sadism and like so much pressure. But as an adult who has to figure out how to pay for rent and bills, and has to work all day most weeks of the year, I wouldn’t mind if the expectations of me were limited to learning lots of stuff for 3 seasons a year.
bena 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I don't miss being a teenager, I miss that unique combination of low responsibility and high possiblity.
Swizec 3 hours ago [-]
> short period from which you matured and and were able to appreciate adulthood
My high school and early college years were pretty rough (depression, suicidal, some substance abuse (couldn't access anything super serious)), but ho boy do I miss having time to casually build a compiler over a week of school holidays, spending all my afternoons fiddling with weird little coding things, and having zero concerns about any of it being fit for purpose or even useful and basicaly never feeling tired.
Being an adult is great but every year brings more accumulated responsibilities and that part kinda sucks. The days where I can get sucked into something interesting and forget time exists are becoming fewer and fewer. And the space of things that feel new and interesting diminishes surprisingly quickly too. The novelty wears off the more things you learn about
2 hours ago [-]
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
> no country as much as America idolizes and worships its adolescents
Would it be accurate to say that the modern concept of adolescence is an American invention?
rectang 4 hours ago [-]
"Hold onto 16 as long as you can" — John Mellencamp, "Jack and Diane"
5 hours ago [-]
Triphibian 7 hours ago [-]
When that Dinosaur Jr. album cover showed up it made so much sense.
philipallstar 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ghost_of_moc 6 hours ago [-]
The venture capitalists all ran here.
Animats 6 hours ago [-]
Ah, yes, the 1970s, before the invention of color film.
blacksqr 5 hours ago [-]
Long-term-stable color photo processing didn't become widely available until the late 1970s-early 1980s.
So if you were an artist and interested in building and maintaining a permanent portfolio, B&W was pretty much your only option.
echelon 3 hours ago [-]
Not to mention it looks timeless.
These people don't look ancient to me. They look like you could reach out and touch them, converse with them, share the story of their lives.
jamesgill 5 hours ago [-]
In the 1970s color film/development/print cost significantly more than black and white.
Shooting in b&w was common, because it was much cheaper. But of course, he could've chosen it or aesthetic reasons.
rafram 5 hours ago [-]
Interestingly, it's the opposite now - B&W tends to be more expensive because it has to be done by hand at most shops, while color development is done by machine.
browningstreet 6 hours ago [-]
You can process and print B&W yourself. Color needs to go to a lab.
B&W is also standard for street and art photography.
You're gonna argue this _now_?
"The past is stupid"
anschwa 5 hours ago [-]
You can develop color at home too, it's pretty much the same process and effort but with different chemicals.
Animats 5 hours ago [-]
Not for Kodachrome, which was good but is dead due to the complexity of processing.
abcd_f 5 hours ago [-]
Don't know if they were Kodachrome, but I still have some color Kodak slides that my dad developed at home in the late 80s.
jcynix 3 hours ago [-]
Definitely not Kodachrome. The process to use at home was Kodak's Ektachrome. Still much more work than the much simpler b&w processing.
Color Polaroids came out in the mid 60s.
Color SX-70s were commonplace in the 70s.
GuinansEyebrows 5 hours ago [-]
i love instant cameras but they aren't really used for professional photography except as a novelty or as a specific artistic choice, and sx-70 isn't a particularly stable medium.
kurthr 3 hours ago [-]
Professionals aren't developing at home unless they have a darkroom, which were fully capable of doing color negatives in the 1970s. If you can shove color into a self-developing mobile consumer device, a professional can have it done.
Somehow this needs to be about poor constrained do-it-yourself professionals?
You can process and print B&W yourself. Color needs to go to a lab.
The consumer "street" photography of the time was mostly Polaroids, or little tiny box cameras you had developed at a booth.
This has all to do with a feel, and It could be that it was mostly shot in color and converted to B&W. Or, the wonderful dynamic range of B&W could be the reason. That's fine, but it has nothing to do with lack of choice.
the__alchemist 5 hours ago [-]
Could you please elaborate your thought process here? For example, are you claiming the author was using obsolete tech for one reason or another? Or making a pretentious artistic choice? Or do you think these were taken in an earlier period, then misatributed as being from the 1970s?
> Retrospective aging is the perceptual illusion where people from past decades look significantly older in old photographs and videos than people of the same age do today
Vsauce did an interesting video about this a while back[1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjqt8T3tJIE
Now you have to spend 4 years studying and go into debt to have a chance at that life. But aside from having a cash flow problem, you can't get caught doing anything a college admissions counselor or job recruiter doesn't like or the plan will fall apart. So don't break any laws, get filmed doing anything unsavory (and everyone has a recording device in their pocket), and expect to have gray hair before you get your feet under you financially--if that day ever comes.
Now regardless of who you blame for this economy (though I suggest you look at the age of the people in charge), it's striking how the only decent social safety nets in the US are for retirees. Baby boomers can get government healthcare, social security, along with more benefits/tax breaks at the state and local level. The young have to pay for their own educations, pay for their own healthcare, and then get taxed to pay for the older generations too.
One generation hollowed out the economy, voted to give benefits to themselves while cutting them for everyone else, and ran up debt at every level of government in the process. Now no one else can afford to live the life they did.
I'm wondering if young people are really less hedonistic now, or if the types of hedonistic activies people engage in have just changed? Would you consider doomscrolling to be a form of hedonism, for example?
EDIT: I actually don't really know what Huarache1 is really talking about. I'm an elder millennial (Xenial, really) and we were plenty hedonistic, just a little safer about it, so it could be the case of younger people relegating anyone they deem old to be a "boomer." I think Millennials have a lot of blame on their shoulders for being so willing to make social media such a huge part of our lives.
Uh, it was heavily marketed towards us, too. And it was a godsend to those of us stuck at home in suburban hell, around the time when retailers and fast food joints stopped hiring teenagers and cars were becoming more expensive and harder to work on without a bunch of expensive tools.
Absolutely it was. It was also quite different in the beginning, though. Many people saw facebook as a photo-sharing site and a way to exchange stupid, public-facing messages. Remember a year or so after the news feed introduced and fb messaging was just becoming a thing (no dedicated app yet) and people started freaking out that their "private" messages were now public when really it was just stuff they had written on each others "walls" that in everyone's minds (with not fault to them) was private to their friend group?
> And it was a godsend to those of us stuck at home in suburban hell,
Very fair so ya, my life-long city-boyness is showing.
why are you blaming the kids who had their brains destroyed via algorithmic social media created by the generations above them? how did the kids ever stand a chance when they were given something stronger than drugs at an age before personality coalescing?
> you are blaming the kids who had their brains destroyed by your generation?
I'm curious as to what part of my post makes you think I'm blaming kids (today) when I explicitly said it's my generation that has a lot of blame. I thought I was pretty clear on that, going as far as to say I think generations ragging on each other is bullshit.
Non-tech people of my generation were also victims to a degree, though at the same time there were a lot, and I mean a LOT of us who HATED social media and avoided it for as long as they could. Unfortunately, I can't count myself as one of them.
You're also making the assumption that I'm sitting passively doing nothing about it. I don't do MUCH, but I have been removing a lot of tech from my life, and I talk about it with people, including younger people. I ditched my smartphone eight months ago, I give my money to as few big tech companies as possible (this includes all the "AI" companies), I don't use anything by Google other than YouTube, as well as some artist ventures. I know it's not much, but I'm a nobody. If you have any other ideas how I can do more, I'm open to listening.
Anyway, your experience at the DJ event is exactly what my Gen X'er friend was describing to me the other day (then I read about it online). She was at a work event and said the "older" folks were all dancing while the younger ones were standing around looking at their phones.
Oh, also my comment around "I hope things get better" is that I've heard that a lot of younger people are indeed ditching their phones and social media, but none that I know (and being 45 without children, I don't exactly interact very often with anyone younger than ~30).
EDIT: I think I got it, is it that I said "I think Millennials have a lot of blame on their shoulders" which makes I sound like I was blaming Gen Z and below? Really my intent there. That is the phenomena of assuming anyone successful and obviously adult is older than me and therefore, not part of my generation. In my mind, Zuck is like 10 years older than me when in reality he's three years younger.
If you want to see a realistic depiction of 1970s teens see the movie "Over The Edge". The plot is absurd, but it captured the way the teens looked and acted.
Interestingly, at the time kids carried oversized combs in their pockets (including the boys). The movie is the only one I've seen where the kids carried those combs.
High school was a really awkward period for me that was much more stressful than enjoyable. The idea that I could choose to never return to anything like that and have a completely different rest of my life was exhilarating to contemplate.
It turned out to be true. College was much better for me than high school; finishing college and becoming an adult was better than being in school at all. Everyone has different experiences but I doubt mine is all that rare, I think a lot of people have kind of a miserable time in high school before going on to figure out a life they enjoy. This pop culture idolization of the period does seem over the top to me as well.
Like someone else in the thread said, they might have been miserable, but they had potential, options, future ambiguity. After a certain point, those narrow and solidify. A miserable past where the future wasn't set feels more glamorous than a miserable present railroaded into a miserable future.
College was a great experience too, and I made some great friends, but I really focused on graduating in engineering so I slowly became the party-pooper, and in grad school my wife and I moved in together, got married, so it was a completely different life experience. Now my focus is on work and getting my 3 kids into good colleges.
I sometimes dream about being in high school again, or taking my kids back with me to see what life was like pre-cell phones. I wouldn't say that high school was the best part of my life, but it is a chapter I reminisce about and wish I could revisit occasionally.
"I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anybody?" - Stephen King, Stand By Me
My high school and early college years were pretty rough (depression, suicidal, some substance abuse (couldn't access anything super serious)), but ho boy do I miss having time to casually build a compiler over a week of school holidays, spending all my afternoons fiddling with weird little coding things, and having zero concerns about any of it being fit for purpose or even useful and basicaly never feeling tired.
Being an adult is great but every year brings more accumulated responsibilities and that part kinda sucks. The days where I can get sucked into something interesting and forget time exists are becoming fewer and fewer. And the space of things that feel new and interesting diminishes surprisingly quickly too. The novelty wears off the more things you learn about
Would it be accurate to say that the modern concept of adolescence is an American invention?
So if you were an artist and interested in building and maintaining a permanent portfolio, B&W was pretty much your only option.
These people don't look ancient to me. They look like you could reach out and touch them, converse with them, share the story of their lives.
Shooting in b&w was common, because it was much cheaper. But of course, he could've chosen it or aesthetic reasons.
B&W is also standard for street and art photography.
You're gonna argue this _now_?
"The past is stupid"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ektachrome
Somehow this needs to be about poor constrained do-it-yourself professionals?
The consumer "street" photography of the time was mostly Polaroids, or little tiny box cameras you had developed at a booth.This has all to do with a feel, and It could be that it was mostly shot in color and converted to B&W. Or, the wonderful dynamic range of B&W could be the reason. That's fine, but it has nothing to do with lack of choice.