Television and Radio are 75% advertisement.
Most of my favorite youtubers from 2010s are gone replaced with nonstop politics, drama, reaction, and streaming content farming.
I feel it in my heart that short form content is damaging everyones attention spans especially my tablet ridden younger family members.
Weekend trips to Blockbusters to rent out a game and movie is gone.
When I go into the search bar on YouTube I see stuff literally called “brain break” and “brain rot”.
I switch on the news and its 90% pure political propagandano matter the station.
Even the memes suck now, say what you want about caption memes and dancing babies and troll face, Pepe, me gusta but that shit was at least comprehensible in humor. go on 67 Wikipedia and it literally says “It has no fixed meaning.”
Even the steam store just feels different now. Its full of gooner porn bait visual novels and mundane activity sims and 1 season relevant fps shooters.
All the stuff I enjoyed is gone, and everything they make now seems so empty and pessimistic now. The last bastion of enjoyment zi have is older media and indie made stuff by a few select artist/small teams . Is this just me getting old yelling at clouds, or is something wrong?
Yeah, it’s just a common thing generationally to pine for the days of olde, and for my generation it was apparently playing outside and then early internet, and OP was there for the YouTube heyday, and I can probably commiserate with them, but by the same token I’m like, well, YouTube ruined my favorite medium, whatever that was.
It extends into everything. Music, my favorite band’s earlier records were better, the new kids in the scene have ruined it, etc. etc. Nostalgia is a real bitch, unfortunately, and we’re all just stuck on Mr. Bones wild ride with no way off it.
I think part of it is experience. You’ve seen it. You’ve heard it. You were there for it, and it now just feels old. But I always tell people who never watched The Wire or Breaking Bad that I’m jealous that they get to experience then for the first time. There are only so many greats out there, and you experience them, and you reflect on everything else you experience in that light now.
That’s all not to say that there won’t be some great shit you’ll experience again. You’ve just experienced so much great shit already that this new great shit has a higher bar. It’s your first love. The first time you ate apple pie ice cream. The first time you heard a song that just touched you. Everything else gets measured up against it, and at 15, for the first time, shit seemed better, but only by comparison.
Getting old is a ride OP. The biggest hill on the rollercoaster is always the first one, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy the corkscrew or that sharp turn later on. I’m sitting here at Kalahari with my kids, and I go down slides on my own and they don’t hit the same, but going down ones with my kid all of a sudden puts a new spice on an old recipe.
I have friends who continue to chase the dragon, and that works for them. Do what you wanna do, don’t feel like you need to stick in the same circles and routines you used to. And if your medium isn’t entertaining to you anymore, just put it down. I don’t play games the way I used to, and that’s okay. I pick back up here and there, the same way I pick up my guitar, and the same way I’m thinking about strapping on the skates to play hockey again. And I’ve positioned myself in a way that I can do these things too, if I want. And if I don’t, I don’t.
Love ya OP. Go out there and have fun, that’s what I always say when anyone asks just about anything.