Were The 60s 70s And 80s The Peak Of Modern Society?

[BehcetsBoy]

I was born in the 90s but for some reason I yearn for those golden decades between the 60s and 80s.

I feel like it was a perfect mix between the old and the new. We had modern machinery that made human lives easier so we weren't just toiling in a jungle all day but we also had the old traditions such as eating high quality foods, average people still ate organ meats, and one the biggest things in my opinion which is no internet and smartphones. The people we were around were the people we were around. We were more involved in our real daily lives and truly knew the people around us, friends, family teachers, milkman, garbage man, preacher, etc.

The world seemed bigger, and if you heard some major news from China or Egypt, it would really fascinate you. What could these exotic countries and people really be like you'd wonder.

Porn and sex wasn't around every corner so those emotional and sexual experiences would have probably felt a lot more magical and the discoveries would have been in and of themselves more memorable.

Am I just romanticising in my head or was this really how it was?

I really hate how the world now feels so small and less mysterious. I don't wonder what the Gaza pyramids or the Eiffel tower are like because I can see a 4K video of it.

Social media has made all relationships feel so superficial, and it just boils down to who has the best looking selfies and who has the most likes. It's harder to enjoy life when it seems like everyone is doing so much better than you on Instagram.

 

[_Finnimalist]

I love this. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I’ve been amazed watching older movies, peoples hair just seems thicker.

I think technology is great but, people always seem to forget that the purpose of technology is convenience not to detract from life.

 

[Constatine]

It seems like there has recently been such a negative change in headspace. People are so focused and perceptions are so limited. Media distributes importance to very specific events. Discourses are so widespread and hence dogmatic that new creative ideas are hardly ever pondered upon, rather you get recycling of the same discussions over and over again. Scientism and Rationalism is of the mainstream culture, possibly due to schooling systems, thus the average individual is a self declared intellectual borrowing ideas from those whom they themselves don't fully understand (the script kitties of intellectual thought). Mindfulness is a lost art, the ability to perceive our surroundings has been muddied by sensory overload. The worth of pondering is forgotten, again partially due to school systems favoring speedy thought processes that solve binary problems. Such headspace opens the door to a world of problems I'm sure many of us have experienced.

 

[yerrag]

The one thing both nice and bad pre-90s was the sweetness of living in an illusory bubble. It was bliss to be ignorant and not knowing better, as we depended on experts who don't really know their subject matter, and the reason they're experts is because we were just coming off a knowledge base of zero.

We have this forum now, and we would never have this then. I remember worshipping Udo Erasmus and his expertise on healthy oils and unhealthy oils, which we now know as questionable, if not just plain wrong. It was hard for Ray Peat to make a dent on our consciousness. The propaganda was hard to overcome. Even now, it is still hard. What more then?

But I liked products then because of their lack of electronics. Not all but there are many that stand out. I could say the ICE cars of the 90s were the best. The mechanical reliability is tops, and the serviceability too. No need to drive to the dealership for faulty electronics. A flood would not end up frying the car. I'm wedded to my car when I drive a stick.

It would seem that electronics, having no moving parts, would be more robust than mechanical parts. But the reality is that electronics don't last as long as a sturdily built mechanical device, when good design and production come together as in a Toyota.

A water pump at home which I have for use when the mains water has an interrupted service, is a mechanical pump fitted with an aftermarket cycle stop valve (CSV) which gives me constant pressure. This mechanical device, at about $100, would give countless years of reliable service along with the pump, which usually lasts forever. Together, they cost $300.
Contrast this with a fancy electronic pump that costs $1000, like one made. by Grundfos. The Grundfos' weakness is the electronics. It will fail within 5-10 years, and it's the electronics that will fail, not the mechanical part of the pump.

I think the mindset from the 60s to the 90s is lost in these times. It was more restricted, but that restriction gives the freedom to focus. In these times, the abundance of alternatives makes it harder to drill down and get grounded. It is hard now to get a Beatles group or a Queen together - each person has his own idea of where his direction is.

The abundance of choice is mind-boggling, and making the wrong decision is easy. To. avoid turning a positive into a negative is difficult for those trained in school to make multiple choice answers to develop their mind.

 

[Tarmander]

60s>90s>50s>80s>70s

 

[yerrag]

60s>90s>50s>80s>70s

How did you arrive at this?

 

[Tarmander]

How did you arrive at this?

pure unexperienced speculation

 

[yerrag]

pure unexperienced speculation

I had that hunch lol

 

[Tarmander]

I had that hunch lol

Listen to your gut

Music edition looks much different

70s>60s>80s=90s>50s

 

[tankasnowgod]

I was born in the 90s but for some reason I yearn for those golden decades between the 60s and 80s.

I feel like it was a perfect mix between the old and the new. We had modern machinery that made human lives easier so we weren't just toiling in a jungle all day but we also had the old traditions such as eating high quality foods, average people still ate organ meats, and one the biggest things in my opinion which is no internet and smartphones. The people we were around were the people we were around. We were more involved in our real daily lives and truly knew the people around us, friends, family teachers, milkman, garbage man, preacher, etc.

The world seemed bigger, and if you heard some major news from China or Egypt, it would really fascinate you. What could these exotic countries and people really be like you'd wonder.

Porn and sex wasn't around every corner so those emotional and sexual experiences would have probably felt a lot more magical and the discoveries would have been in and of themselves more memorable.

Am I just romanticising in my head or was this really how it was?

I really hate how the world now feels so small and less mysterious. I don't wonder what the Gaza pyramids or the Eiffel tower are like because I can see a 4K video of it.

Social media has made all relationships feel so superficial, and it just boils down to who has the best looking selfies and who has the most likes. It's harder to enjoy life when it seems like everyone is doing so much better than you on Instagram.

There were certainly things that were better, but you are romanticizing it a lot. There was still color TV, movies, and magazines, so I would say the Gaza pyramids or Eiffel Tower were just as well known then. Yeah, 4k is an improvement in video, but a video clip (whether on TV or your computer) is still a TV clip, no matter how high quality. If you don't wonder about them now, you wouldn't have in the 70's either. Seeing and exploring something in person is still a world of difference.

The world doesn't seem any bigger or smaller than it did in the 80s for me. Nor do I really remember being wowed by any sort of news out of a foreign country.

I have deleted all my social media accounts. They are a time suck, and make you feel bad, as you mentioned.

Your first paragraph is mostly correct, but "quality" was on the decline in all of those decades, in food, money, construction, craftsmanship, work and many other things (for a variety of reasons). There's things you can point to, like the nutrition guidelines, Nixon taking the US off the Gold Standard (a process that started in 1913), using "government building codes" in the 70s to replace construction workers with less skilled cheaper labor (one of the reasons the southern US border has been wide open since 1984), the spike in iron fortification in the 80s, and increase in PUFA oils.

 

[Pulstar]

@BehcetsBoy
Did you take the red pill recently? Then congratulations and welcome, my friend, to the real world Matrix called modern capitalism.

 

[postman]

I think you're romanticising it. Industrial garbage foods started becoming a big thing after ww2, when canning and MSG became big. About the sex thing, there was probably more crazy no strings attched devalued sex going on back then with all the hippie culture and before the advent of hiv/aids. Instagram is voluntary, you can delete your account.

 

[TheBeard]

And in that time people felt emotions more strongly as hormones could attach to their receptors like they were supposed to.
EDC's were just beginning to be around, but weren't that widespread.

Life was overall more enjoyable thanks to that too.

 

[Regina]

Herein, Peter Thiel's good use of the word, "sclerosis.":
Back to the Future | Peter Thiel

 

[Bad Linhat]

Herein, Peter Thiel's good use of the word, "sclerosis.":
Back to the Future | Peter Thiel

Interesting !
I think the most significative word from this article is "decadence".
In our society the first valor is money. Redoing the same things is good as they generate money. This lead to stagnation and decadence.
The only innovation occur when someone smell money from the idea, not when it's useful for the community.
The path of conventional medicine is an example of this society

 

[yerrag]

Humans, machines, and systems have become less reliable and subject to unexpected breakdown.

Humans need hospitals to be nearby to intervene for the incapacitated state of balance in his being.

Machines running on "modern" electronics are prone to sudden breakdown. Just one faulty capacitor and machine becomes dead. There is no mean time between failure to rely on, unlike with mechanical devices. They're built to fail unexpectedly, the modern way of planned obsolescence, except that you can't plan for it.

Systems based on brute force computational capability and the ability to update with software tend to bake unvalidated designs into the finished product. Boeing 737 Max and the Iowa caucus failure and government ineptness all share a common philosophical laziness.

Doug Casey: How To Survive The "Deep State" :

As for America, it was an idea – and a very good one – but it’s already vanished, replaced by the United States, which is just one of 200 other nation-states covering the face of the Earth like a skin disease. That said, the U.S. peaked in the mid ’50s and has gone down decisively since 1971. It’s living on stored momentum, memories, and borrowed Chinese money.

 

[Opioidus]

Modern society is a dump and didn't have a peak, western civilization peaked in late 15th century and began to decline after the """enlightenment""" and was already a corpse when Napoleon was around. We are living in the "in between" times, after a great civilization has collapsed and before order once again starts to limit chaos.

 

[tca300]

Many, as well as some of the worst serial killers during those times when considering "recent" history. Particularly 70's - 80's. Maybe just a coincidence though.

 

[bk_]

If I look at the west, particularly the US, I would say sadly yes it had peaked economically, socially, culturally. Allow me to share my lazy unsourced observations (though I can add citations later to prove these points)

Economics

• Manufacturing has been outsourced, taking away high paying jobs that did not require expensive post-secondary education.
• Economic statistics have been manipulated for decades to make things seem better than they really are
  • Unemployment measures go by stringent U3 and U6 numbers which exclude long term unemployed and those who worked a menial 1 hour job (such as mowing a neighbours lawn) from the official stats
  • Official Inflation statistics are way off if you consider real estate, rent, and gold. The CPI is arbitrarily changed such as downgrading the average consumers home size or quality of food.
  • Looking in light of these problems it would seem wages have declined since the 70s and continuing to decline
• 200 trillion USD in uncovered government liabilities (such as pensions)
• Uncontrollable deficits in government
• High competition for jobs (requiring expensive and advanced degrees or extensive training and experience)
  • More students than ever are going to post-secondary education for being able to “get a job”
  • $1 trillion in student debt
  • Graduates are buried in debt that cannot be written off by bankruptcy. Many continue to live with parents or live by very modest means to pay off the debt
• Living is becoming less affordable
  • Rent and real estate is increasing relative to average income in most areas
  • Old timers of my parents generation would tell stories of graduating from high school, working some factory or labor job then buying a house and paying the mortgage in a couple of years, buying 2 new cars, buying a cottage, boat/RV etc.
  • Nowadays it takes dual income to raise a family
• Increasing dependency on government handouts and welfare
  • People get paid to do nothing
• Welcoming millions of illegals with handouts when nation is already well populated, having economic uncertainty and being deep in debt
• Parasitic economy of litigation
  • Divorce destroys family wealth and sends it to courts and lawyers
  • 1 million lawyers (more per capita than any other nation)
  • 16 million civil cases per year
  • 100s of billions lost in litigation

Socially

• 50% of kids are growing up in single parent homes (most with no father figure)
  • One of the greatest predictors of crime, poverty, drug use, and other social dysfunctions
• Divorce rate stands at 32% (see above)
• Birth rates are at all time low
  • Sign of low morale, expense of child rearing, and social issues with divorce, strain between men/women, abortion, cultural shift, etc
• Explosion in opiate and drug use
• Phenomena of mass shootings
• 1 in 6 adults on anti-depressants and rising
• 20 million women use birth control pills or sterilization
• 6.1 million kids diagnosed ADHD and growing
• 1 in 59 kids have autism, projected to rise to 1 in 30 or 1 in 2and growing costing 5% in GDP
  
• Less volunteer work, charities in desperate need of money to fill-in missing volunteers

Culturally

• West becoming less and less homogenous demographically
  • Increasing distrust
  • Less national unity or shared identity
  • Neighbours don’t become friends like in the old days, people barely relate to each other in neighborhoods
  • Increasing strife in politics
• Weaker religious communities
  • Less unity, more social isolation
  • Less volunteer work in communities

• Vast difference in political opinion in matters of survival, little national unity, lots of in-fighting

• Open borders vs building a wall
• Globalism vs protectionism
• Liberty vs controlling speech and increasing surveillance
• War with one country vs war with another country or peace

• Generation of high-stressed, frustrated, unloved, invalidated, children wishing for government to create a utopia

• Phenomena of social justice warriors and George’s Antifa goons
• Wanting to exchange freedom for protection of their feelings and protection from criticism
• Feelings take precedence over logic, honesty, and truth

• Lack of independence and belief in self
  • Idea that can‘t get anywhere in life without a government to help, teach, and support us all along the way.
• Looking to government (the fox at the hen house) to solve issues by controlling others through force or increasingly burdensome/expensive regulations

• “Tough on crime” bills such as California’s 3 strikes law and its 300000 inmates in crowded cramped conditions
• Citizen weapon restrictions which indirectly encourage criminals to commit car jackings, and break-and-enters without fear of the criminal’s safety
• Censorship and restriction of speech which is ultimately expanded to protect authorities and authorian groups from criticism
• Killing small businesses with heavy overhead to satisfy state regulations
• Using government to enforce health policy (and end up defending corporate interests)
  
  • Promotion of PUFA as “heart healthy”
  • Forced mass vaccination
  • Banning thyroid from meat

 

[BrianF]

I feel that the 1990s was the best decade and not just because it was my coming of age (16 in 1990). I rate it simply because (for most of it) it predated mass mobile phone usage and was a few years before social media and smart phone adoption. Pretty much everything that is easy and good about life was invented and adopted before then (broadband internet apart), no great changes from now, only you just didn't have the negativity surrounding social media and smart phones which have had a very pernicious effect on society in my opinion. I drank, drugged, ****88, fought and partied like a shore leave sailor for most of it (and well in to the noughts) and theres barely a picture of me between ages 18 - 30 never mind having my entire life mapped to online. I wish I could do it all again.