Netizens Recall 36 Formerly Obvious Things That Sank Into Oblivion And Nobody Actually Cared

If you look on the Internet, you can find many very popular threads, the authors of which ask questions that are quite similar in their wording. For example, "What is slowly disappearing from society and you hate to see it happen?" Almost all of these questions definitely hit a sore spot for people, because they get several thousand upvotes and comments nearly every time.

It's enough to quickly run through the opinions expressed in these threads, and we are practically overcome by depression - apparently, our world is flying at the speed of a jet plane, if it hasn't arrived yet, somewhere into the abyss. The only question is - how fair is all this? Well, let's try to figure it out together.

No, there can be no doubt about it - the Internet has changed us in the last couple of decades so that a person from 1990 can have much more in common with people from a hundred years ago than with our contemporaries. At the very least, technical progress, which was already very fast in the second half of the 20th century, is gaining even more incredible speed today.

Thirty years ago, for some school exhibition, my classmate and I made a stand dedicated to the US presidential elections, and it took us several weeks to collect a selection of all the candidates from libraries and history textbooks, and then another couple of days to draw it all on a poster.

Today, it’s half an hour on Wikipedia, and another hour in Adobe Photoshop - and voilà, that’s all. Or you can just ask ChatGPT, and it will do it for you... Bingo! Perhaps this is the key difference between modern times and past eras. Let me explain exactly why.

Many philosophers, assessing the development of our society, divide two parallel paths of development - technical and social progress.

If earlier these two paths went in parallel and at approximately the same speed (in the ancient world and during the Renaissance, social progress sometimes even outpaced technical progress), today social progress simply doesn’t keep up with the development of technology.

We have gotten our hands on a huge number of things that can potentially make us incredibly smart, strong and much more mentally developed than before - but we either don’t use them to the fullest, or we just use them exclusively for entertainment. Yes, that notorious "fast dopamine."

Here lies another problem of modern society - we want maximum praise and approval, as well as pleasure, and as quickly as possible. The lack of patience and tolerance for the opinions of others (on the Internet, there’s always the opportunity to leave the community you don’t like and find another one) largely determines our mentality today.

We are talking not only about the younger generations, but also about those who are quite a bit older. At least, technical progress has also had a significant impact on Gen-Xers and millennials.

For example, I have often caught myself thinking that it’s difficult for me to watch videos longer than half an hour, as I begin to lose the thread of attention. Other people of my age I know have a rather similar situation. “Clip thinking” as is.

Well, and it also affects the perception of films and TV series of the past. For example, "Twin Peaks," which I personally admired when it first appeared. When, a couple of years ago, the new season came out, I decided to rewatch it from the very beginning - and gave up already on the first episode, when I waited for about ten minutes for at least some action to start on the screen...

Modernity, what are you doing to us?

Be that as it may, I fully admit that I can be totally wrong, as can the numerous participants of the online threads cited today, who often see only shortcomings in the modern world, while in many ways it is just absolutely wonderful. So now I sincerely invite you to discuss in the comments - do you also think that our world is in decline, or is it just a matter of perspective?