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430 points mhb | 24 comments | | HN request time: 0.359s | source | bottom
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techblueberry ◴[] No.46177361[source]
I will pre-empt this by saying I most certainly look to the past with rose colored glasses, and some of this is for sure childhood nostalgia, but one thing I appreciate about the aesthetics of the past is they felt more… Honest; for lack of a better term. Things made out of wood and metal were actually made out of hardwood and metal. Not so many composites that fall apart instead of wear ala wabi-sabi. So I think there’s something to the fact that the past was kind of “cute”, just not in all storybook way.

Theres a lake I visit in the summer that I’ve been visiting since the 80’s, and the houses used to all be wood cottages with no fences, now they’re all mansions, many walled off. Sure the houses weren’t insulated, and you would be crammed in there together, but it felt way more…. Human? Communal?

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1. samdoesnothing ◴[] No.46177398[source]
I wonder why it is that the past seems more real and the present dishonest and fake? Is it simply that it is?
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2. margalabargala ◴[] No.46177461[source]
It has a lot to do with the way our memories form and what memories our brains choose to construct from experiences.

The past was not more "real" than present day reality.

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3. vacuity ◴[] No.46177498[source]
At the same time, it's arguable that certain observations such as "commercialization and commoditization have become stronger" are true. We're certainly living in an era where a lot can change in a few decades.
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4. techblueberry ◴[] No.46177500[source]
I mean - to one extent, concretely in the aesthetic ways I’m talking it was technologically we just had simpler materials. Cars had knobs and levers instead of touchscreens.

Like, so much of what I do today happens online instead of the real world, so I do think you can describe ways in which life or the world really has gotten more “fake”.

Though some of this is funny too? I remember things from the say 50’s to the 80’w as being more “real” and that’s also the like rise of TV dinners and everything eaten out of a can, rather than “real” ingredients.

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5. ◴[] No.46177578[source]
6. sublinear ◴[] No.46177598[source]
People focus too much on the new and not enough on the rest. Of course what's new is going to seem fake because it is. Nobody has figured it out yet. The rest never changed or has improved significantly.

Anyone older than about 30 who takes a few minutes to reflect on all the little details of daily life could probably come up with a surprisingly long list of annoying little inconveniences they no longer have to deal with. Beyond that we've had decades worth of casually raising the bar for what is considered common sense and polite. These are the "real" things we take for granted.

7. imgabe ◴[] No.46177683[source]
It's just focusing on different things. Sure they had wood and metal tools, but they also had literal snake oil, watered stock, and people selling you the Brooklyn Bridge.
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8. pixl97 ◴[] No.46177688{3}[source]
>living in an era where a lot can change in a few decades

So were people in 1910. You could say the printing press set up the following industrial revolution and things have been accelerating ever since. People talk that in the future there will be a technological singularity that things will go so fast people won't be able to keep up, but really in many ways we've been in it for a while already and it's still accelerating.

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9. pixl97 ◴[] No.46177725[source]
>50’s to the 80’w as being more “real”

Yea, people really are out of touch with what was going on around them. Naugahyde, for example was invented in 1914. Fake wood on cars started in the 1940s! It is very likely people remembering the 'real' stuff were quite often talking about objects that were far older.

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10. stephen_g ◴[] No.46177860[source]
Modern manufacturing and materials science let us create imitation materials at huge quantity and low cost that wasn’t possible before about the ‘50s-60s.

So you just used to use real materials out of necessity

11. SpicyLemonZest ◴[] No.46178610[source]
People forget the ways in which the past was fake. Fake butter, for example, was more common than real butter from the 1950s up until the early 2000s. But most people don't eat margarine anymore and so most people don't remember it.
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12. bsenftner ◴[] No.46178670[source]
People don't learn history, and I'm not talking about the wars and battles BS that they use to glorify going to war. I mean real history: biographies of the lives of real and ordinary people. Not the history makers, the people that lived through and had the mind to record their lives for prosperity.

Case in point, this notion that the past as "more real" and the present "more fake"... the amount of fake doctors, fake medicine, religious revivals that were actually fleecing entire towns into destitution was out of control. The "wild west" it truly was, and the law was owning a gun because everyone was desperate.

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13. msla ◴[] No.46178780[source]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_sack_dress

> Feed sack dresses, flour sack dresses, or feedsack dresses were a common article of clothing in rural US and Canadian communities from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century. They were made at home, usually by women, using the cotton sacks in which flour, sugar, animal feed, seeds, and other commodities were packaged, shipped, and sold. They became an iconic part of rural life from the 1920s through the Great Depression, World War II, and post-World War II years.

Good, Honest, Old-Fashioned Clothing was Consumerism, too, bucko.

> During World War II it was estimated that 3 million women and children in the United States were wearing feed sack clothing at any given point in time.[7][14] One participant in an oral history project stated that "everything on the clothesline was from feed sacks."[2] The US Department of Agriculture reported in 1951 that 75% of mothers living in urban areas and 97% of those living in rural areas had heard of making garments from feed sacks.[15]

Did Granny make clothes from scratch? Did she, Hell! She bought cloth from a Large Evil Corporation what with the Dark Satanic Mills and Finance Capitalism and she was mainly unhappy she couldn't spend more:

> There was an element of shame experienced by those dressed in flour sack clothing, as it was seen as a mark of poverty, so efforts were often made to hide the fact the clothing was made from feed sacks, such as soaking off logos, dying the fabric, or adding trim.

Our ancestors would be appalled at people wanting to go back to The Good Old Days. They fought and struggled mightily against what the Cottagecore Losers on their Laptops and iPods want.

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14. lo_zamoyski ◴[] No.46178783[source]
> Not the history makers

Even the so-called "history makers" are the product of imagination, of myth, and of hagiography. If you met these people today, you wouldn't recognize them if you went by the expectations built up by the images we're fed. The same holds of so-called celebrities.

15. _DeadFred_ ◴[] No.46179325{4}[source]
My grandfather rode to school on a horse, saw the last of the nomadic native peoples traveling Iowa, watched polio ruin lives and bring fear, then watched science conquer polio. Watched humans conquer the sky and land on the moon, fought mechanised island warfare as a sent in Marine in the pacific on the side of half the world fighting against the other half of the world. Personally saw the damage of nuclear war in occupied Japan, then watched the world build a 15 minute system for mutually assured nuclear destruction (MAD). Went from mail to shared rural 'party' phone lines, and ended his life with a world connected with a global knowledge network to every home and free video calls to anywhere in the world. He went from canned zucchini/beats in the winter to access to whatever fresh produce (and more importantly ice cream) he wanted all year long.

Unless we make some major breakthroughs, I don't think there will ever be another generation of change like that one.

16. card_zero ◴[] No.46179541{3}[source]
1861, mauvine: all sorts of women wear a startling shade of synthetic purple. 1862, now it's Parkesine: the new fad is shiny plastic-coated boots.
17. Aloha ◴[] No.46180061[source]
Your tone is a bit acerbic - but most of your facts are correct.

Part of what was driving feedsack dresses was the agricultural depression from 1918-1939/40

18. Qwertious ◴[] No.46180241[source]
Hey buddy, I'll sell you the Brooklyn bridge for $5 - just post a screenshot of you donating $5 to FSFE and I'll PM you the title deed.
19. Qwertious ◴[] No.46180255[source]
Most cowboys didn't own a gun - a gun was a month's pay, and nobody with that sort of money worked as a cowboy.
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20. bazoom42 ◴[] No.46180441[source]
As far back as we have written records, we have the notion that people in past were better and more honest and the present day is corrupted.

Classical antiquity had the notion of a lost golden age and a heroic age in past, while later times considered the classical antiquity as the lost golden age. Victorians romanticized the middle ages, while we romantisize the victorians.

It is just easier to see the flaws and imperfections in the present. And there is the survivorship bias: Quality products and buildings survive, while low quality crap is destroyed and lost. The swords survive but the pointy sticks are lost. The good music survive but the crap is forgotten.

21. bsenftner ◴[] No.46181161{3}[source]
20% to 25% of the cowboys were Black, and that aspect of history has been erased. Hollywood, propagandists and media's efforts to glorify, White wash, and profit off the American West Frontier has 100% distorted our history. It was much closer to this "the past was not cute", and then add in rampant corruption, criminal and religious criminal activity and you art starting to get there.

We are a propaganda nation, far better at it than any other on Earth.

22. ocschwar ◴[] No.46181664[source]
My childhood was dominated by the smell of licorice in some places because chocolate was too expensive.
23. bluefirebrand ◴[] No.46182821[source]
The threat of physical violence was a lot more present and real in the past

I think there is a lot of shady and dishonest business that happens now that would get you killed in the past

24. techblueberry ◴[] No.46205690[source]
Actually the history of real people is my main area of interest :-). I stand by what I said, but I way understand you have to sort of blur your vision and take the bigger 60%, this is not the 99%, also the article was specifically about aesthetics, which is inherently a more rose colored glasses approach. I’m not sure that there’s any era I’d rather live in than today (though this is a nuanced question, since you wouldn’t know better, and I do think we’re in sort of a local minima so for sure I’d rather live in like the early 2000’s and maybe before, probably no earlier than auto-bill pay, digital banking and modern dentistry lol.). But there are many eras I would like to travel to for the aesthetic.