A simple comparison between the state of the post-1945 world and the state of the post-1990 world from a Western perspective offers a terrible contrast between the fulminant evolution of science and technology and the fulminant regression in terms of personal, spiritual, and mental space.
To those born between 1952 and 1979—a generation unlike any other.
Agustin Martinez
We are the children of a world in transition. Our parents could never have imagined the changes we were about to experience. We grew up at the dawn of a technological revolution that would transform the planet.
We were the last to experience street games: marbles, dodgeball, hopscotch, and endless games of hide-and-seek. And the first to discover video games: Pac-Man, Atari consoles, and the first arcade machines.
We listened to soap operas on the radio with our grandparents and picnicked on the grass with homemade snacks. We danced to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and even Mechanic and The Flintstones. We grew up with Tom and Jerry, GI Joe, Candy, The Pink Panther, and The Jetsons.
We were the pioneers of recorded music: 45 and 33 rpm vinyl records, audio cassettes recorded off the radio, BETA, VHS, Walkman, CDs… We witnessed the arrival of computers, the first pocket calculators, and cell phones as big as bricks. And we believed the internet would change the world—and it did.
We were called "Generation X," like a rough draft between two eras. But we were bridges. We learned to use a mouse and keyboard before it became instinctive for later generations. And we never looked down on those who didn't know.
We are the last generation to drink Coke from a glass bottle, to go shopping with a checkered cloth bag on our bike, to buy candy with coins from a loaf of bread. We are also the last to pick up a slice of bread that had fallen to the ground and murmur a silent apology—today, we would shout "microbes!"
And yet... we survived it all.
Traveling without seatbelts, without car seats, without airbags.
Bike rides without helmets, rollerblading without kneepads, metal swings and rusty slides. Overly heavy bags, squashed snacks, scraped knees, games that lasted until nightfall.
No internet. No smartphones. No PlayStation. But a boundless imagination, real-life friends, and days filled with shouts, laughter, and adventures.
We shared drinks without fear. We wanted to catch chickenpox to stay home. We flirted with an empty bottle, not behind a screen. And when we wanted to bring everyone together, a simple shout or a whistle was enough.
We weren't labels—gamer, otaku, dark, or whatever. We were faces, nicknames, personalities... but united.
So, congratulations to us.
To this generation straddling two worlds.
To those who grew up strong, upright, with beating hearts.
Sursa :
LinkedIn
How does crazy become normal?
John Hastings
Take female body hair.
The mass shaving of women’s legs and armpits began just over 100 years ago, driven by razor companies like Gillette desperate to double their market.
They used new mass media - magazines, ads, film - to convince women that hairless skin was feminine, hygienic, and sexy.
It worked.
What started as a clever sales tactic became a cultural standard so deep that many women feel shame and disgust by the idea.
Meanwhile, men were conditioned to see hair as unfeminine & dirty.
An evolutionary feature that protected skin from bacteria became a liability - erased by glossy marketing and repeated exposure.
Consider breakfast cereal.
A recent invention of the industrial era, it was born not from nutrition but from ideology and processed convenience.
John Harvey Kellogg, a devout Seventh-day Adventist, created cereal partly to promote bland diets that suppressed sexual urges.
The cereal aisle is now a shrine to artificial colourings, sugar, and corporate manipulation dressed up as breakfast.
Decades of advertising have taught us it’s normal to start the day with dessert in a box.
Most parents feed it to their children before school, never questioning why they crash before lunchtime.
Modern shoes are another silent deceiver.
For hundreds of thousands of years, human feet evolved to move naturally, barefoot on diverse terrain.
Then came hard soles, narrow toe boxes, and heels - first for aristocracy and later for mass fashion.
We deformed our feet, weakened our arches, and destroyed our alignment in the name of style.
Today, the average gym-goer wears thick-cushioned trainers that disconnect their feet from the ground.
Every step alters the kinetic chain, contributing to the epidemic of back pain, knee injuries, and poor posture.
If you put modern shoes on your dog you’d call it abuse as they’d be riddled with joint pain within a year.
These are not harmless quirks of culture; they’re symptoms of belief systems engineered by industries for profit.
And once belief is sold - through repetition, shame, and identity - it becomes harder to reverse than the habit itself.
We think we choose, but more often we’re conditioned.
Social media today runs on the same formula - sell insecurity, offer a solution, repeat until belief becomes law.
So ask yourself: what else feels “normal” that might actually be absurd?
What other cages have been painted gold, and sold as progress?
The real revolution begins not with rebellion, but with the quiet act of questioning.
Because the most dangerous ideas are not the ones we fight but the ones we never even think to doubt.
Sursa :
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