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Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

Not caring about the future is something a 17 year old would do. Not worrying about whether the stuff he loves now will endure tomorrow is typical of that age. He simply hasn't lived long enough and matured enough to feel nostalgic about stuff. I promise you he will miss things when he's 30 or 40.

I think this reflects more on teenagers and grownups than on the internet :)

> His perspective seemed to be that there's so many webcomics and the "memes" and conversations he has with his friends are ever evolving, there's not really a lot of time to care about the old stuff.

He's missing on old stuff like Calvin & Hobbes, to name just one example.

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I cared about the future a lot when I was a teenager/early 20's, and was a bit of a digital hoarder. When I was a freshman in college a million years ago (2001) it was common to meet people and trade binders of burned Divx's. I had hundreds, because I might want to watch them someday. My Mp3 collection, tiny by some standards, was still tens or hundreds of gb - and this in an age when a 20GB hard drive was a decent size. I saved every photo I took and curated the folders of them.

Then three things happened 1) Almost everything became easily available (or reasonably easily) 2) Of the things that aren't easily available (personal photos), I realized I never look at it, with very little exception. 3) I realized I am going to die someday, and at the rate I consume media I will _never_ get to even a sizeable fraction of it.

So I try to print the pictures I care about, I have a folder of just a few photos and videos I really care about (mostly my kid), and that's about it really.

Media used to be somewhat scarce, but now basically everything is available everywhere all the time (rights issues notwithstanding). We take a thousand photos on a vacation, not a few rolls of film (72-108 images) It's overwhelming.

Older dude checking in. I threw out my Divx collection about 10 years ago. I have precious little time to spend watching 2-hour films, and I recognize that the number of films I will watch before I die is on the order of maybe 300. When I do get a chance to watch a film, I want the experience to be as great as it possibly can be. I want as high a resolution as I can get with the best color. Compared to 4k HDR stuff available today, the Divx stuff looks like total shit. I have grown to despise my fellow human beings in groups larger than about 7, so I've built a home theater where I can watch a movie without having to deal with the bullshit that is the general public. I'll invite 4 or 5 of my friends over on occasion. Specifically, the ones who respect my rules of watching a movie. No talking, no phones, that sort of thing. I'll buy a Blu-ray disc brand new so I don't have to worry about random scratches or whatever from previous renters. I don't stream because I no longer tolerate any of the bullshit that happens half the time, like random degradation from the service resulting in pixelation or pauses.

For music, I just subscribe to a streaming music service where I can download ("pin") stuff to my phone. Mainly because it's ridiculously cheap and convenient. I don't care about "owning" music, like it could somehow forever "go away" and I'd be sitting in the corner of my basement crying about how I can't listen to such-and-such a song any more. But honestly I'm more likely to listen to audiobooks these days, which I do immediately strip the DRM from and store separately on my phone.

When I go on vacation, I take a pathologically small number of photos, and I only take them on my phone. I can't be bothered with lugging around a huge lens and camera body everywhere I go when I'm trying to experience some place new. Whenever I show the photos to people, they often say, "Wow! What camera did you take these with??" And I say, "A used Pixel 2."

The fancy camera is for people that enjoy photography as a hobby in itself, and use trips as an opportunity to practice their skills. But I definitely agree with your "living in the moment" stance. For me, I never take pictures because I can't ever tell in the moment that this would be a good picture that I'd want to show people (that, and pictures never are as good as actually being there).

I tend to take pictures that tend towards the surreal, such as a life sized plastic cow as a lawn ornament [1] or a bear dressed as Goldilocks serving a human skull [2]. Or a human sized teddy bear just chilling out on a park bench [3].

[1] http://boston.conman.org/2014/10/29.2

[2] http://boston.conman.org/2014/10/30.3

[3] http://boston.conman.org/2014/10/31.2

    and I recognize that the number of films I will watch before I die is on the order of maybe 300

This kind of thing seems morbid, but as I tiptoe into my 40s I find it hilarious. Got my home's roof redone lately. Allegedly has a 50 year warranty. Mentally added 50 to my current age and was like... well, yep, that oughta do it. hahaha.

"This will last until I die" is quite the value prop.

A bit morbid but also incredibly important.

When my colleagues say "I worked on this over the weekend" I get pretty upset because

1) Dude you're in your 40's. If you're lucky you've got ~2100 lazy Sunday afternoons left. Probably a third to half of those in decent health. That's not very many. How many of those do you want to spend doing stupid shit (aka most jobs) for somebody else for free?

2) Don't normalize that behaviour so I have to do it too.

It'll help with re-sale (still 22 years to go!) - one likely outcome before you kick it.

>>I have grown to despise my fellow human beings in groups larger than about 7, so I've built a home theater where I can watch a movie without having to deal with the bullshit that is the general public

To each their own of course. A lot of us go to the theater to enjoy a film with a large crowd.

> A lot of us go to the theater to enjoy a film with a large crowd.

Wait. Really? And there's a lot of people who enjoy watching things in crowds?

Yeah and there are people who enjoy going to concerts, and festivals, and events.....

Concerts and festivals are made more enjoyable by the shared energy. Other than concert movies and maybe Rocky Horror Picture Show, I struggle to think of movies where I’d rather walk on sticky floors to see it with 100 other coughing, talking, texting, etc humans than at home in a decent home theater.

Comedy and horror movies come to mind as being shared experiences.

Ah. I see. I explicitly avoid these genres. Maybe that's why I never experienced any positive influence from other people in the cinema.

While not a status statement as it used to be, one element is the "I was there" thing: being able to tell others later that you were there for the opening session of X blockbuster/defining movie...

I'd rather be in the theatre, with a giant screen. Sharing in the appreciation with all the other people there when there's a particularly poignant line, or moment.

Often, it's only slightly better than a home theatre, but I don't want a giant screen I don't use 999% of the time taking up a large part of the wall.

And very rarely, you'll have spectacular moments, where the entire audience shares in a powerful emotion, moments you'll remember for the rest of your life. That you won't get at home.

And so we all have different preferences :)

" coughing, talking, texting"

True, but also laughing, cheering, and applauding (on occasion). For a big midnight release a lot of the fun is waiting with other fans - I loved going to openings of movies like Return of the King (LOTR), even the last awful Star Wars prequel, etc. and waiting with hundreds of other excited people at the Fremont Theater - a grand old theater seating 1100. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fremont_Theater

If you haven't seen Rocky Horror in a theater instead of at home, you ought to give it a try. Or The Room - bring spoons.

I went to a concert once. I had fun, but I would have never guessed that crowd was contributing to my fun.

I watch movies at an accelerated speed, usually around 1.5 to 1.7x speed. That means I can easily watch 2 movies in the span of a couple hours. So basically I'm pretty well caught up on all the obviously good movies. I have some trouble finding hidden gems, mainly because netflix/prime video are so horrible at recommendations.

Because of my accelerated watching I'm actually more selective about movies & tv shows especially TV shows, because only the good ones are tolerable when watching episodes back to back.

Anyways 300 movies, 1 per week, 5 years?

> I watch movies at an accelerated speed

This sounds so depressing I want to scream.

I'm guessing you don't like introspective, moody or slow paced movies? I shudder at the thought of watching Wong Kar Wai's "In The Mood For Love" at 1.7x speed...

I had a hard time letting go of my old digital packrat stuff too. In fact I never fully let go.

Fortunately, thanks to modern storage capacities, I was able to compromise with myself. I stopped packratting new stuff. And the old stuff fits on a single hard drive now. I have a copy of that drive at my brother's place in case something happens to this one.

I'm 99% sure I'll never watch any of that stuff, but a single offline HDD isn't expensive and isn't really taking up much space in my life, so it was a good compromise for me.

I think there really is something to an abundance mentality.

My dad used to hoard, of all things, toilet paper. Why? He grew up in WW2 Philippines, had his house bombed and had to hike up into the mountains where they would shit in the river and wipe their butt with stones.

The idea seems crazy to me and my wife, as does my Taiwanese-born in-laws' predilection toward hoarding food. But we grew up in a world where you can always go to Costco and get more. That wasn't the case even as recently as our parents' generation.

Similarly, today's teens are growing up in a world where you can always go to YouTube or Netflix and get more media, or Google and get more information. The idea that these might be scarce resources and you might need a personal collection, just in case the Internet gets shut off, is as foreign to them as the idea of running out of toilet paper is to me.

This is a really great analogy. I've never thought about this before and I think it explains some of my data hoarding tendencies and maybe this will help me let go of some things a little more. Thanks for sharing this!

As far as pictures go, I've learned to be ruthless with the delete button and only keep photos that I really care about. Mostly, those are the ones with people in them, that record a meaningful moment in history, or with actually interesting subjects. Photography is somewhat of a hobby for me, so I still take a lot of photos, but I'm quick to delete them.

This has the side effect that I can store my entire photo collection (10 years/60 GB) on my phone's SD card where they are easily accessible. This has been valuable, because I refer back to photos I've taken years ago surprisingly often.

I threw out my huge binder of burned CDs (and later DVDs) too. I also threw out all my VHS tapes of my favorite shows that I recorded off the TV in the 90s.

I realized I really don't need to hoard bad video quality anime series'; there's more media that I can realistically consume in a lifetime.

I have a large and ever-growing (> 100,000) photo collection that isn’t particularly well curated, and I have worried for years that I’m accumulating too many pictures at too low a signal:noise ratio. But now I actually think that I’ll be able to hold out for machine learning to come along and help me get more value out of it. Apple and Google are now good at finding faces, and soon enough I imagine they’ll have pretty good algorithms from sorting good photos from bad ones.

Sometimes you really can just ignore a problem long enough until someone else solves it for you.

I save all my photos and videos I take, I don't feel like it's that much, but still a good 700gb. I personally love having it, and look at it at least a couple of times a year. I just love having access to all this footage. Last week for example we were talking about how our backyard used to look like with my daughter. I was able to pull out old footage of our backyard, and even a video of a tractor cleaning up our backyard. It's nothing vital, but it was very nice for me to be able to look at it again. I'll keep organizing and keeping old photos and videos.

I do agree that mp3 and movies are a bit useless. I still have a 1TB or 500gb drive somewhere full of movies. I probably didn't boot it up in the past 5 years.

The one thing I regret not keeping, is all my projects since I was a kid. I programmed a lot of things between age 10-15. Video games, created art on paint and photoshop. All that is gone. I wish I could access it even if I know it wouldn't be good quality stuff.

I made the mistake of tossing my whole CD collection and now find that there were albums I once enjoyed that don't exist in Spotify that I can casually jump into on a nostalgic whim.

I also am finding the longer I'm on Spotify the more gaps appear in my playlists as songs are removed from their collection.

Fortunately I digitised a few ultra rare CDs 20 years back as OGG files, but not all of them.

>He's missing on old stuff like Calvin & Hobbes, to name just one example.

But Calvin and Hobbes is even more accessible now than it was when I was a teenager in the mid to late 80s. Back then I had no concept that some day it would be available online (on what?) or in books, so each day I would cut each comic out and tape it into a notebook I kept. Now I have the softbound book for my kids to read and the hardbound books on acid free paper for myself. But I still look at C&H online.

> But Calvin and Hobbes is even more accessible now than it was when I was a teenager in the mid to late 80s.

Not if, like the teenager in the original post, you don't have "a lot of time to care about the old stuff" because of ever evolving memes and conversations.

For people who simply don't have the time or don't care, it doesn't matter whether Calving & Hobbes is readily available or not.

...so? New things are being created. You enjoy(ed) C&H, now future generations might enjoy new things. It's just a fact of growing older and having cultural changes.

Also a counterpoint: I (22) know people my age or younger who enjoy C&H. Things are absolutely more accessible now, full stop. Being accessible does not mean one is forced to choose that particular thing! Please let people enjoy what they enjoy. Just because I like tom and jerry cartoons and think they're a classic doesn't mean I gripe about newer generations who have different cartoons/etc that they like.

Nobody is griping, calm down! It was just a reflection on the attitude of the typical teenager, and how he'll grow out of it.

> "Things are absolutely more accessible now, full stop."

Not if you don't "have the time" because of all the "memes" and "evolving conversations". Overexposure to constant new stuff is actually an impediment.

You know people who enjoy Calvin & Hobbes? Good for them. They managed to overcome the distractions of the latest stuff to focus on the good ;)

> Not if you don't "have the time" because of all the "memes" and "evolving conversations".

This is not related to something being accessible whatsoever. C&H is widely available, and someone choosing to not access it does not make it not accessible. People can choose different things to look at.

> Overexposure to constant new stuff

"Overexposure" is subjective. We live in an era where new stuff constantly comes out, yes. More so than ever before.

> is actually an impediment.

Subjective. Just because someone chooses to look at memes instead of C&H is nothing of an impediment. Please do not admonish others for not liking exactly what you like.

Well, yes, everything we're saying is subjective.

> "This is not related to something being accessible whatsoever. C&H is widely available, and someone choosing to not access it does not make it not accessible."

I never said it wasn't accessible. I just said teenagers who don't have the time for "old stuff" because of "evolving memes and conversations" are missing out on this, and that not caring about the past or the future is typical teenage thinking.

To be honest I don't understand what you're objecting to anymore. Some imaginary version of something whiney you believe I said, I guess.

So that you don't reply to things I'm not saying, here's a summary:

I replied to someone saying his/her teenaged relative didn't have time for old stuff and didn't care about it by saying that living in the present, without caring about past or future or how long things will endure is typical teenage thinking. It's what they are known for. This teenager will grow up and eventually mature and care about old stuff and feel nostalgic about stuff.

Things I'm NOT saying:

- Everything old is better.

- Calving & Hobbes (or insert your favorite comic here) is not readily available.

- Teenagers should like old comics or music.

- Teenage thought is wrong (it's only abnormal if you're a grown up and still think and behave as if you were 15). Otherwise, it's an absolutely normal part of growing up.

- That there is anything to complain about, instead of this simply being an observation about life, youth and aging.

> He's missing on old stuff like Calvin & Hobbes, to name just one example.

And what new stuff are you missing out on?

Everyone is always missing out on something. It's no great crime.

Agreed that it's no great crime. And of course, I'm missing out on all kinds of stuff. Not because I'm too busy with ever evolving memes to pay attention, I hope.

The mentality that only today matters, that the past is old and boring, that only the "ever evolving" should grasp your attention, and that who cares if what interests you today will exist tomorrow is distinctly a teenager's mentality.

It's something adults usually -- but not always, of course -- grow out of.

This is no criticism, by the way. It's ok that teenagers think and feel this way. It's also expected that they grow out of it as they mature and become adults.

You missed the point. I'm not saying that the past is old and boring, or that teenagers even believe it is (not all of them do!). I'm saying that every generation produces outstanding media and art (somewhere among the clutter), and that it's ridiculous for older people or younger people to dismiss the art that does not belong to their generation.

You'll notice this is what I've been saying all along, so I don't think I've missed your point at all. Every generation indeed produces outstanding art!

Teenagers typically -- but not always -- focus on the present, disregarding both the past and the future (which we've both agreed is a symptom of lack of maturity). In fact, the word for teenager in Spanish is "adolescente", meaning "they who lack" (maturity, judgment).

> "I'm not saying that the past is old and boring"

I didn't say you did.

> "[...] or that teenagers even believe it is (not all of them do!)

Many if not most do.

A lot of comic strips are a product of their time, as they are a commentary on current events. Some are more timeless than others, but I've found that many things that were funny at the time I saw them just aren't now. Or, they are only entertaining because I lived through the events they refer to.

A good example is going back to old SNL episodes, or Tonight Show monologues. Stuff that I remember laughing about back in the day, feels like when someone tells you a joke that you don't get, then explains the context. You then "get" the joke, but it isn't as funny.

> A lot of comic strips are a product of their time

Yes, and even those are worth reading. Newer is not better.

I get what you're saying - Doonesbury is maybe a good example of one that you really had to be there. On the other hand a lot of the classics that do have a time based cultural context can still be very funny.

Take Asterix where a lot of characters wore the faces of contemporary celebrities or politicians, but that was a secondary joke so they still maintain their appeal. The Simpsons and South Park also have a lot of cultural references but the early seasons are every bit as funny now. Classics like Marge vs the Monorail still hold up as the core theme is one that keeps repeating every generation, but a guest appearance by Leonard Nimoy wont mean anything to a new audience.

As an aside, I loved Asterix as a kid and wasn't aware of any contemporary personalities! It has stuck as one of the favorite comics of my childhood -- along with Lucky Luke -- to the point me and my brothers can quote randomly from almost any issue. As an adult, I noticed the modern world references, but maybe because of the ties to my childhood, they remain secondary. Asterix and Lucky Luke are timeless and a beloved part of my youth :)

I'm 26 and still don't care about the past. Not old by any means, but I've matured past the point of teenage epherism I like to think. I just believe that nostalgia is one of the banes of humanity as a species that holds us back. We should learn from the past, not pine for it. My first experiences with computers was at the age of four on a Windows 95 machine and while there's little things I fondly remember from the early days, there's nothing I yearn for. I certainly don't care to preserve it beyond fleeting recollections in history books. As long as we aren't discarding the past completely and repeating mistakes previously solved I see no reason to hold on to it. I don't care about Geocities or meticulously crafted Myspace profiles anymore than I care about the stagecoach or telegraph.

Is there anything you deeply care about currently? Are you optimistic everything in the future brings improvement?

While it may seem irrational for people to pine for past things like internet sites/services, it is not the service itself, but the experience and environment it was consumed in.

I guarantee you will pine for some things in your future, because some experiences or parts of your environment now are likely better than similar things at a future point.

It's somehow funny to see waves of nostalgia pop up. I remember seeing comments about LoTR from kids who grew up with it. "they dont make movie like that anymore".. it was their <starwars>

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