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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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
I'm with you on the older tech era. The 2000s were the peak of technology in my opinion. The freedom and openness of the internet was a unique point in human history. It was still standard to control the hardware you owned back then and IoT hadn't yet infected a bunch of stuff it didn't need to be in.
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
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.
> 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
> in reality for a lot people adolescence was a painful
I thought that this is an American thing too. They way American movies portray bullying, the need to be the queen or king of the prom, or at least be popular, and so on... I don't remember me or my classmates having so much drama. We were able to drink alcohol, smoke - the so called adult stuff - and had almost 4 months of vacation. What's not to like? :-)
> Lovely pics, but no country as much as America idolizes and worships its adolescents.
I don't think US culture is significantly different on this point from that of the rest of the core Anglosphere. So, I doubt "no country as much as America" is true.
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.
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.
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 in that regard.
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?
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.
>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.
Elder Millenials, Xennials, even younger Millenials will understand that what we are going through is difficult, but almost incomprehensible.
There is this tremendous realization, for the few of us capable of not scrolling endlessly, of what we lost. I believe this is what's causing the immense political upheaval and anger between men and women. The System isn't working, and it's gotten so bad that I think trying to do anything is genuinely better than what it is now.
Yes, anyone can be recorded, which then dictates social norms for many who want to remain silent. This forces us to never be too open about our interests, and the few which are open about them, often are only doing what is acceptable within a subculture. And even then, it's likely to be laughed off by people not from those subcultures.
Now, because we are poorer, we mostly gamble what our meager pay gives us, on prediction markets and Gacha games. Some poor fellows even pay for steamers, or for Onlyfans girls and "believe the Sex Worker was into them" so to speak.
It's lonely, nobody wants to speak out publicly about their interests, those that do, often do so out of anger and are jeered off.
So, no wonder our mental health issues are terrible compared to the past. We're not even facing people most of the time.
I would say they similar in that they are both pleasure-seeking behaviors that are fine in moderation, but carry a significant risk of turning addictive and self destructive.
There are pros and cons to both. Both provide outlets for creativity and socialization. But I've lost several childhood friends to drug overdoses, and spending too much time on the phone can lead to withdrawal and depression.
I feel like you are asking me pick one or the other as the superior pastime, but I would choose neither. IMO kids are better off playing sports, playing in a band (without the drugs), drama club, etc. Those are structured activities - but given enough time and space people will start to form relationships too.
sex drugs and rock n roll are fine in moderation because they take place during human socialization and serve to enhance an experience of connection. does doom scrolling enrich anything outside of dopamine receptors & corporate profits? rather than request your choice of option, I intended to note that doom scrolling alone in bed could not be compared to the hedonism of generations above in any way outside of a common neurological response.
I imagine a lonely young adult scrolling away, then I imagine woodstock. not many parallels outside of the species involved ..
I think they were never fine in moderation, but one at least had a chance of real human connection, love, marriage, and even the potential for it to grow into something "mature", and non-hedonistic. And it's not the one with smartphones.
Boomer era hedonism is built upon the assumption that "this is the way the world works, and always will work", and as such, with so much affluence and wealth, they were essentially nudged to create a cultural boom via drugs, sex, and rock and roll, which won over the youth of the time against the intellectual Communists of Russia.
But as a result, the sexual revolution brought about a great "romance famine", wherein the modern day has everything to favor different people to stay separate. The specific reasons of which vary between the sexes, but point is that both have more to gain by staying single. Therefore there is significantly less sex taking place in my generation.
Not only that, but screen addiction, political polarization, mass inequality, the prices of everything keeps getting much higher. Our Dollars are also worth much less than that of the Boomer era. This means we have to work much more for less pay, and less value for each Dollar.
The Hedonism of our times is more solitary, more lonely, arguably more self-destructive, but that's because we feel as though we have little to lose.
This comes into spending more on food, more expensive tea and coffee (since Alcohol is still more expensive than that). Gambling, gacha games, prediction markets. Pornography, chatbots, social media, anything to kill the emotional apathy. As for drugs, that's just Xanax, anti-anxiety medications that are abused, as well as weed and opiates to "slow" down the world since it goes by so fast. Vapes, Codeine (Purple Drank), carts, etc.
All of these forms of Hedonism are inherently very insular, and lonely, rather than going clubbing, Woodstock, going for Joyrides with friends, or even having sex.
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.
Unemployment is at 7.7% if you include discouraged workers, and participation of all working age adults is 61.6%.
Participation was lower in the 70s (60%), due to most Women not entering the workforce. But ours includes most women, so your point is genuinely incomparable.
No, the kids aren't "all right". I'm not blaming you for this, just pointing out that yes, we have it much, much worse, not even taking into account just how lonely, sick, and poorer we are, per salary, per dollar, and our lack of homeownership (that's an entirely different set of data I'm not posting here).
Remind me of your purchasing power? Your home ownership rates? Value of your dollar? Wages relative to lifestyle? Mental Illness rates? Chances of entering a high paying job, or prestigious University? Labor Unions? Relationship rates? Debt?
Getting drafted is terrible, but at least you had a nation worth fighting for. Not mentioning how many drafted were poor, non-college educated people, of which even if we are poorer, much more of us go to college for worse wages and outcomes, as well as more debt.
Also, the threat of nuclear war never went away, we just stopped caring about it.
Why? We brought numbers for one specific issue and you ignored them.
The first item on your new list is absurd. The 70s are the decade that coined the term stagflation. To be nostalgic for the 70s because of the value of the dollar is wild.
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].
One thing I noticed long ago about the boomer generation is they are likely to make small talk with random strangers in public (store clerk, waiter, etc) without much hesitation. They knew their neighbors.
People today are more closed, I think they’d be less likely to do that, even as they get into middle age and past the insecurities of youth.
Sex/drugs/rock-n-roll probably got a segment of the population out of its shell that otherwise wouldn’t.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 37.1 ms ] threadSo 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.
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?
I thought that this is an American thing too. They way American movies portray bullying, the need to be the queen or king of the prom, or at least be popular, and so on... I don't remember me or my classmates having so much drama. We were able to drink alcohol, smoke - the so called adult stuff - and had almost 4 months of vacation. What's not to like? :-)
I don't think US culture is significantly different on this point from that of the rest of the core Anglosphere. So, I doubt "no country as much as America" is true.
In some ways Australia is more US-influenced than the UK is though
It also wouldn’t surprise me if one’s experiences of the topic depend on factors such as which generation you belong to, your subculture, etc
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.
There is this tremendous realization, for the few of us capable of not scrolling endlessly, of what we lost. I believe this is what's causing the immense political upheaval and anger between men and women. The System isn't working, and it's gotten so bad that I think trying to do anything is genuinely better than what it is now.
Yes, anyone can be recorded, which then dictates social norms for many who want to remain silent. This forces us to never be too open about our interests, and the few which are open about them, often are only doing what is acceptable within a subculture. And even then, it's likely to be laughed off by people not from those subcultures.
Now, because we are poorer, we mostly gamble what our meager pay gives us, on prediction markets and Gacha games. Some poor fellows even pay for steamers, or for Onlyfans girls and "believe the Sex Worker was into them" so to speak.
It's lonely, nobody wants to speak out publicly about their interests, those that do, often do so out of anger and are jeered off.
So, no wonder our mental health issues are terrible compared to the past. We're not even facing people most of the time.
There are pros and cons to both. Both provide outlets for creativity and socialization. But I've lost several childhood friends to drug overdoses, and spending too much time on the phone can lead to withdrawal and depression.
I feel like you are asking me pick one or the other as the superior pastime, but I would choose neither. IMO kids are better off playing sports, playing in a band (without the drugs), drama club, etc. Those are structured activities - but given enough time and space people will start to form relationships too.
I imagine a lonely young adult scrolling away, then I imagine woodstock. not many parallels outside of the species involved ..
But as a result, the sexual revolution brought about a great "romance famine", wherein the modern day has everything to favor different people to stay separate. The specific reasons of which vary between the sexes, but point is that both have more to gain by staying single. Therefore there is significantly less sex taking place in my generation.
Not only that, but screen addiction, political polarization, mass inequality, the prices of everything keeps getting much higher. Our Dollars are also worth much less than that of the Boomer era. This means we have to work much more for less pay, and less value for each Dollar.
The Hedonism of our times is more solitary, more lonely, arguably more self-destructive, but that's because we feel as though we have little to lose.
This comes into spending more on food, more expensive tea and coffee (since Alcohol is still more expensive than that). Gambling, gacha games, prediction markets. Pornography, chatbots, social media, anything to kill the emotional apathy. As for drugs, that's just Xanax, anti-anxiety medications that are abused, as well as weed and opiates to "slow" down the world since it goes by so fast. Vapes, Codeine (Purple Drank), carts, etc.
All of these forms of Hedonism are inherently very insular, and lonely, rather than going clubbing, Woodstock, going for Joyrides with friends, or even having sex.
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.
Participation was lower in the 70s (60%), due to most Women not entering the workforce. But ours includes most women, so your point is genuinely incomparable.
No, the kids aren't "all right". I'm not blaming you for this, just pointing out that yes, we have it much, much worse, not even taking into account just how lonely, sick, and poorer we are, per salary, per dollar, and our lack of homeownership (that's an entirely different set of data I'm not posting here).
Also, remind me how many of y'all were drafted to go fight in Nam?
Getting drafted is terrible, but at least you had a nation worth fighting for. Not mentioning how many drafted were poor, non-college educated people, of which even if we are poorer, much more of us go to college for worse wages and outcomes, as well as more debt.
Also, the threat of nuclear war never went away, we just stopped caring about it.
The first item on your new list is absurd. The 70s are the decade that coined the term stagflation. To be nostalgic for the 70s because of the value of the dollar is wild.
Lifestyle was still better back then.
> 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
People today are more closed, I think they’d be less likely to do that, even as they get into middle age and past the insecurities of youth.
Sex/drugs/rock-n-roll probably got a segment of the population out of its shell that otherwise wouldn’t.