“You’re just nostalgic!”
They will say when you point out the fact that everything today is crumbling around us.
Where every McDonalds has transformed into a grey box without a playplace - because the playplace would mean people stay longer without paying more money, and the grey box can be sold in the future when divestment is on the table.
We live in a world where the food that we eat is less nutrient dense than it was 20 years ago - and a 1/3rd the size of what it used to be, while being 3x as expensive.
That the men all have half of the sperm count and testosterone they did even 30 years ago.
That the car that you drive is built far worse than it was in the 90s and spying on you - because it wasn’t enough to sell you the car and the maintenance - they have to sell your data, too.
That the house you live in is built with garbage materials, the corners cut so that the builder can achieve 0.025% more margin. The home is meant to get to the day after the builder’s warranty expires, not even make it to the end of the decade.
That in a world of “infinite streaming”, there is nothing to watch. Where the technology you use is continually selling out your privacy and sanity, while you are not permitted to own any of the media you supposedly “buy”. Where everything is locked behind a log-in screen or a paywall.
The phone you buy is manufactured to die in 2.75 years so that you must buy another. But not just your phone - your furnace, your car, your walls, your oven, your washing machine and dryer, your computer, everything is meant to /break/ - because if it lasted, you wouldn’t spend more money.
Every idea just being re-hashed for corporate profit, nothing new has been said in 20 years.
That the things that you have written or recorded are now training data for “AI”. The books that you could be reading are being bought up by “AI” companies, only to destroy them after ingesting them.
“But we live longer!” The bugman proclaims as if the length of life is the only metric by which we can gauge life. “But there’s so many things to do!” He proclaims as he eats the slop, consooms the media, and votes for the politician he is supposed to vote for.
Everything is getting more pricey, yet you get less every year. Nothing works well, and yet we are called nostalgic when we long for a time that at least we owned the things we paid money for. You essentially have to build everything yourself nowadays if you want any semblance of quality and longevity. The only way forward is radical self reliance. I refuse to pay for things that don’t last, that are meant to break on me, that are meant to trap me into an ecosystem I cannot escape.
No - it’s not nostalgia.
Things just really are worse.
As always, God bless, and until next time.
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