[rpgdemon]

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

Here's the unrelenting, inescapable reality, though: Things are bad and are only decaying in every possible aspect of life. We can talk about this in the macro or the micro, by looking at gradual changes or sudden ones, by looking at the personal or the global.

That's definitely not true. Politically, things are shit in a lot of ways. But we're definitely not worse off on a macro scale than we were like 20 years ago. You're getting misled by the immediacy of information, and the fact that we actually give a damn about the problems now, as opposed to back when America was "great", where we just didn't care about them.

Ironically, that's the same narrative that Trumps supporters buy into - "We never had these problems of police brutality against black people back in the 80s! We never had transgender people being oppressed! These weren't even issues, let's bring it back to how that was!"

I don't want to talk politics though, or how the world itself is, in terms of good and bad people, because that is exhausting.




I was giving this concept some thought recently. A favorite restaurant recently changed owners, and that made me think, "Oh, well of course everything is always getting worse the longer it goes on - You will always be losing favorite restaurants, favorite game series, et cetera, because the people involved are humans who will live their lives (or die ) and move on" I realized that it's not really true, though.

Everything changes constantly. And that makes it seem like things are getting worse, to a certain mindset. Even when those changes are bringing new and exciting things to you.

It's really hard to describe this in the abstract, so I'm going to use a metaphor of Magic cards. If you don't now, MTG is most often played in what's called "Standard", which consists of approximately the previous two years worth of sets.

This means, every year as the new set is released, you lose an entire set's worth of cards! The deck that you used to love gets ostensibly worse. Maybe you were playing Elves, and the new plane that we're on this year has NO ELVES. (Maybe that happens for night on five years in a row. Maybe I'm a little bitter about this.)

Cue: "Magic is now WORSE! There are no elves! This sucks! I love elves! My deck is worse now! The game is just losing out, every year as more and more of my elves leave Standard!"

That's the mindset that leads you to think, "Everything gets worse each year." You crave for the old thing that you used to love. That old thing was awesome. And you don't have it anymore, which sucks. But it needed to rotate out, to make room for a new thing.

But let's not look at the new thing. Your elf deck crushed faces at Friday Night Magic. You replace the old cards with new filler, and yes, your deck just gets worse over time. Each set that rotates out takes out large chunks of your deck. Thus, "The world gets worse, every passing year."

So, Magic sucks now. You lost everything you used to love about it. The game is just bad, there are no elves anymore.

It turns out that Goblins are a ton of fun now! They reprinted all these awesome old Goblin cards, and now you get to experience that! You get to rediscover the game in a small way, as you build a completely different deck.

So yes: The old thing that you love may be getting worse - But that may just be because there's a new way to interact with it, that you'll fall in love with just the same.




The other issue thing is - The things that stay the same get stale.

Even if the thing you love stays EXACTLY the same, you don't. If you go back to preschool, the playground that you used to love is tiny and boring now.

A different example: Say you LOVE steak. On your birthday, you get a kobe beef steak, done at this one restaurant, by this one chef, and it was paired with the perfect wine, and was the best dining experience of your life.

You go back to the restaurant next day, because of how WONDERFUL that experience was. And, it is still really freaking good.

So, you go back the next year. And the next year. And, you realize, "These steaks are no where near as good as they were when I started. This restaurant is going down hill."

The only thing that's really changed, however, is you. You've got this memory: When you eat this steak, you are floored by the most wonderful meal of your life, and now you can't recapture that. You'll still enjoy it, but it will never be the first one, that you're remembering. It's not that the steaks are getting worse though, it's the fact that you've gotten used to them.

Or, going back to the first point, maybe the head chef changes, and they take your steak off the menu. The restaurant, for you, just got worse. And, realistically, we all know that your favorite restaurant will eventually change owners, because nothing lasts forever. This makes it seem like we're constantly losing these favorite personal things, and the world is constantly turning shittier. But we're also constantly gaining new things to try.

That's not some optimistic wishy washy platitude - That's the truth of how the world works. You lose your favorite things, and you get new favorite things, because the world is constantly in flux.