The Nostalgia Thread

[yung.carl.jung]

on the topic of love: I think I conceive of love differently than most people do.

I do not think love is "falling in love", that is infatuation. It is also not the feelings we have for someone, may they be reciprocal or not, acted upon or not. it is also not "sticking with them during hard times", that is loyalty. those are all essential to a relationship, but not they're not in and of themselves love.

love is the potential that is innate to all of us, which we exercise through what we've come to call treating others lovingly, which means treating them with respect and being affirmative towards them in whatever way that might entail. more concretely, love is when we're being tender, when we're being playful, when we're being vulnerable, when we're being supportive, when we're caring or nurturing to someone else. it can be expressed sternly or gently or awkwardly or even distanced, but it can never, ever, be insincere. love is always sincere. in that regard, love is also not the opposite of hatred, it is more in opposition to irony, defeatism, passivity, detachment, aloneness, insincerity. love is the fundamental authentic experience.

love transcends monogamy and even speciesdom and even life itself. I love my friends, male or female, in a meaningful way and I express that love regularily. I can love a pet, or a tree, or a dead person, or a country and its landscape, or even something as abstract as an idea or passion, through my actions. in that regard, love is much more like a superpower than it is a feeling.

 

[Birdjaguar]

@yung.carl.jung

 

[civvver]

I really want to play this old sega genesis boxing game called greatest heavyweights. The career mode was pretty sweet. Only available on pirated roms though and I don't feel like setting that up.

 

[civvver]

on the topic of love: I think I conceive of love differently than most people do.

I do not think love is "falling in love", that is infatuation. It is also not the feelings we have for someone, may they be reciprocal or not, acted upon or not. it is also not "sticking with them during hard times", that is loyalty. those are all essential to a relationship, but not they're not in and of themselves love.

love is the potential that is innate to all of us, which we exercise through what we've come to call treating others lovingly, which means treating them with respect and being affirmative towards them in whatever way that might entail. more concretely, love is when we're being tender, when we're being playful, when we're being vulnerable, when we're being supportive, when we're caring or nurturing to someone else. it can be expressed sternly or gently or awkwardly or even distanced, but it can never, ever, be insincere. love is always sincere. in that regard, love is also not the opposite of hatred, it is more in opposition to irony, defeatism, passivity, detachment, aloneness, insincerity. love is the fundamental authentic experience.

love transcends monogamy and even speciesdom and even life itself. I love my friends, male or female, in a meaningful way and I express that love regularily. I can love a pet, or a tree, or a dead person, or a country and its landscape, or even something as abstract as an idea or passion, through my actions. in that regard, love is much more like a superpower than it is a feeling.

All of those other things you mention are facets of love. That's why the ancient greeks had the six words to describe all these faces of love- eros, the infatuated sexual passion, Agape the love all beings and a type of empathy and caring, Phila the deep friendship love, Pragma which is like the loyalty you describe. All those things are love.

 

[H4run]

Wasn't big on getting high. Was very rare event.

Same as 80s, same now. The street parties just got bigger with social media.

Local street party 1999.

Now.
2012

2017

Top thumbnail is a 50 litre beer keg. Used to do keg stands on them. You do a handstand on top and they put the beer tap on your mouth.

American friend wasn't good at it and faceplanted the keg.

Less fires being set now vs the 90s.

I was a heavy drinker, but not for beer, never fancy beer, I like that hot stingy sharp feeling like today I love espresso. Both me and my current Boss actually best friend in high-school and both of us love to drink. I usually buy local vodka or mansion house and mix that with local soft-drink or sometime energy drink, because imported booze are quite insanely expensive at that time. But I remember during one new year my boss bring me blue vodka, he told me to drink it in a go, I drink as much as I could, quite much actually, it burned my throat, and if I keep doing that stupid thing my liver gonna be exploded I think, and I start drinking local vodka without any mixture, it's really taste like alcohol mixed with water.

I already quit those stuff for more than 10 years, most of my friend pretty much away from me during my "repent" period well except my boss, he ending up follow my path that's how close we are. But still sometime I dream about booze. Especially that sweaty one in refrigerator, damn those things. However I believe if that's permissible for me, that itself is enough to destroy everything that I have now. I was a very avid drinker. Now what left for me is stupid cigs.

 

[Zardnaar]

I was a heavy drinker, but not for beer, never fancy beer, I like that hot stingy sharp feeling like today I love espresso. Both me and my current Boss actually best friend in high-school and both of us love to drink. I usually buy local vodka or mansion house and mix that with local soft-drink or sometime energy drink, because imported booze are quite insanely expensive at that time. But I remember during one new year my boss bring me blue vodka, he told me to drink it in a go, I drink as much as I could, quite much actually, it burned my throat, and if I keep doing that stupid thing my liver gonna be exploded I think, and I start drinking local vodka without any mixture, it's really taste like alcohol mixed with water.

I already quit those stuff for more than 10 years, most of my friend pretty much away from me during my "repent" period well except my boss, he ending up follow my path that's how close we are. But still sometime I dream about booze. Especially that sweaty one in refrigerator, damn those things. However I believe if that's permissible for me, that itself is enough to destroy everything that I have now. I was a very avid drinker. Now what left for me is stupid cigs.

In 90s you could buy a litre of cheap spirits for $6.50 USD. 48 beets were around $33 dollars a bottle of Opel Nera $23 USD.

1125 ml of JDs or Jim for $25 USD.

The really cheap spirits weren't to bad taste wise, 22%. Get absolutely plastered for you and a friend or two for $13 USD. Aged 16 drunk 1.5 litres of it.

 

[H4run]

In 90s you could buy a litre of cheap spirits for $6.50 USD. 48 beets were around $33 dollars a bottle of Opel Nera $23 USD.

1125 ml of JDs or Jim for $25 USD.

The really cheap spirits weren't to bad taste wise, 22%. Get absolutely plastered for you and a friend or two for $13 USD. Aged 16 drunk 1.5 litres of it.

I believe booze are better and cheaper in your place. Mine if you got money you can have it good, if not we were using something like this (taste sweet and nice actually):

Spoiler cheap local wine :

While this one is as cheap as dirt and smell horrendously strong, taste like expired coughing medicine syrup and it's thick not fluid.

Spoiler kolesom :

 

[AdamCrock]

Love is .... eternal ...

 

[Zardnaar]

I believe booze are better and cheaper in your place. Mine if you got money you can have it good, if not we were using something like this (taste sweet and nice actually):

Spoiler cheap local wine :

While this one is as cheap as dirt and smell horrendously strong, taste like expired coughing medicine syrup and it's thick not fluid.

Spoiler kolesom :

Those prices were 1996.

1 dozen Eurolagers on special. $13 USD

750ml spirits $25-$32 USD. $20 USD on special.

Everyday prize of NZ macro ale. $23 USD for 24 pack.

Every day price of NZ good beer/Eurolagers $16 USD. For 12.

900 ml can of Zatecky Gus/Baltika 7. $3.30. Baltika 9 $3.80.

Cheap wine that's not to bad. $6.50- $9.50.

Craft beer, nicer brands and expensive wines cost more.

Not sure how much cheap nasty beer and spirits are as I don't buy them.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Yeah I miss the things to do when not being locked down like an animal - work -> home -> repeat , like going out with the guys

Let me get this straight. You leave your home every day?

I haven't been outside in 59 days. The farthest I've been is to the lobby to collect mail or whatever deliveries the person refuses to bring to the suite.

I get that it is extremely easy to look down on love and romance in the 21st century, but consider this: even with all the hollywood bs romance being thoroughly ingrained in our heads and lifestyles, even with Tinder and Grindr being a thing and love being more and more of a commodity ever day, there is still this:

almost all young people are united insofar as we grow up in extremely fast-paced, complicated, rootless times. we have no multigenerational households. we likely change jobs many times in our life. our identities are fractured, we are atomized as indivduals, we lack a strong safety net, we lack human contact, we lack a future for our kids, for our planet, and we even lack utopian ideas. we won't even know if we get to retire, at all, or if the world will still be there. and that is what love is in the 21st century, overcoming all these hurdles together, staying together irregardless of toxic outside influences, coping together with the mundaneness and the horrors of life, imagining a future together when there might not be one. yeah, you had your cold war, but you never had this. love in the 21st century is precarious, but it's still, sometimes, very beautiful

Multi-generational households were considered weird in most parts of Alberta even in the '70s. I remember one of my classmates saying to me in 1974 (the year I started Grade 7), "You live with your grandparents? Eww, isn't that weird?". It's like they thought anyone older than their parents were some disgustingly icky alien life form, and that there could be no way to have a normal kind of interaction with people two or more generations removed.

Well, that was my normal.

What was also my normal included a constant stream of wondering if there was going to be a future because of war, environmental issues, and many more things that people still worry about today. The current generation needs to let go of that "yeah, you had war, but we have it worse today". You don't have a monopoly on worries, and neither did my generation when it was "the younger generation."

You want human contact? Get your nose out of your smartphone, walk up to a real human, and start a conversation. Even if it's just "Nice day today," it's a start. I've had interesting conversations that began that way and gradually morphed into less mundane topics.

You lack a future for your kids? How do you think my grandparents felt, being young adults in the Depression years? They married in 1934, my dad was born in 1935, and just four years later, our country was involved in a world war. For the second time in my grandparents' lives. Thank goodness this one didn't result in a pandemic like the first one did.

I'm not claiming at all that there's nothing for younger people to worry about nowadays. But there are some of those things that you can definitely do something about.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

What was also my normal included a constant stream of wondering if there was going to be a future because of war, environmental issues, and many more things that people still worry about today. The current generation needs to let go of that "yeah, you had war, but we have it worse today". You don't have a monopoly on worries, and neither did my generation when it was "the younger generation."

the difference is that during the cold war people were afraid of potential ecological disaster and nuclear war, while today people know, in fact have empirically verified, that there will be no future unless extreme measures are taken. that's a huge difference.

You want human contact? Get your nose out of your smartphone, walk up to a real human, and start a conversation. Even if it's just "Nice day today," it's a start. I've had interesting conversations that began that way and gradually morphed into less mundane topics.

you're barking up entirely the wrong tree. also, those issues that are affecting us are more systematic than just individual failure. smart phones are inherently designed to be addictive. some people are inherently prone to addiction. those are facts. previous generations equipped their kids with freakin pocket-size slot machines and are now looking down on them for developing a gambling addiction. who woulda thunk.

young people today don't lack meaningful human contact because they're too ******* stupid to talk to others or put down their phone (even though many people want to believe that.. it's much easier that way..), but rather because there is a war going on for their attention span.

You lack a future for your kids? How do you think my grandparents felt, being young adults in the Depression years? They married in 1934, my dad was born in 1935, and just four years later, our country was involved in a world war. For the second time in my grandparents' lives. Thank goodness this one didn't result in a pandemic like the first one did.

there is a big difference between a world in turmoil and a planet where you literally cannot breathe anymore, no? there have always been precarious times in human history, what we're seeing now is, I insist, unprecedented.

 

[H4run]

young people today don't lack meaningful human contact because they're too ******* stupid to talk to others or put down their phone (even though many people want to believe that.. it's much easier that way..), but rather because there is a war going on for their attention span.

I never think about it that way, very good insight. You are telling that the external stimuli from advertising to entertainment industry are waging war to our attention span.

A big multi/transnational corporation who got armies of worker that studied to manipulate and attract our attention, to studied to exploits our keen to addiction, waging war with each individual in the society. That's crazy and might sound ridiculous, but it's ridiculously true. Well done Yung.

 

[civvver]

I never think about it that way, very good insight. You are telling that the external stimuli from advertising to entertainment industry are waging war to our attention span.

A big multi/transnational corporation who got armies of worker that studied to manipulate and attract our attention, to studied to exploits our keen to addiction, waging war with each individual in the society. That's crazy and might sound ridiculous, but it's ridiculously true. Well done Yung.

I have noticed that since getting mobile games which are usually really short play periods like check in, click a few things, solve a puzzle all in 10 minutes and then you do that several times a day, I have less patience to sit down and play pc games that require a longer amount of session time. It's like I've trained my body to have a short attention span which it comes to gaming.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

I never think about it that way, very good insight. You are telling that the external stimuli from advertising to entertainment industry are waging war to our attention span.

A big multi/transnational corporation who got armies of worker that studied to manipulate and attract our attention, to studied to exploits our keen to addiction, waging war with each individual in the society. That's crazy and might sound ridiculous, but it's ridiculously true. Well done Yung.

I have noticed that since getting mobile games which are usually really short play periods like check in, click a few things, solve a puzzle all in 10 minutes and then you do that several times a day, I have less patience to sit down and play pc games that require a longer amount of session time. It's like I've trained my body to have a short attention span which it comes to gaming.

yes and yes. it's more than mobile games: push messages, pop ups, clickbait, "infinite scrolls" like instagram with embedded videos, but as civvver said the video (especially mobile) games industry might be the worst offender. using insight from psychological research is nothing new, advertising has done it for decades now, and it's also not new for video games. Just look at World of Warcraft and how they consciously manipulate(d) people into spending time on things they didn't really want to do. We have such a vast body of knowledge of how the human mind works that it's easy to prey upon: One of the very first instances I noticed myself was "daily quests" in WoW. You'd get a quest you could only do once a day and it'd take about 20-35 minutes usually and give a lot of gold. Not a big deal, right? It's completely fair. Well, suddenly everyone has a lot more money, all the goods in the auction house become more expensive, and you're now forced to do daily quests if you even want to keep up. Yes, there was actual currency inflation in WoW. The psychological mechanism being abused is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out . Since every day you don't do your quest you essentially miss that reward and can never get it back. It's insidious. And it's been used in thousands of games ever after. Nowadays some games come with exp boosts that cost real-world money that the companies advertise as "time savers". Because they deliberately make their games long, tedious and grindy, so that it feels extra rewarding to be boosted. I could go on for days.

 

[H4run]

The psychological mechanism being abused is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out .

I basically stop playing online game after graduating high-school because of tried to distant myself from "fear of missing out", nicely coined.

Actually the fire-power that corporation unleash to our impulse is much more than just that, their operate at various different levels and variables. The corporation basically manipulates and exploits every-kind of impulse that we have to sells their commodity. Our fear, our hope even our libidinal impulse.

Take for instance the objectification of human body that further used to attract sexual impulse to sell a product for me is quite "below the belt" move, it's a win at whatever it cost move. People objectifying human and reduced them to a meta-commodity that is used to sell a commodity, for me that is dehumanizing.

Take a simple example of meta-commodity and commodity relation; a restaurant business that sell their food with using human body as meta-commodity (gimmick), like serving dishes using naked body as a plate. And the more soft and subtle form of this thing happening everywhere, in your YouTube ad, in billboard, on tv ads, they might want us to believe that is liberating, but what I see only a capitalist system using every tools they can to conditioned their target to be (over)consumptive.

Everyday, if you play enough attention, is a barrage to our sensory nerves.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

the difference is that during the cold war people were afraid of potential ecological disaster and nuclear war, while today people know, in fact have empirically verified, that there will be no future unless extreme measures are taken. that's a huge difference.

Oh. Come. On.

Of course we were afraid of nuclear war, or at least very aware that it was a possibility. My final year of high school was in 1980, and between the war-themed curriculum in social studies and the post-apocalypse-themed reading list in English, I had a steady diet of potential nuclear war that year. It gave me nightmares I have never forgotten. It was reasonable to be afraid of it, because we didn't have much confidence in the politicians' understanding of the consequences, even with the examples of what happened in Japan during WWII.

Do you think people were that stupid? Are you seriously trying to tell me that prior to the ending of the Cold War, people did not understand that climate change was a real and dangerous thing (we didn't call it that, but we understood what was going on)?

Granted, there were a lot of deniers, and the same is true today. Even now, with a pandemic going on, all the premier of my province can think of is oil, and how to funnel more $$$$$$$ to his corporate buddies, and to hell with whoever he has to screw over. There are health care workers begging for PPE, and they're being told to "buy your own"... and they're not available.

Governments are taking advantage of the situation to ram through legislation harmful to the environment, in the guise of "reopening the economy."

you're barking up entirely the wrong tree. also, those issues that are affecting us are more systematic than just individual failure. smart phones are inherently designed to be addictive. some people are inherently prone to addiction. those are facts. previous generations equipped their kids with freakin pocket-size slot machines and are now looking down on them for developing a gambling addiction. who woulda thunk.

I don't "bark up trees." Especially wrong ones.

You think I don't know that modern technology is addictive? I don't own a cell phone, and one of the reasons (besides cost; mobile phone service in Canada is insanely expensive) is because I've seen how addicted people can get. I don't want to join them.

This isn't all holier-than-thou, btw. Most of my waking hours are spent online, and I've noticed my own attention span being much shorter than it used to be. Sometimes I don't even finish drafting a post here before a stray thought about my current games will send me back there for one or two more levels. Or maybe someone will post a video, I'll watch or listen to it, and then get sidetracked by the recommendations that come up for me (shouldn't complain too much about that, though; I did find a new musical group I really like).

But at least I'm not so involved with gadgets that I'm walking into a tree or out into traffic. And thank goodness for the distracted driver laws that mean the taxi drivers are paying a bit more attention to the road than they are to their phones.

young people today don't lack meaningful human contact because they're too ******* stupid to talk to others or put down their phone (even though many people want to believe that.. it's much easier that way..), but rather because there is a war going on for their attention span.

What would you call it when they (not all, but many) don't know how to have a basic spoken conversation anymore?

I've had to tell taxi drivers to put their phones down, because I don't feel safe with a driver whose attention is not wholly on the road. I've seen kids as young as 3 with their faces practically glued to their mother's phone because she's using it as an electronic babysitter. And yes, my mother didn't mind that she could park me in front of the TV on Saturday mornings and I'd be quietly absorbed in cartoons that make me cringe nowadays because of the content and how some types of characters were portrayed. But back in the mid-late 1960s, that wasn't considered questionable at all. And I was equally adept at entertaining myself with books or toys or persuading my grandmother to play ball with me or get out the crokinole board (I still have that, btw, though the playing pieces are long-gone).

there is a big difference between a world in turmoil and a planet where you literally cannot breathe anymore, no? there have always been precarious times in human history, what we're seeing now is, I insist, unprecedented.

I never denied that what's going on now is unprecedented. What annoys me is your assumption that nobody understood what was going on, until the Cold War was over, like a switch was flipped on a particular date and then people suddenly gained 20 IQ points and understood.

Have you ever watched the original Cosmos series? I mean the original from 1980, not the 1990 update or that cartoon-infested thing by Neil deGrasse Tyson. The original Cosmos was written and filmed during the Cold War. Carl Sagan went to great lengths to express exactly the things you say nobody cared about back then.

That series woke a lot of people up, including me. I wasn't completely unaware prior to that, but it did help to clear the cobwebs that remained.

 

[Lexicus]

Do you think people were that stupid? Are you seriously trying to tell me that prior to the ending of the Cold War, people did not understand that climate change was a real and dangerous thing (we didn't call it that, but we understood what was going on)?

It's not calling people in the 1980s stupid to note that climate science was nowhere near as advanced as it is now.

I never denied that what's going on now is unprecedented. What annoys me is your assumption that nobody understood what was going on, until the Cold War was over, like a switch was flipped on a particular date and then people suddenly gained 20 IQ points and understood.

Our understanding of the science has gradually increased. No switch flipped.

 

[H4run]

We are living at the same time and worrying the same future. Unless one of us die first we are contemporary to one another.

 

[civvver]

I'm not going to go out and compare generations. When I think about the current climate I think about all those who lived through the great depression and how there was a lot more scarcity. I think each generation has their own challenges and to measure my pain is bigger than yours seems kind of pointless.

But regarding gaming, I never understood why world of warcraft designed the game to be such a gigantic time sink. I remember having to grind battlegrounds for 20 hours a week for 3-4 weeks just to get enough honor points for stupid pvp bracers. The reason I thought this was incredibly stupid was because the game is monthly subscription based. Whether someone plays 12 hours a day or 1 a week the price is the same. Mobile games I get it cus they make money off ads or packs you buy to speed up your progress, in warcraft there was no such thing. I guess they just wanted everyone hopelessly addicted but you can do that without grindy daily quests and such.

 

[Socrates99]

I miss having lower standards for video games. Every once in a while some game I loved 15-20 years ago comes on sale on Steam for like 79¢ or I'll track down a Genesis cartridge, or load up one of the retro games on the Switch online service thinking I can enjoy a revisit. Sometimes I am happy but more often than not the graphics are hard to look at or the controls are too clunky and I'm disappointed. Simple things used to keep me enthralled, now I feel kinda snobby.

I'm not going to go out and compare generations. When I think about the current climate I think about all those who lived through the great depression and how there was a lot more scarcity. I think each generation has their own challenges and to measure my pain is bigger than yours seems kind of pointless.

But regarding gaming, I never understood why world of warcraft designed the game to be such a gigantic time sink. I remember having to grind battlegrounds for 20 hours a week for 3-4 weeks just to get enough honor points for stupid pvp bracers. The reason I thought this was incredibly stupid was because the game is monthly subscription based. Whether someone plays 12 hours a day or 1 a week the price is the same. Mobile games I get it cus they make money off ads or packs you buy to speed up your progress, in warcraft there was no such thing. I guess they just wanted everyone hopelessly addicted but you can do that without grindy daily quests and such.

The time sink is what ultimately drove me away. Quit shortly after my first was born. Can't get into MMOs anymore.