No, clearly I ain’t got no culture.

The boomers would probably get that one better, but I doubt there’s any kind of boomer community.

Seriously, I saw the word and was thinking they enjoy old literature.

Does it have something to do with the rise of smartphones and no one typing on real keyboards? (Maybe why blogs died.)

Is it a consequence of voting, which blogs didn’t have?

What happens to your thoughts? Do you turn them all in the form of a question? Do you tear them down into a Mastodon one-liner and hope a popular person notices it?

If Lemmy had more of ourselves in this way, maybe it would be a healthier place.

Being idle until the media put out an article on something for us to talk about gives them too much power over us.

There’s an actual_discussion community, which isn’t exactly lively. There’s a casualconversation community, and even that’s all in the form of a question.

I wonder sometimes how it could have worked out if I’d had decent guidance. The prospect of living back under my mother’s glare or having to do homework again feels awfully tiring, though. And I’ve forgotten my locker combination! And my schedule. And where the classrooms are. Fuck, I can’t remember what a secant is!

I would have to fight back for my own vision of life rather than my mother’s. Now that I have the life experience to even have one. Back then I was so aware I didn’t know anything about life and the world. Would she fold, or would she go thermonuclear?

Maybe the butterfly’s wing would be a little different and there’d literally be nuclear war.

Maybe I’d be satisfied to see videos of other versions of myself in other universes and see what was possible.

Say you still get your same kids.

I know the usual answer is to buy stocks, but that seems too easy.

If you were a character in a book, you’d try to stop one of the famous disasters. Conveniently, they always remember lots of details about the famous disasters.

I would occasionally read the genx subreddit, where people would say “we” did this and that, much of which didn’t apply to me, and which no one would bother to push back on.

And I’m reading a pop science book about brains, and it’s doing the usual thing about how immature teen brains are and what their behavior is like.

How true is it that “we” were taking crazy risks and being monsters to our families and so forth?

I was a good kid—although admittedly I was in an abusive home—but also if I think back to school, there are a good number of kids who didn’t seem to be awful, although maybe just seeing someone at school doesn’t tell you much.

By “old”, I mean they were probably in college in the 1950s or earlier. Generally in the USA.

I went to college in what today they would call the late 1900s, and I definitely did not have that. What I experienced was a heavy workload, an interesting computer to mess around with, this new thing called the internet, and what I saw around for those who weren’t coping well was heavy drinking to get drunk and addictions to MUDs. No intellectualism.

Maybe what happened was that, in those biographies, they were probably generally culturally Jewish, from New York, scientists, writers, from a certain milieu. And the GI Bill happened in the 1940s and the flavor of college may have changed in the wake of that.

They may have been raised hearing the grown-ups talk over issues, increasingly participating as they grew up, whereas we were raised staring dumbly at sitcoms (“Hey, remember the time on Three’s Company when someone overheard something and there was a misunderstanding?”).

Not for deep interests, but you know like that old song about someone’s favorite things where the examples are all like copper kettles. Where you might write a few sentences about the little thing you like.

Was it fascinating? Did it feel like the amazing future? Were you all too aware of the mounting cost relative to what you were actually doing?

I’ll read how a cooking oil will become rancid, or the oil in nuts, or the oil in whole-wheat flour. But I never notice. I never find that something has now become disgusting in that way.

(Although I’m not crazy about nuts to begin with, and I’ve never had a fresh one from a tree or anything, so it’s possible I’m reacting to something there.)

How much do you notice rancidity? Do the people around you detect it similarly?

Some discussions online mention rancidity in connection with supertasting, but I strongly suspect I am a supertaster because I have to go very light on most bitter ingredients, cut back on sugar in a recipe so it doesn’t just taste like sugar, find too much fat to be gross, and so on. [Reading about supertasting is such a blend of sadness and vindication. You mean grapefruits are genuinely supposed to taste good? And an avocado all by itself? And raw pineapple? Honestly?]