Great Washington Post nostalgia study. Adults think U.S. society was historically nicest and comfiest—most moral and close-knit, families happiest—whenever they happened to be little kids, and culture (music, movies, TV, fashion, sports, food) best whenever they were adolescents. wapo.st/3WXd9xS
Cool. Now ask why - because that's when you felt safe, and that's when things were new (to you).
When they had no responsibilities because their families took care of their basic needs. I think this applies more to people with reasonably secure childhoods.
Good thing my childhood sucked so I don't have nostalgia at all.
I need to see this over age of the people answering, to verify it's not just averaging towards 1989 over the entire population.
OK I can understand all this except television. Television was unwatchable until I was well into middle age and now it’s great 😛
It used to be great (well past my adolescence). Then streaming execs and people who are content to watch garbage ruined it.
feeling incredibly smug about my own answers to this. like i'd have to have a head injury to think that the late 90s/early 2000s were "the most moral society"
I was a kid in the 80s and a teen in the 90s, and I feel you. Those periods sucked in most every way. And even as a teen I felt like the choices being made economically were unsustainable and would damn us. And there was no morality to be found anywhere that wasn't hypocritical and self-serving.
yeah. maybe this is just a consequence of where i was living, but i definitely feel like everyone was just kind of a prick when i was growing up lol. both my peers and the adults supervising us. and then the reaction to 9/11 was totally unhinged like fucking hell lol.
Yeah, as a CSA survivor I never looked back on my childhood kindly in general. So that might've been immunizing me to the nostalgia effect. Everything was getting worse and nobody was sheltering me from it lol
damn yeah i can imagine that would definitely torpedo any chance at having rose colored glasses.
Didn't help that I liked to read the news in depth. So I was the kind of nerdy teen who came away from reading a paper, outraged, "Why the hell did the liberal government just forgive billions in loans to banks declaring record profits, then saying we have to cut social programs?!"
As adolescents, we have a very limited knowledge of the world, especially the evils. As kids, we have few responsibilities, and big shiny world to explore. Compared to the struggles that come with growing up, working, paying bills, of course we will look back to this age as favorite.
Ah, but when was the Washington Post best?
Specifically, as opposed to "most reliable news reporting" in general?
They pretty much peaked with Watergate, and I was young for that.
*nod*
I think the 90's were peak societal moment. Largely prosperous and peaceful. Before the Internet. I was in my 40's.
There’s a whole world of underprivileged teenagers at the time doing SO MANY drugs that had the opposite experience entirely. They are now damaged elder millennials (esp if they did a tour in Iraq). People really do live in bubbles.
I have no doubt; every society in any era has problems. If the situation you describe is better now, I am truly glad for that.
The drugs were better back when I did them.
I'm an outlier. Even as a kid I knew the mid/late 1960s were tumultuous times (I remember coverage of the RFK and MLKjr assassinations, body counts, protests). And the early 1970s were awful, awful for teen nerds/geeks.
I remember sitting in front of the TV watching a diagram of RFK's head wound. The only good thing about that is that now we'd get computer animation of the bullet's path through his skull, from the bullet's POV.
thinking really hard about why i didn't notice propaganda when I was 9 years old. probably because there wasnt any
Do Gen X’ers do nostalgia? Isn’t that a bit…mawkish? My fashion concerns are “does that come in black” I think we try and avoid perky music from any era. Excuse me while I go listen to Black Hole Sun.
Based on a completely objective survey (n=1) in my home, these results are bollocks.
It's pretty easy to take this as a biological rule, but it's more likely that the basic state of the economy-- a system that treats entrants as an unfortunate and temporary expense, to be disposed of as quickly as possible-- hasn't changed since at least the 1950s.
Ah 8-12 that magical time when kids are learning that thier parents are lying sacks of shit using them for social clout, and that no, other kids parents/families don't necessarily treat them in certain ways, and they latch onto TV families instead. (Exaggeration for somewhat dark comedic effect)
This is an incredible study!
Somebody else was paying the bills when you're younger.
Of course people think this. Everyone is nostalgic for a time when their lives were simple, it doesn’t get any simpler than when you’re a child and you have no responsibility. People need to grow up. As to culture, My parents derided the idea that any music in the 70’s would be remembered fondly
When I was a kid they were trying to make the kind of marriage I wanted illegal in the state constitution
I think all the good stuff happened before I was born. It feels like nostalgia though? I thought this as a youth so the markers of this time remind me of my youth.
The one category I can't believe this works for is food. The options today are just vastly greater/better
I think they are better, but not by much. If you live in a larger city the food quality and availability does not change that much over time. (Although, the impact of the COVID lockdowns on small family restaurants has been terrible things are getting better.)
If by cuisine they mean the ability in increasingly smaller cities to get better quality ethnic food cooked by natives, then it’s been up and to the right for decades now.
Look at all the movies that came out in 1984 and I don’t know how anyone can say that any other single year was better. Ghostbusters, Gremlins, an Indiana Jones movie, Karate Kid, Police Academy, a Star Trek, Terminator, Last Starfighter, A Christmas Story… www.boxofficemojo.com/year/1984/
Face it, ya peaked at 10 years old. See, this is why we can't have nice things.
Well, we’re gonna fix that with this generation.
Music is the least surprising imo.
The world was "best" when you were still too little to understand how the world really was.
Eh. We don't do nostalgia as well as we did back in the day.
True mf story!
The US Peaked in 1986 - this is a KNOWN FACT.
Subconscious coping mechanism to help people accept the inevitability of death... dying don't feel nearly as bad if you think the whole world has gone down the shitter in just your short lifetime.
If universal pessimism is cope given that it makes death easier to accept, I'd hate to see seethe.
I hope to god this trend dips for those born in the 80s, because there’s just no way of looking at that decade and seeing peak morality
Laughing and crying at once thinking about my two kids someday thinking ify this current moment as a time when America was most moral and caring.
I can't help but think of the droll old chestnut (attributed to fan Peter Graham) that the "Golden Age" of science fiction is "thirteen."
This is one of those polls that supports an intuitive idea but is methodologically junk at least as presented.
The distribution would basically have the same intuition if people were asked and then gave smaller ranges.
Which you know because... vibes?
I mean it's going to shift the age someone is referring to by four years at most, which would still show a peak at some younger age in the past. Arguably compressing things to the midpoint might be making the peaks flatter than the true distribution
Sure but thats not the only confounding variable. The poll is apparently lumping age groups together on the sample end and being inprecise about what they're referring to in responses, which makes the results unreliable for any real identifiable cohort.
You don't like the "We artificially picked the middle of the decade" disclaimer at the bottom? Lol, just ridiculous on their part.
Yup. 1981, 1985, and 1989 are not all "the 80s" for anything they're looking at. And the subgroup sampling is going to have like 9% margin of errors for relevant cohorts.
I didn't get even get to the subgroup sampling before dismissing it as useless. Good catch.
It’s a dumb question imo
Oh, yeah. You ever notice how many people act as if all pop culture--music especially--stopped the minute they graduated from high school or college? Their tastes ossify at that point and NEVER CHANGE.
I seem to clearly remember the mid 90's as being violent as hell and also stunningly wack culturally? Stupid ADD-Recall Brain won't even nostalgia correctly
Ah, to once again experience the cheese ball, and the laugh track...
Another massively subjective opinion poll pretending to be "data". These people also thought that climate change was a joke, dot com and real estate were life long investments and yellow-cake patriotism was real ....
I suppose we had low political division, but it was in service of Reagan (ick).
Child of April 69. And music took a hell of a plunge in 83, hitting its nadir in 87: only 2-3 hits of the entire year's top 100 remain fresh. I've gone to a couple HS reunions and I like seeing old friends, but hate listening to that swill.
‘Except music’ was my take on this entirely- strong agree. And nostalgia is because it’s hard as crap to make friends as an adult, and the weight of the world is now on your own shoulders. (At least a lot of folks had pensions in those days. Unchecked capitalism has done its thing…)
Yeah, John Oliver did a piece on this back on the daily show a very long time ago and I’ve never forgotten it. The good old days were when people were children and didn’t actually have to deal with any of the shit that was going on.
These people are insane, I remember people complaining in every decade. Radio is a special case because it is kind of dead now, so it probably was better at any time in the past.
Were there any younger millennials in this study? Like, at all? Because I have very vivid memories of the Great Recession years that are around that high point in this graph, and lemme tell you, I would not rank a single one of those highly
I have this conversation with my Mom all the time. Are things really as bad as Fox News tells you, or do you just know about them now?
It's just The Onion's "All-Time Best Year For Movies Was When You Were Twelve." write large.
The older I get, the more I appreciate what an insidious and malignant force nostalgia is
nostalgia: a dog puking then eating its own puke.
I think it’s gotten worse, nostalgia used to be way better when I was a kid
That reminds me, I really think there should be a new version of American Graffiti that takes place around 1999-2000.
If it came out this year it would take place in 2013! And you know, that might just be nostalgic enough!
"Happy Days" would be early 2000s as well. Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
It’s basically powered by resentment about aging, and probably that is powered by fear of death, nothing good comes from those things
Except Gen-Xers can actually point to a couple of objective reasons (TCA of 1996, MP3's/Loudness war) for why music and radio had already peaked by the mid 90's and it's been downhill ever since.
also like, what even is "radio" anymore, like are we still only talking about AM/FM? bc how much cultural relevance does that have anymore vs like, the discovery algorithms on spotify my son is 13 and i don't think he's ever listened to "radio" in the traditional terrestrial broadcast sense
Yeah, "radio's" demise was inevitable, but as the framework of music broadcasting, I would sign-on to that characterization of streaming algorithms being the successor And there are valid reasons for thinking that they are objectively worse, prioritizing homogenized commerce over art
It’s related to the phenomenon by which pop music peaked when I was most emotionally vulnerable to trite love songs
Went to a show on Saturday with an 80s & 90s cover band. They were great! Everyone in the audience had grey or white hair and I was like "Oh no"
Shades of: "The classic rock station has started to play the music I switched to classic rock to avoid."
That's how you know the Dahaka has found you
I asked my Dad recently when did his rock stations started calling it "Classic Rock" after I was complaining about how the local classic rock station started playing 90's rock. And he said it was right around 1990.
The (totally not subjective) problem is that we're in the awkward period where they're also still playing 70s and 80s rock
90s rock needs to be called "neo-classical rock". Problem solved.
R E T V R N (Eddie Vedder's Version)
I remember when the local classic rock station didn't even play 80s stuff and would play stuff from the late 50s through the 70s. This was in the mid-90s. Now they play tool, bush, and occasionally Korn.
I remember my grandpa had Perry Como tapes in his Buick (with the front-row bench seat) and, well, Every Rose Has Its Thorn is older today than a lot of Perry's music was in 1988
Ahhh...front row benches. Been a long time. And yeah, we're really hanging tight on nostalgia. Like dazed and confused was only 17 years apart from its time period. Like if Superbad were shot today but still set in 2007. I think I just turned to dust.
My *favorite* music is that of the early 90s, when I was indeed in my tween/early teens, but I tend to break with other middle aged folks in remaining stuck exclusively in that time. I’ve found lots to enjoy about every era of music in my lifetime (and many eras before it).
For me TV was mostly best before the reality TV revolution. Society was best in the months before before 9/11. Sports were best before so many leagues greatly expanded playoff eligibility. Gaming was best during the PS3 era (2006-13; mid-20s to early-30s). The economy is best right now.
Yeah, I still listen to a lot of stuff from the 90's, but thanks to places like Bandcamp (and money!) I still get tons of new stuff and it's all really good. It helps that I got into different genres over time, so I'm always discovering new things.
I think my source is a half-remembered Cracked article, but isn’t a theory that everyone thinks the music of their teens was the best because melatonin production drops off as we age? We’re literally biochemically less passionate later on.
How any Gen-Xer can think families were happiest when we were kids completely escapes me.
They didn't ask me...mfs
Sometimes people ask me what it was like growing up in Aotearoa/NZ. I've never really been able to answer that, because in addition to *where* I was there's also *who* I was (a child) and *when* that was (70s mostly). They're all entangled. It's impossible for me to say which I'm nostalgic for.
The author of the greatest description of Trump - the short- fingered vulgarian. Been a big fan since my magazine days in New York City in the 80s and 90s.
oooh, forgot about that. We need to bring that one back.
Haha and it still haunts him
🙂
Almost no one in Gen X or Gen Z thinks that. Only Boomers think this before they totaled the country.
If you've ever argued with someone of a different age about what era of Saturday Night Live was best, you've already experienced this phenomenon.
This is 100% reflected by Alito, Rufo, Hannity, etc. They all long for their childhood perspectives of America.
Can't escape politics in any post can we?
We can't escape politics at all.
Out here in the free world politics is about everyday life.
Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, is politics. And the only people who claim otherwise and complain about it is right wing people.
this post was very literally and obviously about the core of the conservative mindset. if you didn't make that connection you're kind of a dimwit?
How is nostalgia 'literally and obviously' political you insecure fucking moron?
You're going to have a great time here
this isnt even worth a reply, but have you checked in on any right wing and/or fascist political movement in the last, i dont know, 100 years? do you remember any of their slogans or values? eagerly awaiting your response 👍
do you know what the verb "to conserve" means? do you know what US "conservatives" want, and why? once you've got those figured out, there's a small mental leap you'll need to take to connect those things with a different word, "nostalgia". we all made that leap right away. take your time
Calm down galaxy brain
thanks furry with three posts, you seem cool
"Why does everything on the Internet - which is the direct result of policy decisions to fund DARPA and NASA and shift vast quantities of resources via democratic processes - have to do with politics?!?"
Politics is literally the focus of the article. “Apparently, you could argue that nostalgia is colored by political preferences. Surprise, surprise.”
Yes, this post is about why we can't.
are you a. fucking idiot
They all want to live accountability free like generations of white men have in this country—internet has made it too easy for so many folks to SEE how horribly men with unchecked power and no accountability choose to behave
I think this is also when the rules for any sport in question were the best, most pure, and every rule change since has been an abomination.
Every generation thinks it invented sex...
Pop culture was best when I was in high school and just after. Everything else was best when I was too young to know what was going on.
Super interesting. I wonder if there is any tangible connection to that age and the emergence of consciousness and/or memories being “saved” by the brain. I didn’t read the article yet.
Can report that this doesn't work at all for the early 70s
It does for music
Right? I just posted that. Add 80s, AIDS crisis adolescence on top of that 70s, Vietnam War unsettledness and violence. This is just all the nopes.
I can see it.
As I described it once; You miss the taste of cereal before your parents divorced.
@intelwire.bsky.social Is it not weird that music has one of the most clear absolute peaks (70s), but also the narrowest peak in the age-based charts?
Ah you beat me to it
Make America Childhood/Adolescence Again.
Those people didn't have their big brother John pinning them to the floor and farting on their heads when they were little kids, apparently.
That is very interesting, and not surprising at all. I also note that I differ slithtly from the "norm" in two areas. I think that both music and movies were at their peak when i was 20-30.
And I am WAY off regarding tv. Today's shows are a lot better than the crap they made when i was young. By that I do mean what the streamingservices provide, not the awful reality-shows on regular tv.
An interesting study, but also how extremely unsurprising.
File this under "No shit, Sherlock" and "Someone actually paid for this study?"
So the best times were before any real sense of responsibility, and the best culture was during the formation of an identity? 🤔
bsky.app/profile/torr...
soooo... they proved 80s music is best!
I wonder how they calculated the error bars when this seems to be a fairly large rounding bias.
Was wondering the same thing. I mean, if they got 2,000 evenly distributed adults from age 18-80ish, that's a lot more opportunities to answer ages 20-younger than it is to answer ages 40+. I suspect bad sample design.
And the 1960s and 70s were comfortable for me in particular but not necessarily the country or the world in general. Have a Cold War, some race riots, a couple of oil boycotts, or some stagflation perhaps? *shakes head at people's collective amnesia*
*blinks* Huh. I grew up in the 1960s and 70s. I hit adulthood and concluded they were some of the tackiest, ugliest stylistic decades for centuries. I shuddered when the "retro" cycle hit them. No nostalgia.
LMAO. The good old days were neither Good or Kind.
We never get the world we believe that we will inherit
When other people do this it’s evidence of flawed thinking and reasoning, and should be condemned When I do it, it’s obviously correct
I’m trying to think of any argument that food has gotten worse as time has gone on…
Maybe you could make some case for more additives, more processing, some degree of resentment toward "fake meat" in certain quarters, less healthy, more fast food, etc. They're mostly wrong but it is at least an angle.
Yeah, I think there is a strong argument that basic food quality has definitely declined at some point in the past. But given the word “cuisine” I think they mean restaurants.
Fascinating use of data, and one that makes intuitive sense. I’ve even noticed myself listening a lot now to music from that period of my life that I didn’t listen to then. Movies, sports, food though….no. Especially food.
yea but in the case of the 90s it was actually true
But the best video games did come out in the 90's. It's objective fact 😌
Really damning stuff. “Society was best before I knew what was going on” and “Culture was best when I first started paying attention.” Those dorks need to grow up and adjust to reality
Nostalgia, baby! Best drug in the world!
Source : Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures
I was 10 in ‘84 and 16 in 1990, so it doesn’t work for me. Crime and crack were everywhere, being shot at was normal, and we knew our music was inferior to what was written for our parents generation. Maybe TV was better without a million streaming platforms for all the garbage that’s out there now.
How is this not definitive proof that humans are constitutionally idiots that are incapable of groth
Hmmm … mine seem to cluster around the late 1920s and right now.
"Life was best when I was slim, had all my hair and could fuck all night long"
It’s funny having twenty-something kids and watching nostalgia take root in real time.
I wonder if there's a dip in the fashion data for folks born 1958-1962. The purple turtleneck and rainbow striped white jeans I wore in 1974 is the stuff of pure cringe now.
Which is fine if you were a socially aware 11 year old, which most 11 year olds are not.
Let me think... I don't really fit into the nostalgia era.
Why am I laughing? Because I was raised on Disney films and my parents’ niche taste in music (and then more Disney), so I have no idea when the culture was “good.”
Nostalgia blinds us all
