Lol. You just described why I hate nostalgia. It’s also why I prefer to move forward.
Thats not god thats capitalism
Dang, it’s like he vibe coded humanity
We could get all those feelings back and then more on the top if we had 2 day work weeks.
No that’s us. WE DO THAT.
That makes sense for the average person maybe. Unfortunately, I am not the average person and I will almost certainly be cripplingly even more sad in old age. I have strong reasons to believe this, largely due to having missed out on life more or less by sheltering myself from it in my youth. And as I age I’ll continue to know this and it’ll become more and more cemented and bitter.
Though I will say, this also might be influenced by the fact that they merely surveyed a slice of people, and older people might have been happier in 2012 (and continue to be so) because they have more money than previous generations will have in their own old age.
It’s survivorship bias imo.
I think this graph misses off a group struggling with ill health and pain in later life that say things like come on death, what are you waiting for. They are done, stuck in a long decline.
Why would they not be included?
…huh. It centers right on the working years, doesn’t it? Plummets when you would enter the workforce, and rebounds right around retirement
Pretty accurate graph for me so far. I would say “it gets better” is more true. Childhood kind of sucks and early adulthood is poverty and stress. 30s the nadir maybe, not much worse than childhood. But from my 40s things have improved, and so has my mental health and happiness. Like I got more competent at more of my life, finally.
This is just a function of modern life. Your brain wasn’t built for sitting in a cubicle. It was built for hunting, gathering, and telling stories and singing songs around a fire. Childhood is just a lot closer to that natural state of things. Growing old didn’t kill your childlike sense of joy and wonder. Working a job did.
No, that’s been the same in all ages. Childhood is magical because you don’t carry the mental burden of your own survival. Cavemen adults didn’t think it was joyful or magical when food or water became unavailable and they had to decode between dying in the wild or in war against some other tribe, or staying and risk watching everyone they know ø die of starvation.
And also being surrounded by the millions of others suffering the same fate.
I don’t think you lose the capacity to feel those strong emotions when you get older, but rather the weight of how bleak reality is overshadows the joy, or in extreme cases, makes it seem crass.
You guys had happy feelings as kids?
No
I did. I had and extremely happy childhood, which just makes adulthood that much more unbearable.
Don’t forget to also instill in them the concept that they can have those feelings again if only they achieve performance-based metrics that they are not aware of and have no capability of actually learning
Nostalgia is the siren’s song.
Eurylochus: What was the song of the sirens like?
Odysseus: All the things you want it to be. Then, all the things you wished you never wished for. It was the delicious itch you go to scratch but find it’s under the skin. You can’t reach it. So the delicious itch becomes unbearable. Told you what you most want, is what you most can’t have. And what you most can’t have, is what you already had, and lost.
This is why I think it’s weird that people pretend its an amazing gift to be born. Being alive can be good and nice and fun and satisfying, but is often just as much the opposite.
Life is definitely a curse.
Lemmy told me this is just what having depression is
Think some humans lack the “hyper aware” part.
I’m jealous of that in a way.
It’s yet another test of their faith.
