Quote:
Originally Posted by craigs
The thing about 'dreams' is that they never were real in the first place.
California was essentially populated by real estate hucksters who hyped an exotic and futuristic escape from parts east up until about the 1960s, when a space age, high tech, countercultural dream born of widespread optimism and prosperity became the enticing narrative. People receptive and economically capable of responding to the resulting combination of the exotic, futuristic, and culturally avant-garde narrative kept the state growing and in the public consciousness until relatively recently. But America changed, and so too did its perceptions.
In the poorer, sicklier, more abjectly desperate and angry America of 2020, there's not much to hype and not many who can afford to buy in anyway. The 'exotic' holds no allure in a nation where there is no longer a trustworthy 'normal' upon which to fall back; the countercultural now seems unaffordable, silly, a ticket to addiction and homelessness; a 'future' of burning forests, rising seas, and wildly shifting economic sands isn't much of a draw.
California suffers all the economic and health crises and embittered cultural malaise that the rest of the country does--because those are the defining issues of our age. There's no "____ Dream" going on anywhere anymore, because this is an age of disillusion. Where once you heard people send you off with a chirpy 'Have fun!' you're now more likely to hear a leaden 'Be safe." And that was even before COVID ravaged the cities. There's very little dreaming in a time when reaching for the stars takes a backseat to battening the hatches.
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i think this is pretty good.
when the millennial counter culture fizzled out into the cult of the online personality disorder i just embraced the technocratic and STEM regime that we are under and at least had something to look forward to if i fully bought in. started seeking opportunities in the bay area and elsewhere that i wouldn't have before - with limited success. got some letters behind my name.
now even that appears to be in trouble.
with no actual counter culture - Online has now revealed its truly synthetic parameters - as an alternative we are sort of culturally marooned for the time being. zoomers don’t seem to be embracing anything millennials didnt except they are more comfortable in their pessimism and are fully digital natives...although theres a solid argument that so are millennials.
california has almost always been a magnified lense (since at least the gold rush), or perhaps more aptly a psychedelic drug through which you could view the greater american project - and come away with a different perspective.