eras
      ----

      what's probably a very common
      phenomenon for people (at least
      it is for me) is daydreaming about
      living in a previous era. it's
      true that cultural nostalgia almost
      always dreams of the time 30 years
      earlier (for lots of complicated reasons),
      so it's obvious that some forms of nostalgia
      are just sort of sociocultural laws
      that happen due to factors completely
      independent of any inherent "greatness"
      of the era in question. there are lots
      of video essays and normal essays that
      cover this cycle in more depth, so I
      won't. 

      still, I feel compelled to wonder how it
      would be to jump back to decades from my
      own lifetime, or near it -- namely,
      the 90's, 2000's, and very early 2010's.
      while I'm aware that the uncertainty and
      tragedy in this world never ends and I
      certainly couldn't escape from it just by
      living in a different time period, there's
      one thing that would be different: I would
      no longer be living at the very forefront
      of the unknown. I would be able to name the
      trends and styles and music and know the
      aesthetic and feeling of the world I live in,
      because any time before the present is just
      another part of a story in the cultural
      consciousness, where the subtler elements of
      the world all have more concrete connotations
      and the feeling of soul-crushing semiotic
      confusion no longer presses into my mind every
      waking minute.