Nostalgia, Societal Change, and the 50s or Whatever

I’ll admit that this year has seen some proliferation of dystopian aesthetics. Prophylactic masks on everyone, shields around cashier desks, and prescribed sitting circles in public parks. Despite that stuff, I’m not much of a dystopic thinker. Even in areas where things are bad, they’re almost never worse than they were. I think believing otherwise leads to a kind of laziness that can hinder progress when it fosters the fallacy that clearing up some supposedly modern problems will revert the world back to some default state of goodness that it’s assumed to have had at some nebulous point in the past.

But nah. Work has to be done to put that state in place, and it’s going to be harder because it will be an entirely new thing.

Have you ever heard someone say that they wish they could just go back to being the person they were in high school?
But then you look at their high school self and think “Uh, yeah. That’s not really an improvement.”

That’s how talk of societal change sounds sometimes. But instead of high school, it’s the 50s or whatever.


Bonus Question!

Best high school?

I went to  a bunch, but I graduated from Blythe Academy and had a pretty solid time there. And now I happen to live across the street! At the time it was a commute.