Sometimes its better to listen rather than just being vocal all the time. You can learn more.
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2025
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Love how the emphasis isn't on communication. Don't read. Don't talk to eachother. Just sing patriotic/religious songs, and make sure to force everyone to participate. I'm hopeful this take was dud in 1938, as it should be today.
I'm noticing a certain level affluence in the left image. I wonder if people from poor families in that time period would look as fondly at a time before radios.
Boy, I don't remember where I got this information from... I think it was probably a radio show or podcast... maybe Radio Lab?
But the "kids these days" idea is extremely common throughout recorded history. Like there are records from ancient Greece where people are complaining that kids don't show the respect that they used to, and pining for the old days when people used to act better.
And you find the same sentiment over and over whenever in history you look, wherever people kept personal records.
Reminds me of this quote by George Orwell:
"Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it."
What's strange is, I'm 42, and I don't have that idea at all. I have it in reverse. I see stories on the news about how some kids in high school are protesting new laws, or banding together to get the whole school to do something wholesome for the disabled kid at prom, or hosting events to bring awareness from their town that gun violence has no place in schools, or the one story where a 12 year old solved some science thing that actual scientists were stumped on.
I see all that. They're trying to make the world a better place. They're dealing with a world that quite honestly is far darker and scarier than I grew up with. The world has shoved them into this mess and said "deal with it". And they are.
But then I look at boomers, and think "These assholes had everything handed to them growing up, took everything for themselves as adults, and now bitch and moan that there's nothing left to take now that they're elderly."
The kids are alright. Fuck the boomers though.
But if you look at the baby boomers when they were young, they were protesting things like the Vietnam War and marching against the government.
Perhaps it's not at all inconsistent. Although my politics are based on morality and I've gotten much more left wing as I get older, maybe a lot of people are just selfish assholes who make decisions with almost no information, and will support whatever politician promises them more money. When they're young, it manifests as progressive, and when they're old and have money, it manifests as conservative.
I want to make sure to emphasize that I think it's obvious that conservatives today back policies that make their constituents poorer, especially with regard to healthcare. But if you're uneducated and don't know anything, politicians can just say the words "lower taxes", and greedy dumb fucks will flock to them.
I know. And I get it. And I'm old and wise enough to know I don't know anything about anything.
Also, I know I'm as wistful of my youthful times as my great grandfather probably was, but the world today vs the 80s/early 90s... The Internet thing is an epoch shift. It's crazy that our grandparents grew up without planes in the sky and we're expected to navigate cable news, yes, I get that.
But to go from.. the world.. to.. the world plus the globally interconnected virtual world.. is fucking nuts. I had lots of screens. I wrote code on a CRT in 88 and fucked with my share of bunny ears or played Civ 1 for entire school breaks. It's not just screens. The library of Alexandria x a million in our pockets, everyone everywhere all the times accessible to one another, constant surveillance from walking down the block to our most private digital thought, all of it capitalized and personalized to perfection to encourage obsession and consumption and spending.
I have one of the rare boomer parents, that for however crazy she is, she's flat out said, "I understand it's impossible to get a mortgage and get started these days. I don't understand how kids go to college and start careers." Vs "but we did more with less. Fuck off."
These are actually different times. Things were less anxious and bombarding and all consuming.
Just about every change in communication technologies has caused social and political turmoil
- the printing press
- radio
- TV
- the internet
- social media
One possible explanation is that, new forms of communication often don't have as much social regulations (intrinsic or extrinsic), which cause the proliferation of socially unacceptable ideas and conspiracy theory
There are a couple of YouTube videos by Hank Green that go into this topic
That's not to say that i don't feel the "doomscroll depression", or that things will 100% get better. Just that there's a historical trend, and we happen to be in the dip of the largest communications tech change in history
It's different because it's 24/7, and global. But it's the same pattern
Could’ve been the Pessimists Archive (later renamed Build For Tomorrow, and now apparently Human Progress? Idk man): https://humanprogress.org/pessimists-archive-podcast-ep-18-kids-these-days
Kids! They’re lazy, narcissistic, and disrespectful — or so says the older generation. But when you look back through history, you’ll discover that older generations have been saying a version of the same thing for thousands of years. Our question is: Why? And we found an answer
Too lazy to hear people leisurely talking, but in my experience, a proportion of people are lazy, narcissistic, and disrespectful regardless of age. Kids make that more obvious because they’re supposed to obey their parents until they emancipate, but kids want the best of both worlds: protection AND independence.
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Humans spent 99% of history living in bands of about 200 people. It was in everyone's interest to make sure the rest of the tribe was well fed and happy.
Then farming came along...
Humans spent 99% of history living in bands of about 200 people
I think at that size it's called an orchestra
Oh! Cleveland actually has an AMAZING orchestra! One of the top rated in the world actually. They're very good.
A Tribe Called Cleveland
... people settled, setup markets and markets were used to exchange goods and services, but most importantly, hearsay and gossip.
Seeing more and more respect given to Indigineous wisdom on here and I gotta say I'm 100% loving it.
I think this is completely legit. I grew up in an area with some local people who would just get around some instruments and sing to pass the time and I think it is fucked up that this isn't more normal. It's so enriching to just sing and make music like that even if it's not for anyone (maybe especially so). I do think that it's better to do things like this because it's an active collaboration between everyone instead of passive enjoyment, unlike sitting in a room listening to music or sitting in separate rooms watching tik toks
This is great if you enjoy singing. But if you don't enjoy singing and you're forced to do it because your family is like "this is family time and we're going to do this" then it's pure fucking torture.
This applies to literally anything though. Movies, tv, etc
Yes, the problem in my eyes is people with nostalgia for times they thought were perfect and trying to enforce those on younger generations.
Edit: I should add, to me that's what this cartoon represents. An older generation waxing nostalgic about how lives were when they were young and frowning upon the younger generation doing their own thing. And it's a cartoon that has been remade many many times, it's basically one of the oldest memes.
Is the family listening to a radio?
Kids these days. Lazing around all dressed up nicely in the room with their family listening to the radio. What has society come to?
That's what people would do before TVs became common. In addition to music, there were all sorts of radio shows with voice acting and sound effects and stuff.
Is this what the kids mean by aura farming? 🤔
Playing standing up is weirdly horrible, as your fingers come in from slightly above instead of slightly below.
While I agree older generations are always complaining about the habits of newers ones, always dooming everything, and that progress is good and unavoidable...
...I honestly do think we should sometimes sit down and re-evaluate if older habits have a place and if their criticism can bring some truth. I've been moving away from the hyper-connected and convenient modernity we live in and adopting older habits like writing my notes with paper and pen, under a candle light, and it's honestly been fantastic for me, just as an example.
I don't think the technology is ever really the problem it's just how people act towards other people that matters regardless of the medium.
The whole gamergate thing was no different than a bunch of sexist male chess players in the 1930s complaining about women competing for the first time. I cannot imagine that evening 100 years will be free of racism and sexism and otherism in general.
I do think we have this knee-jerk reaction to reject things from older generations because it seems outdated, but honestly a lot of life advice that gets passed down has persisted so long because it works.
We also have a tendency to reject things from newer generations as immature. I guess thoughtful change is the happy medium.
Sometimes when my family comes into town we'll grab what instruments we play and jam along to whatever someone wants to sing.
It's a way that people have made art together for centuries. Before modern recording, the only way you'd hear music was if someone you knew made it.
I love listening to recorded music, but I do think people are missing out if they don't have a way to make music with others. There's a magic to it.
I know I'm taking this comic too seriously, but I'm a big fan of Benny Goodman's music and 1938 was the year they played the famous Carnegie Hall concert. These 1938 people could be listening to some great music there for the first time. I'm envious.
For reference, people could see a concert by a band for just a few cents back then too.
$2.30 (adjusted 2025) to see Benny Goodman and his Orchestra? Sold
His concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City on January 16, 1938, is described by critic Bruce Eder as "the single most important jazz or popular music concert in history: jazz's 'coming out' party to the world of 'respectable' music."
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Benny Goodman on the Let's Dance show was around 1934-1935.
Possibly the concert for this poster was from after that, but let's use 1935 as a reference.
According to an inflation calculator, 10 cents is worth $2.36 today.
That's still a pretty cheap concert ticket by today's standards!
Ticketmaster had yet to enslave everybody.
Growing up, these were the vinyls of my dad's I got excited about. I had my Zepp and Pearl Jam tapes but this wasn't what I'd be buying at J&R or Sam Goody, so it was a treat.
Sidenote: we went to Wayne's World in theaters on a Cub Scouts trip (different era...) for some reason. We came home and I remember not even completely on the door raving about this awesome song from the beginning of the movie. Somehow he knows wtf I'm on about, and beckons me to the record player in the den, puts on Night at the Opera and blows my mind. First time actually listening to records with the old man, not just having them on and me also existing.
I really doubt the first panel was representative of a random "evening at home" for most people, even in the 1900s.
What do you think they did in the evenings?
Reading. There are plenty of complaints from ever since the printing press about people using books to ignore each other. It wasn't really all that different from tv or phones. I don't think first panel family is older than mass production of novels.
Also not everyone had a fucking piano
Yeah, I was going to say, unless there was a mysterious time period when grand pianos were a product of mass consumption, first panel is like the 0.01%.
And even then. I'm sure some people played music in the evening (including more accessible instruments). More than today, sure, maybe. Some might sing once in a while to, why not.
The full-on family choir around an instrument every evening, as a thing that happened widely, is where I'm calling bullshit.
But you don't need music to sing
For many families, singing was nightly event. At least several times weekly.
Lots of families had only a few books and sometimes access to libraries.
But yeah
And then.... Karaoke
No, we fire ze mizzles!
Is mom smoking a doobie in the second panel? I've never seen anyone hold a cigarette like that...
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