When cellphones were pretty new and smartphones were being thought of but not yet invented the conventional wisdom was, “No one is going to carry around a device all day! That’ll never happen!”

And that was what most people believed. It was the obvious thing to claim.

And it was, as it turns out, completely wrong. People in fact do carry around smartphones all day. Something in only a decade or so went from, “Impossible. Will never happen” to “Of course, who doesn’t carry their smartphone everywhere?”

That shows how fast what is obvious can change, and how little-recognized it is when it does. And it always does.

Mcdonald’s In the 70’s

Nope! That is the design motif from the late 1980s. 1970s McDonald’s had a variety of seating designs, but none like this and not in these colors. Most had cushions and upholstery that were muted brown, yellow, or even black. Many had wood paneling and brown cross-tiled floors. There were also some metal-backed chairs.

How do people always get this so wrong?

I think just as much as the economic headwinds, the expectation that every kid needs to be closely surveilled 24/7 by necessity means a much lower birth rate.

Culture cannot be ignored. And right now, children are expected to be treated like concentration camp inmates under constant guard, not allowed to stray more than 10 feet away lest the cops be called, not allowed to play alone or sometimes even be alone, and with no prospect of any of the freedoms I and most people over 40 enjoyed as children.

While children suffer, regarding the birth rate, parents in this terrible culture also must bear a heavy burden. They must devote every scrap of waking attention to making sure little Timmy or Joanna is never out of sight as CPS gets called in an eyeblink these days. This culture of extreme monitoring puts an upper limit on how many children most people will have or wish to have.

After all, who’d want to have children who could never be more than an arm’s length away where you basically become an unpaid prison guard in charge of their every move and breath?

Sounds terrible. And requires an enormous time investment, far more than previous generations would’ve devoted to any one kid. So, yes, culture matters just as much as economics when looking for the answer as to why more people don’t want to live a life like that to have some kids.

Women and men are pitiful in different ways now. Women got what they thought they wanted and it destroyed them.

Men were told to retreat and did, and the bitterness of listening to words and following them rather than observing actions and doing based on that destroyed them.

Is there a way back? Perhaps not. Diseased cultures often simply die.

For those who escaped a low income upbringing, what culture shocks did you experience?

How vastly less common casual violence is, even among men. Where I grew up it was just a thing that happened constantly, a background hum to which you grew accustomed¹.

The middle class and particularly the upper middle class and above just does not work like that.

1. The movie Good Will Hunting portrays the casualness of violence in that type of environment pretty well. Winter’s Bone too.

Broadly the larpers on here think that fertility declines can be counteracted by stripping women of their rights and implementing some sort of (this varies) hypertrad social structure with religion as the social technology to hold it together.

Of course, this wouldn’t work. https://t.co/R63KJsGcQP

— psychosomatica (@Xenoimpulse) July 4, 2025

It is impossible to recreate the cultural past by recreating the material conditions of that past. Culture simply does not work like that; as Nietzsche knew, there is no going back. That project is doomed to fail in really heinous ways.

How modern logos would look like in ’84.

Cool, but some of these fonts were not around in 1984 and regarding the Discord logo, there were absolutely no game controllers that looked like that in ’84. That would’ve been a joystick like this:

In my hands is my new PlayStation 2. Jack Tretton is smiling at me. Everybody in Best Buy is smiling.

I take off my PS VR headset. I am back in the senior care facility. Nobody has visited me for 12 years. I put the headset back on.

I hold my PlayStation. I am smiling, too. https://t.co/IFMw7gdQuA

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) February 2, 2025

I do not like this post. Not at all.

Videogames are something I never really got into and I never owned a PS2. But I do remember that release day as it was all over the news.

What pre-internet experience do you miss the most?

I miss the lack of surveillance. Not that there was none, but it had a cost; if someone or some entity wanted to keep tabs on you it was an active effort. These days if you have a mobile phone or a car made since ~2015 nearly anyone can buy your data and find out a huge amount of info. The government of course can also track your every move effortlessly. And don’t even try to convince me that smartphones do not “listen” to our convos. Unless you’ve gone full clown, it’s obvious that they do.

We’re all in the panopticon now, with no way out.

It’s the age of regret: gen Z grew up glued to their screens, and missed the joy of being human.

They are going to regret all of those painfully-stupid tattoos too.

But it’s the complete lack of social skills of that generation that is the real problem. At least a few are attempting to do something about it, but it’s a drop in the bucket and probably will not matter.

Dating requirements.

This isn’t entirely wrong, but it also isn’t fair to women.

It ignores that being attractive isn’t actually that easy. We live in an obesogenic environment that requires a lot of self-control. And to be what most men consider attractive¹ involves quite a lot of work from women: “natural” makeup, shaving legs and armpits, dressing decently and flatteringly and other skin care and body care routines that most men are not even aware of.

But it’s right in that men are more judged on things they have no control over, especially in the US².

As a first approximation, women are valued for merely existing; men are valued for status and achievements. Those men who have neither are considered disposable by both men and women.

1. If you don’t just naturally have it like my partner.
2. Women in other countries aren not so incredibly, unhealthily obsessed with height as American women are. Don’t know why.