An emotion that feels more rich and rare than others, nostalgia is a special thing in life. The 90’s kind of felt like a special peak of energy, a peak of enthusiasm just before something made it all fall flat.
It might just be a phenomena experienced by the 90’s kids because every generation experiences it, but either way the kids born in that era seems to flood the Internet with representations of their nostalgia. Makes sense, no age group spends as much time on the Internet as the 90’s kids.
Remember the feeling of physical CD’s, disk-man players, cassettes, VHS tapes, and all the aesthetics of the 90’s?
All of these things seem to reinvigorate us with a memory of that powerful energy we felt back then.
Here are 40 memes to remind you of the good times.
There’s a common thread to every meme that can be found in this article: humanity is on a massive scale dealing with a psychological phenomena that affects all people, and that is, that the lazier and more comfortable we become, the less we feel what we have. The less we have to work for what we have, the less pure our satisfaction from the outcome can be.
Now, perversions of this concept certainly exist: people are encouraged to slave away at corporate jobs, and to spend years of their life slaving away learning irrelevant and sometimes downright misleading things at universities, for what? For money, and the desperate aspiration to somehow find satisfaction and happiness at the end of that tunnel. That work doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness or satisfaction, despite being hard work.
However, a certain amount of effort, genuine, voluntarily put-forth effort, should kind of be required in life for things that we now have at our fingertips requiring zero effort. There’s a consequence for every shortcut we take, from our natural habitat as human beings, to people living in a world of technology.
A simple example would be, if robots did all our cleaning, cooking, and basic labor for us, we would become extremely weak, sick, docile, ect.
However, in for example simply the advent of this grocery store paradigm we now live in for purchasing food, there is virtually no underground market of farmers and food providers compared to how it was a century ago. We get lazy by nature when things are too easy.
Things got significantly easier, instant gratification became even more potent in just the last 20 years. Hell, just 10 years ago it was common to have an iPod or MP3 player separate from a cell phone. It wasn’t even conceivable for a person growing up in that time, that eventually cellular phones would be fused with music players, computers, and whatever else we need.
This is happening at such a rapid pace, we can hardly predict the outcome of decades of rapid, laziness and docility inducing technology.
People would be very wise to watch out for the weaponization of this social, human principle. This principle could be weaponized to make a population docile for purposes that could only possibly be conceived of in the mind of a psychopath.
(Image credit: boredpanda)
