#spikiearctexture

[anarchist-soupkitchen]

conformity soup

Why do people view some periods in the past through rose tinted glasses? There was still troubles back then, people still struggled for housing, struggled for food, struggled for equal rights but through all that, we still hold these times as somehow grater than our own. I feel like this sentiment is quite prevalent in people born in the 2000’s to the 2010’s. What almost all people from the 2000’s grew up with was struggle, the world has just entered into the 2000’s the hopes and dreams of the rise of technology has been carried into a new millennium. Great scientists have just prevented the computer error what could shut down millions of systems around the globe, but that hope for new advancement was swiftly stifled with the 9/11 terrorist attacks what sparked a 20 year long conflict that was a constant backdrop for the decades to come. What followed from 2001 was the London bus bombing in 2005 and the terrorist attacks in Mumbai 2008. Through all that, the growth of a generation of children who have only experienced terror.

In our interconnected worlds anything seems possible, you can meet friends, date, share your creations, watch movies, play games, kindle newfound hobbies, and organise mass global events all in the comfort and safety of your own home. This isn’t something we got for free though, researchers at Harvard have been seeing a worrying trend of young people starting to show signs of depression, 34.3%. Which unsurprisingly heightened due to the pandemic and the rise of online everything. This can in no way excuse the other causes of depression, but when almost all things you need to do to function in human society is online, it can’t improve things.

That’s why I think so many young people go back to past time periods to try and try to find something comforting. Those time periods had so much more people interacting with people face to face, you connect with people in your local area, find love in your own bubble, and foster your own little community of people you can finally connect with. When looking at the 80’s that’s all I really see, I forget about the hardships of that time and just see the interconnectedness of people; something I don’t think we can get to anymore. Something I don’t think we could get again in that from.

The 80’s, to me, was all bout bold fashion choices. You could wear a disgusting outfit and no one would care because ‘it’s the 80’s!’, comparing that to today, popular fashion is filled with bland white, cream, grey and black. We can see this unintuitive colour palette reflected in the sharp-edged hospital look of modern architecture. Less is not more in this sense, the stifling unoriginality and conformism of this outlook that encompasses the whole of our modern culture is suffocating. Bland sameness, conformity soup, nothing but ehhh, hhheees and hhhoowwwws.

The more we stray away from originality, the more we become disconnected from our very essence, our very humanity. Humans were made for art and community. Even in our base forms we made art and we cared for people. To take away from that and restrict people to a single colour palette, a single outlook, a single dish of soup, it is anything but human.