Things We Said Yesterday

Feeling that the past was better is not a good sign for society.

Memory is an interesting area of research. How do molecules and/or electrical connections provide us with our memories? I was working out the other day and listening to a Beatles song. I immediately recalled driving in the 1980s on one of our long-haul family vacations. We had a pre-Walkman bulky Panasonic tape player connected to the car lighter via a relatively new type of connector. The tape player sat between the driver and navigator, as we had only physical maps in those days. The rule was that the driver chose the music, and here was the same song I had played in Wyoming over 40 years earlier. Nobody imagined touch screens or on-demand video. We had music beyond the AM radio, and we were happy.

While nobody would like to go back to outhouses, candles in place of electric lights, or a world with no air travel or internet, there still seem to be some qualitative life aspects that felt better back then. Before we had a cellphone constantly clamoring for our attention. Before we lived in a world of instant information and global news. I grew up in the generation that went after school to the park or rode bikes and was told to be home at 6 PM for dinner. There was no “Find My iPhone” tracking feature or cellphones to call or answer. We played with physical things, many of them just crude toys that were reimagined into weapons or tanks. Our computers weighed a lot, had green letters, and did very little. Printers were dot-matrix, and one had to remove the feeder holes from the sides of the pages. We had snowball fights and sat around for hours trying to figure out what to do Saturday night. When movies and bowling were ruled out, there was little to do beyond sit around and shoot the breeze or watch the Bulls lose.

My wife also recalls the Sabbath afternoons of her youth. People came out with oranges and ever-popular in Israel sunflower seeds and sat in the sun. They would meet or talk from balcony to balcony and were happy. Israel is still considered one of the happiest countries in the world, despite terror, war, and Iranian missiles. There appears to be a certain internal happiness that is harder to achieve when we have so much external plenty. To his dying day, my father would ask where we “refueled” on our trips from Israel to Las Vegas. I always tried to gently explain that there was no longer a need for refueling, but yes, we did stop in London, Toronto, New York or the like in order to change planes. Today, we have 19-hour flights, but going through the airport is about as fun as having your wisdom tooth removed without anesthesia by a hyena.

While my son and I were talking the other day, we thought about the future of superintelligence (SI). Before you go to work, you will task it to make a movie with very specific requirements as to genre, time period, etc. You’ll come home, and it will be ready for your enjoyment. Same for music. "Write me a song about how badly they are treating Donald Trump in the media, put it in Country Western format, and have backup singers sound like the Honkettes." I don’t know what Hollywood’s future is. I have seen some short alternative James Bond videos, and they look incredibly authentic. Gone are the days of having to call back an actor to redo a scene. Will they need CGI in the days of SI? Getty Images stock went to nothing; people can simply create any image they want, so who needs their carefully curated collection?

One of the reasons for our contemporary ennui is the flow of information. I put into Google “continuing genocide in Gaza”. I received hundreds of hits, including Wikipedia, the self-appointed storage unit of human knowledge. According to them, “The Gaza genocide is ongoing.” Does anyone who supposedly runs or edits Wikipedia know how many Gazans have been killed by Israel every week for the past year? My estimate is five to 10, and they are all terrorists. Based on publicly available press releases, Israel has been tracking down Nukhba and other terrorists who entered Israel and harmed civilians and soldiers. On average, they blow up a motorbike or car every other day. Food is also freely flowing into Gaza, with Gazans declared obese and a new restaurant appearing to open every few days. So how is a nonexistent “genocide” “ongoing” if Israel is only killing a handful of people each week, virtually all of them known terrorists with innocent blood on their hands? Apparently I missed the urgent news flash that killing any Gazan, even one who is a terrorist murderer, is the new definition of GENOCIDE. There can be no other explanation. For over a year, there have been no major Israeli Defense Forces activities, but Muslims and their lefty puppets throughout the West gurgle on about genocide.

Now take Gaza, add the economy, some more lies about illegal aliens and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and then add more skewing of facts concerning Iran and the Russia-Ukraine war. People are rich and miserable. They have lives never dreamed of by the richest of the rich a hundred years ago, while they are burdened with a world that is supposedly going down the drain. They can wear designer duds, carry the latest iPhone, drive a technologically amazing electric car, and still be unhappy. Our simple and, by today’s standards, archaic life of yore seemed to give greater happiness. I frequently see postings on X with videos from the 1980s where people seem really happy. Europeans often show videos of London, Paris, or other locations where, instead of riots and destroyed public property, there were happy families going about their business. Humans tend to have a soft spot for the past, a longing for the “simpler life”. But in every technical aspect, our world is faster, safer, cheaper, and better. You want a $300 Texas Instruments calculator from 1970 that had only a few functions, or do you want a hyper-sophisticated engineering calculator as an afterthought on your $1,000 cellphone?

Much of the skewing of information is based on the West’s enemies using technology like bots to put forth lies and strengthen their apparent importance. Tucker’s anti-Israel screeds apparently lost significant viewership when Russian data centers went boom last week. Normal people feel squeezed by seeing their stock portfolios going up while being told that the economy is lousy. They see Iranian military and oil assets in ruin and are inundated with “Iran is winning” or “We’ve already lost this war” from people who either hate Donald Trump or are also on a foreign payroll — without revealing the same. Truth today is more valuable than diamonds. The latter can be made to be high quality in a lab. The truth — not so much.

So being nostalgic for the past is not going to help us move forward. It’s like driving while looking  in the rearview mirror the whole time — a bad outcome is inevitable. But we can use those past experiences as our benchmarks: I remember what a happy home was like, what an enjoyable vacation felt like, etc. We can’t — and don’t want to — undo the technological revolution that has made our lives comfortable, more productive, and easier. Our appliances — Samsung and Siemens — have features to make Sabbath observance by a Jew easier. There were no such things in 1980, but somehow people got by with their refrigerators and stoves. The happy and successful ones will be those who use the technology available today for their benefit and won't be controlled by it. Happiness is inside.

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