The nineties are when you dream of SEGA and they give you a NES clone, you play "Yiear Kung FU" - imagining that it is Mortal Kombat 2, and in the rest of the civilized world everyone is already playing Play Station.
The epigraph is so-so, but it makes it clear how bad it is to bring such things up again, in other words, to be nostalgic.
Nostalgia is such a thing, it makes you remember good times as if they really were good, but almost always this is far from the case. You were young, young, and not as experienced as you are now, you remember the good, replacing the bad with something non-existent, or rounding the bad to the point of romanticism. Melancholy is a dangerous thing.
What does such melancholy look like to a worker from the outside? It roughly looks like this: what you don’t remember (this is important!) you replace with pieces of modernity. For example, now there is a large selection of goods in stores, there is the Internet, unlike the 90s (or 80s, 70s, and so on), but people often forget that at that time there were different rules of life, a different mentality, not so much different, but quite different from modern times. There is sometimes a feeling when you communicate with people much older than you - they connect the present with the past, and do it so gracefully that they believe themselves. It looks like they lived in a soviet or post-soviet with a more or less decent income, the refrigerator was full of delicious food (which young people love so much), sausages, sausages, smoked fish, sausage, cheese, ham, butter, and tomatoes... But the truth The fact is that we ate all these things only on holidays, or on paydays, and we don’t remember the rest of the days because why? What was so interesting these days that you would remember them? That's it! The patterns in the head narrow everything down to small memories, choosing bright periods between boring everyday life, and one gets the impression that there was prosperity, and that people were kinder, life was simpler...
Old people - everything is completely mixed up for them, the queues have disappeared, fashion has turned into mincemeat, and it seems to them that the way they dress now is how they dressed all the time. But what can you prove to an older person? Most of their nostalgia ends with phrases like “there’s no such thing anymore,” or “they don’t make that anymore,” hinting that the technology was more reliable, the music was better, the food tasted better, people were kinder, and just in general! (this “and in general!” means that you cannot doubt the kindness of the person speaking to you, and in vain you asked, you did not live in those wonderful times - envy me. New guy.
When considering such conversations about nostalgia, you usually come to the conclusion that the person speaking to you is naive, but checking the facts suggests that everything was not so rosy.
I don't know why it happens but it is simply intoxicating. I try to be careful with it, as if it was a hard drug. I find nostalgia everywhere: in video games, tv shows, movies, songs, food, cleaning products, car brands. I even feel nostalgic for things that I didn't even live myself.
Really powerful stuff.
But there's also this myth, that the future "has" to be better, that the present is better than the past, than we are better than our forefathers
I think I have to agree with you yretek. Some things really do get worse with time. Sometimes there is regression, natural disasters happen, big changes are not always the best. Time is morally neutral so to speak. It doesn't turn *everything* better or worse. Being on the younger side, you are just ignorant to the things that were better most of the time.
Nor technological progression always makes things better. Some are dystopian, can be used for very bad things.
the present is always better than the past, if we look at it from the point of view of our time, if we take essentially the past time))) - we will see that at home we have a hot water tap, our shit is washed off into a hole in the floor, and we don’t have to take it outside anywhere -far from home, we have access to all (almost) information in our world; all we have to do is take a flat object out of our pocket and shout a question at it)))). we don't have to run through the forests and kill animals, we can buy food in the store. The house is warm, bright, cozy. you can insult a person abroad in a matter of seconds, and nothing will happen to you for it; if you get sick, you won’t die; if you get very sick, then doctors can prolong your life for a long time. Of course, there are also bad sides: for example, if someone insulted you on the Internet, you can’t just find and kill this person. in both worlds there is a huge difference in survival. in this world you are being treated all your life, and are depressed from what is happening, in the old world you don’t have depression because it hasn’t been invented yet)))), and you don’t get discouraged by bad news because you don’t know how to read)))) , and you rejoice at what is happening around you, because progress has not taken away the so-called wow effect from you. you are happy because you are alive. everything is relative.