Freddie deBoer:
You can’t stop the flow of time. But you can count the costs. And I think a lot of people, for reasons I can’t quite make out, are threatened by the idea of counting the costs when it comes to change. That’s what I’m asking you to do today: count the costs. Count the costs with me.
I can put my finger on two things that have meaningfully changed in the last 25 years: my age and the internet.
I was thirteen at the turn of the millennium. I came of age in the 90s, and I too have this romantic nostalgia for that time. Issues of Star Wars: Insider delivered to the mailbox, music on CDs from record stores, the nascent internet and action figures and trips to DQ and Memorial Day spent at the family cemetery. Things felt slower then, and they were. The speed at which things change, at which culture is grown and shaped and discoursed and discarded, at which information flows, was so much slower then.
Now things feel fraught. Now things feel fragile. Now things feel on edge and tense and anxious and uncertain. And maybe they aren't — maybe they just feel that way. But why would they feel that way? What's changed?
My age and the internet. The latter changed everything, and not for the better. Sure, things might seem better — things might objectively even be better. But things don't feel better.
Why is that?