> Kids 30 years ago wanted to endlessly watch TV, play video games, listen to tapes, and read books.
Not "endlessly." 30 years ago, in the suburbia being decried, I had a bike and friends my age in the neighborhood. You called to see if they wanted to go do something, or went down the street and knocked on the door. And this was in a time (1990s) when the country's violent crime rate was about double what it is today, but there was no social media and 24-hour news doomscrolling making parents paranoid.
Health services and cops also gave less of a shit about things like that. This was great for the wider society but the small minority of kids that had it bad suffered.
The older I get, the more I value ignorance about certain things like what’s happening in the wider world (beyond maybe 15 mins of headlines a day). The overload of minutia about people’s lives and irrational fears is such a waste of time and bad for health.
There is not enough actual news happening in the world to justify 24-hour news coverage. So the media has to make stuff up until they fill the time. But then once they do this, they're also somehow incapable of telling the difference between what they've made up and actual news.
And someone else's news is not necessarily my news. Horrible crimes happening on the other side of the country don't make it any more likely that there's going to be a horrible crime in my backyard. That's a local news story, but drives clicks and outrage, so now it's national/world news.
Not "endlessly." 30 years ago, in the suburbia being decried, I had a bike and friends my age in the neighborhood. You called to see if they wanted to go do something, or went down the street and knocked on the door. And this was in a time (1990s) when the country's violent crime rate was about double what it is today, but there was no social media and 24-hour news doomscrolling making parents paranoid.