this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
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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.
I always read this. And I’m not disagreeing. But we had to evolve to hunt and sing and tell stories. At what point do we evolve to where sitting in a cubicle is the “normal” for which we are evolved to do?
Like at some point when AI puts us all into the matrix pods, will we say things like “our body wasn’t meant to be in matrix pods all day. We were evolved to sit in cubicles for eight hours and work on computers.”
I guess if we have a couple hundred thousand years of tech stability we might adapt.
Eh, I'm pretty sure AI is going to tank our oil wells and we'll be back to a hybrid neolithic and wild west culture. Of course, the transition is going to be rank with bodies.
We'll never evolve to that point. Unless the environment people live in is pretty constant for thousands of years at a minimum, evolution will not be a factor. We've certainly been farming long enough for it to have some evolutionary effects. Look at the genes on lactose toleranace. Maybe if we lived in a world with jobs like today for the next ten thousand years. But that seem extremely unlikely. Historically, even just the idea of working somewhere other than your home would have been odd up until just a few centuries ago. In early modern Europe, even most manufacturing was done as literal cottage industry.
This is what the cubicles are trying to do with the people and the culture it favors.
Even with intense selection pressures and a small evolution, anything short of a genocide will take ~ 2000 years. It can happen faster, but it has to decimate the population, and the trait has to be expressing itself in a percentage of the people already.
Nostalgia is a form of blindness. You did not feel the way you remember. There are not as many new ways to feel as you get older, but children have not had enough time to feel the full gamut of their emotions.
But nostalgia isn’t limited to things from childhood right? I get nostalgic for things I experienced as a fully grown adult. Often things in media, like tv shows, music, games.
I can confirm that stuff was much more exciting in my 30's than it is now I'm in my 50's, but was more exciting still when I was a kid. The reason for me is partly that there were so many things I could experience for the first time, combined with a general sense of optimism and endless possibility about what could happen in the future. The world was full of unknowns that have gradually become known, which is comparatively dull.
I guess a lot of younger people today might not feel that same sense of optimism, since it was largely connected to hopes about where technology and social development might take us, and if the last decade or two is anything to go by, it doesn't look promising.
I would say its rooted in our tendency to reminisce over positive emotions instead of negative ones. I think people get especially nostalgic about childhood because your emotions as a child are just more raw, both positive and negative.
We remenice about our positive emotions. The negative ones become encoded in our behaviors as trauma responses.
I take issue with how trauma is framed in modern psychology. The guidance we receive from our negative emotions is incredibly useful and framing it as being similar to recovering from a wound is misleading. I'm not trying to belittle people who have had traumatic experiences when I say that, how you feel about things that have happened to you really matters. They way you respond to these events almost defines you as a person, and having poor coping mechanisms will hurt you further. But bad experiences are inevitable, and treating them with taboo limits our ability to see out of ourselves and understand our situations with clarity.
Oh, I reminice over negative emotions too
Enter: adults of traumatic childhoods who only feel one terrifying way no matter what’s going on in their lives
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.
Hot take but sometimes I think ppl have kids just 'cause they can't cope with their obsession for life not being like it was and want to live through their children who they imagine will have that happiness or bring it to them somehow magically.
Or, you know, maybe they genuinely enjoy life and want to share that?
No, it's definitely that first thing...
I'm a parent, and I will say that I was not feeling any real nostalgia when we were making the decision to have kids. I still kind of felt like a kid myself, to be honest.
The thing is, now my oldest is heading into middle school, and I'm starting to see parents my age who are doing that kind of thing to their kids. I think mostly it comes from a good place (i.e. "the world kinda sucks these days, and we did middle school in a much nicer time, so whatever of that I can pass down to them is good"), but there are definitely some people who have poured everything into "my children must have exactly the same childhood that I did," and I'm baffled by that sentiment. I hope I'm more the former than the latter.
Even worse are the parents who subject their children to total surveillance and dont allow them to do anything they perceive dangerous, even if the real risks are negligent. A friend of mine married, she already had a child from a prior relationship. That child had some issues learning english in school, so my girlfriend at the time offered to give her some lessons.
They lived a bit outside of town, but with good public transport connections. They absolutely denied that this 14 y.o. takes the train, switches into the subway (not even leaving the station, transfer would have been direct) and walks about 4 minutes from the station to us, because the district we live in is "so dangerous and full of immigrants" (The way would have passed a small tower which served as apartments for medical personell of a hospital and a childcare facility). They insisted on driving her everywhere - and this behavior was the default. In comparison, when i grew up, the first 2 weeks of my school life my mother accompanied me, made me learn the path and told me on which corners i should watch out, and that was it. I switched school in the 3rd year, which included taking public transport at the age of 8 - one day of training was enough.
This girl suffered from having no fucking clue about the world because she never was allowed to experience the world on her terms, which was also her main issue regarding learning - her mother (who did not have any higher education) insisted on learning with her even when the material was more than mom could handle, but never teaching her HOW to learn, which is a damn important skill to have. All forms of responsibility for her own life were held back from that poor girl. She was so naive that would bet my left arm that she will be scammed and fucked over on a regular basis.
These fears came from her mom being a teen mom, which meant she wanted to "protect" her. In reality she laid the groundwork for another generation of teenage pregnancy.
They then had a son, and as soon as he was able to run around they slapped a goddamn GPS watch with automatic alerts if he should move a bit outside of very restrictively defined borders (which means they went off far too often and they would call him on this watch every time, ingraining into the child from as young as possible that his parents watch his every movement) and with the option to listen in at every moment of his life.
Some people shouldn't have kids.
Ooof. Yeah, I've met other parents like that. "so dangerous and full of immigrants" definitely paints a picture, for sure. There are folks all over the place who feel, despite evidence to the contrary, like the world is so much more dangerous than it used to be. I think that those two things have to go together--the whole "Fox News makes people afraid of immigrants for fun and profit" thing, though I have also met some left-of-center people in that same boat, so who knows.
If you compare the times I grew up and when that girl grew up, i lived a lot more dangerously: traffic was very heavy around my home and noone gave a shit about things like "school areas", speed limits were a higher and were violated by a lot more people, and crime rates were insane compared to her childhood. I actually grew up in one of the worst areas in town with peep shows, sex workers, gambling and drugs being a lot more prevalent than in most parts of the city (and the criminal activities weren't driven by immigrants, but by the autochthonous people around) . These days the traffic is still insane (it is THE main artery of the city after all), but the side streets have all been made 30 km/h zones and seedy establishments have been replaced with specialty shops and higher-end night clubs (who have the advantage that they can crank up the volume, because it won't even register with people next to the heavy traffic)
Is this in the US? There was recently a case where a woman was convicted of something like child endangerment for letting her kid walk to the pond half a mile in her own neighborhood. Which means now the parents have to protect themselves from the law.
That terrifies me as a parent, I'll be honest. I have an 11-year-old, and he's totally responsible to be able to go to the library and back on his own. It's just on the other side of our neighborhood. And I want him to have that opportunity, so we let him. But I'm terrified that someone will decide for us that we're taking too much of a risk.
Nope, Austria. The US has always been mental regarding their kids and what they are allowed to see and do - comes with the prudishness and religious fanaticism. If your society is thinking that showing female nipples corrupts children (even tho the majority of children know exactly how nipples look like because they were fed by them - male nipples are fine btw!), but slaughtering hundreds on TV is fine, something very basic is not ok.
I’m guessing for the most part that that was not the original intention when deciding to have children. But rather starts to occur over time as they raise them.
That seems too early? People are having kids un their 20's. Nostalgia doesn't really start then.
That's a fair point.
I know you only sometimes think this (or think that sometimes people have kids for the reason you state), but I can chip in a data point for myself where I have never been sad about how my life has changed as an adult, my kids are very happy, and I'm very happy for them! I am sometimes magically reminded of my youth because of them but I do not seek to feel the same again. I know why I had kids and none of the reasons were to personally relive my youth vicariously, but I acknowledged that they would likely feel many of the same great feelings I did as a kid (and good for them!).
You guys had happy feelings as kids?
No
Every now and then I will hear something, or the light will catch a scene just right, or something will smell just in the right way where color and light and feeling flood back into to the world. It lasts for a few seconds, and then it’s gone.
Definitely bullshit.
when I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse/out of the corner of my eye/I turned to look but it was gone/I cannot put my finger on it now/the child has grown, the dream is gone/and I have become comfortably numb
Now it’s “There’s no way out of here”.
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
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.
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.