Why does culture get less happy year after year? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why does culture get less happy year after year?

#31

Post by kstenerud » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 4:03 PM UTC

People looked happy in movies and TV because that's simply how it was done. One of the things that made shows like The Simpsons and Married With Children so revolutionary was their rebellion against this artificial happiness, peeling away the veneer to show the dysfunction that was always lurking beneath. This "peeling away of layers" defined much of the 90s, and eventually led to a kind of one-upmanship to see who could be the grittiest, the most provocative, the most extreme.

There's a similar revolution brewing at the moment in Japanese TV with the release of shows like The Naked Director.

Re: Why does culture get less happy year after year?

#32

Post by mikkergp » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

tomgp wrote: post #25

Feels like theres some cherry picking going on. eg whilst “the power rock of the ‘80s is… incredibly cheerful’ the 80s also played host to Joy Division and Suicidal Tendencies neither of whom exude incredible cheer (though the angst is expressed very differently). Similarly the cheerful rock’n’roll of the 1950s might be contrasted with the mournful blues and jazz which spawned it. Or what about the 50s novels of Rich…

The 80's also had some of the darkest horror and dystopian sci-fi that we've seen in popular culture. Interesting in the article he never mentions Seinfeld or Peanuts as those were turning points into more realistic or less sympathetic characters for their genres (tv comedy and comics respectively)

edit as I'm still reading: "The one note today’s entertainment strikes is the depressive tone" is an eye roll level of reductionism.

I'd be curious how the reduction in influence in religion has played a roll as well. The FCC rules on what you could say in TV/radio used to be downright archaic, and I think religion espouses this idea that good people are happy and everything turns out ok in the end because god.

Re: Why does culture get less happy year after year?

#33

Post by vehemenz » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 4:06 PM UTC

I don't know. Even if this anecdotal narrative has any merit, I'd still take doom-and-gloom over the recent infantile direction of popular music and film. Thankfully there's some decent TV still.

Re: Why does culture get less happy year after year?

#34

Post by superchroma » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 4:06 PM UTC

juanci_to wrote: post #11

superchroma wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or perhaps it's because the world is falling apart and we're on a solid trajectory to make it worse, and unlike a war, it's not something easy to bounce back from?

Let's be fair, humanity has been saying that everything is falling apart for centuries. There's in the front page a post that's named: "A brief history of nobody wants to work anymore"¹ that shows registers from as early as 1894 of media saying "Nobody wants to work anymore". Even the classic "Kids these days" can be tracked back to 624 BCE². Socrates said too something along those lines: «The children now love luxur…

Well, we've never had microplastics inside literally everything before, and I'm not too thrilled about it, and forever chemicals aren't too flash either. We get a pass for asbestos because the earth made it (thanks for nothing, gaia), and radiation because it goes away, but we've really taken the cake for worst idea with these things.

Re: Why does culture get less happy year after year?

#35

Post by nano9 » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 4:06 PM UTC

Not sure if this is a frame of reference effect, or maybe just a local minimum, but alternative/rock music from the early 00s was extremely depressing compared to the modern stuff (which seems to have settled into an abstract/esoteric niche). I have sometimes wondered why it seemed like depression was "cool" in the late 90s/early 00s. For instance, if you look up the lyrics for Chevelle - Send The Pain Below, you'd quickly realize such a song would set off a bunch of red flags in 2022, yet this was a song played daily on the radio.

Re: Why does culture get less happy year after year?

#36

Post by vitiral » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 4:08 PM UTC

sudosteph wrote: post #19

I'm of the opinion that most of the "dark, gritty" stuff we keep seeing in media just boils down to standard trend-chasing and market pressures to continue to use existing IPs. The cheesy, feel-good stuff from the 60s has already been done, so the darker stuff, especially when it's a darker take on those same characters, is still somewhat subversive to most viewers. When artists can't get real novelty, subversiveness…

A very measured take. I was personally of the opinion it was because we don't experience "real" problems today (mentioned by another commenter), but this is at least an equally plausible explanation for the media trends. Well done!

Re: Why does culture get less happy year after year?

#37

Post by vitiral » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 4:10 PM UTC

danjoredd wrote: post #27

mojuba wrote: post #13

Isn't it because depression and anxiety were taboo topics then? I think these topics have been normalized only relatively recently. Even in the 1980s none of the superstars would come out and admit they are suffering depression (Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson come to mind). Or a more recent "coming out" by Sinead O'Connor that she's in deep depression was a complete shock to me (and to many). I couldn't even wat…

True, but I also think the romanticization of depression is a factor as well. Just look at "Doomer" culture on the internet, or "black pill" types. Watch one of those videos on youtube, and all of a sudden you get a deluge of those types of vids. That is what I fear for future generations. When depression is seen as an aesthetic, some people(mostly teenagers) try to identify with it and accidentally end up depressed…

You can (and IMO should) disable youtube suggestions based on your past browsing. You can also have it only store 3 months worth of tracking (in case you ever turn the suggestions back on).

It definitely lowers the quality of the suggestions... but that's kind of the point.

Re: Why does culture get less happy year after year?

#38

Post by corrral » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 4:10 PM UTC

jamal-kumar wrote: post #24

corrral wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I frankly feel kinda great in a crisis. The more serious, the better. All the dumbest parts of my brain shut down and I do what has to be done. Squeamishness, fear, anxiety, second-guessing, rumination—all shoved in a closet and the door slammed. Gotta be an acute crisis I can do something about, though. "Climate change" or whatever doesn't trigger that state. If not for being pretty happy with being alive and having…

Isn't a great part of the occidental world going through 40°C heat waves right now? That doesn't concern you?

On the one hand, yeah, sure, on the other, that concern does nothing but hurt me. It's entirely pointless. You don't need to maintain a constant state of concern/anxiety to remember to work toward solutions to those sorts of things when possible.

And anyway, I only wrote that those kinds of things don't trigger that pleasant crisis-flow-state for me, not that I'm not worried about them.

Re: Why does culture get less happy year after year?

#39

Post by kokanator » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 4:11 PM UTC

Not having life and limb threats in our day to day lives does not mean our mind will not go seeking threats. Our mind will find/create a threat to arrive at some kind of balance. And, having no way to actually to react to a 'threat' our minds will terrorize us.

Though it is true the speaking of anxiety and depression has been normalized, there is a substantial non-linear spike in these maladies in our modern times that cannot be reconciled just with normality. Just take, for instance, what the 'threats' in social media are doing.[0]

The saying, 'all things are relative' applies here. If you have never experienced a true threat to your life, actually continuous threat and/or actual bodily harm, threats to your food or shelter then social media might be the meanest worst thing you have ever seen and thus a true terror to you.

[0] https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Haidt%20Testi...

Re: Why does culture get less happy year after year?

#40

Post by briga » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 4:13 PM UTC

The 50s were a sort of golden era for North America, it really did seem like opportunities were boundless for a while there. An average family could expect to own their own home and a car in the suburbs. The cities weren't as grossly over-crowded as they are now. California only had a quarter of the population it does today, just imagine how much more pleasant that must have been. There was no social media. No quick and easy access to mood-altering drugs. A culture that valued long-term committed relationships. There were no 24/7 new networks broadcasting minute-to-minute updates on the latest mass shooting or climate catastrophe. Certainly there were still issues back then, but maybe we've just made culture less happy over time. When I look at culture today it's hard for me to imagine where do we go from here.