Quite a lot of our contemporary culture is actually shot through with a resentment of limits and the passage of time, anger at what we can't do, fear or even disgust at growing old.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing.
When our culture shifts, it tends to overcorrect, throwing out everything associated with an era we've moved past, rather than saving what was good and combining it with what is new.
Really, each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the '50s, and for other generations it will be something else. Change is scary for everyone, as is complexity, contradiction, and an uncertain future.
I just think that some version of the past in our culture is going to rise up and become dominant.
The way we experience history and time in all its forms shifted quite massively between 1989 and 2001 - to the point where contrivances like decades are now kind of silly.
Our present time is indeed a criticizing and critical time, hovering between the wish, and the inability to believe. Our complaints are like arrows shot up into the air at no target: and with no purpose they only fall back upon our own heads and destroy ourselves.
Of these years nought remains in memory but the sad feeling that we have advanced and only grown older.
It's very, very hard to affect culture. And you can get surprised thinking you're farther down the path of change than you really are because, frankly, most of us like the way things are.
We tried not to age, but time had its rage.
We are comfortable with the fact that we cannot know personally what happened in the world before we were born, yet we are uncomfortable with the notion that we will stop engaging with time at some point in the future.
No opposing quotes found.