Where has all the weirdness gone?
People are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: we’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline.
I’m not the first to notice something strange going on—or, really, the lack of something strange going on. But so far, I think, each person has only pointed to a piece of the phenomenon. As a result, most of them have concluded that these trends are:
a) very recent, and therefore likely caused by the internet, when in fact most of them began long before
b) restricted to one segment of society (art, science, business), when in fact this is a culture-wide phenomenon, and
c) purely bad, when in fact they’re a mix of positive and negative.
When you put all the data together, you see a stark shift in society that is on the one hand miraculous, fantastic, worthy of a ticker-tape parade. And a shift that is, on the other hand, dismal, depressing, and in need of immediate intervention. Looking at these epoch-making events also suggests, I think, that they may all share a single cause.
Let’s start where the data is clear, comprehensive, and overlooked: compared to their parents and grandparents, teens today are a bunch of goody-two-shoes. For instance, high school students are less than half as likely to drink alcohol as they were in the 1990s:
They’re also less likely to smoke, have sex, or get in a fight, less likely to abuse painkillers, and less likely to do meth, ecstasy, hallucinogens, inhalants, and heroin. (Don’t kids vape now instead of smoking? No: vaping also declined from 2015 to 2023.) Weed peaked in the late 90s, when almost 50% of high schoolers reported that they had toked up at least once. Now that number is down to 30%. Kids these days are even more likely to use their seatbelts.
Surprisingly, they’re also less likely to bring a gun to school:
All of those findings rely on surveys, so maybe more and more kids are lying to us every year? Well, it’s pretty hard to lie about having a baby, and teenage pregnancy has also plummeted since the early 1990s:
Adults are also acting out less than they used to. For instance, crime rates have fallen by half in the past thirty years:
Here’s some similar data from Northern Ireland on “anti-social behavior incidents”, because they happened to track those:
Serial killing, too, is on the decline:
Another disappearing form of deviance: people don’t seem to be joining cults anymore. Philip Jenkins, a historian of religion and author of a book on cults, reports that “compared to the 1970s, the cult issue has vanished almost entirely”. (Given that an increase in cults would be better for Jenkins’ book sales, I’m inclined to trust him on this one.) There is no comprehensive dataset on cult formation, but analyzed cults that have been covered on a popular and long-running podcast and found that most of them started in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, with a steep dropoff after 2000:
Crimes and cults are definitely deviant, and they appear to be on the decline. That’s good. But here’s where things get surprising: neutral and positive forms of deviance also seem to be getting rarer. For example—
Moving away from home isn’t necessarily good or bad, but it is kinda weird. Ditching your hometown usually means leaving behind your family and friends, the institutions you understand, the culture you know, and perhaps even the language you speak. You have to be a bit of a misfit to do such a thing in the first place, and becoming a stranger makes you even stranger.
I always figured that every generation of Americans is more likely to move than the last. People used to be born and die in the same zip code; now they ping-pong across the country, even the whole world.
I was totally wrong about this. Americans have been getting less and less likely to move since the mid-1980s:
This effect is mainly driven by young people:
These days, “the typical adult lives only 18 miles from his or her mother“.
Creativity is just deviance put to good use. It, too, seems to be decreasing.
A few years ago, I analyzed a bunch of data and found that all popular forms of art had become “oligopolies”: fewer and fewer of the artists and franchises own more and more of the market. Before 2000, for instance, only about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, etc. Now it’s 75%.
The story is the same in TV, music, video games, and books—all of them have been oligpol-ized. As points out, we’re still reading comic books about superheroes that were invented in the 1960s, buying tickets to Broadway shows that premiered decades ago, and listening to the same music that our parents and grandparents listened to.
You see less variance even when you look only at the new stuff. According to analyses by The Pudding, popular music today is now more homogenous and has more repetitive lyrics than ever.
Also, the cover of every novel now looks like this:
But wait, shouldn’t we be drowning in new, groundbreaking art? Every day, people post ~100,000 songs to Spotify and upload 3.7 million videos to YouTube. Even accounting for Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is crap”), that should still be more good stuff than anyone could appreciate in a lifetime. And yet professional art critics are complaining that culture has come to a standstill. According to The New York Times Magazine,
We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.
Remember when the internet looked like this?
That era is long gone. Take a stroll through the Web Design Museum and you’ll immediately notice two things:
Every site has converged on the same look: sleek, minimalist design elements with lots of pictures
Website aesthetics changed a lot from the 90s to the 2000s and the 2010s, but haven’t changed much from the 2010s to now
A few examples:
This same kind of homogenization has happened on the parts of the internet that users create themselves. Every MySpace page was a disastrous hodgepodge; every Facebook profile is identical except for the pictures. On TikTok and Instagram, every influencer sounds the same. On YouTube, every video thumbnail looks like it came out of one single content factory:
No doubt, the internet is still basically a creepy tube that extrudes a new weird thing every day: Trollface, the Momo Challenge, skibidi toilet. But notice that the raw materials for many of these memes is often decades old: superheroes (1930s-1970s), Star Wars (1977), Mario (1981), Pokémon (1996), Spongebob Squarepants (1999), Pepe the Frog (2005), Angry Birds (2009), Minions (2010), Minecraft (2011). Remember ten years ago, when people found a German movie that has a long sequence of Hitler shouting about something, and they started changing the subtitles to make Hitler complain about different things? Well, they’re still doing that.
The physical world, too, looks increasingly same-y. As Alex Murrell has documented, every cafe in the world now has the same bourgeois boho style:
Every new apartment building looks like this:
The journalist Kyle Chayka has documented how every AirBnB now looks the same. And even super-wealthy mega-corporations work out of offices that look like this:
People usually assume that we don’t make interesting, ornate buildings anymore because it got too expensive to pay a bunch of artisans to carve designs into stone and wood. But the researcher Samuel Hughes argues that the supply-side story doesn’t hold up: many of the architectural flourishes that look like they have to be done by hand can, in fact, be done cheaply by machine, often with technology that we’ve had for a while. We’re still capable of making interesting buildings—we just choose not to.
Brands seem to be converging on the same kind of logo: no images, only words written in a sans serif font that kinda looks like Futura.
An analysis of branded twitter accounts found that they increasingly sound alike:
Most cars are now black, silver, gray, or white:
When a British consortium of science museums analyzed the color of their artifacts over time, they found a similar, steady uptick in black, gray, and white:
Science requires deviant thinking. So it’s no wonder that, as we see a decline in deviance everywhere else, we’re also seeing a decline in the rate of scientific progress. New ideas are less and less likely to displace old ideas, experts rate newer discoveries as less impressive than older discoveries, and we’re making fewer major innovations per person than we did 50 years ago.
You can spot this scientific bland-ification right away when you read older scientific writing. As (same guy who did the cult analysis) points out, scientific papers used to have style. Now they all sound the same, and they’re all boring. Essentially 100% of articles in medical journals, for instance, now use the same format (introduction, methods, results, and discussion):
This isn’t just an aesthetic shift. Standardizing your writing also standardizes your thinking—I know from firsthand experience that it’s hard to say anything interesting in a scientific paper.
Whenever I read biographies of famous scientists, I notice that a) they’re all pretty weird, and b) I don’t know anyone like them today, at least not in academia. I’ve met some odd people at universities, to be sure, but most of them end up leaving, a phenomenon the biologist calls “the flight of the Weird Nerd from academia”. The people who remain may be super smart, but they’re unlikely to rock the boat.
Whenever you notice some trend in society, especially a gloomy one, you should ask yourself: “Did previous generations complain about the exact same things?” If the answer is yes, you might have discovered an aspect of human psychology, rather than an aspect of human culture.
I’ve spent a long time studying people’s complaints from the past, and while I’ve seen plenty of gripes about how culture has become stupid, I haven’t seen many people complaining that it’s become stagnant. In fact, you can find lots of people in the past worrying that there’s too much new stuff. As relates, one hundred years ago, people were having nervous breakdowns about the pace of technological change. They were rioting at Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and decrying the new approaches of artists like Kandinsky and Picasso. In 1965, Susan Sontag wrote that new forms of art “succeed one another so rapidly as to seem to give their audiences no breathing space to prepare”. Is there anyone who feels that way now?
Likewise, previous generations were very upset about all the moral boundaries that people were breaking, i.e.:
In olden days, a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking
But now, God knows
Anything goes
-Cole Porter, 1934
Back then, as far as I can tell, nobody was encouraging young Americans to party more. Now they do. So as far as I can tell, the decline of deviance is not just a perennial complaint. People worrying about their culture being dominated by old stuff—that’s new.
That’s the evidence for a decline in deviance. Let’s see the best evidence against.
As I’ve been collecting data for this post over the past 18 months or so, I’ve been trying to counteract my confirmation bias by keeping an eye out for opposing trends. I haven’t found many—so maybe that’s my bias at work—but here they are.
First, unlike other forms of violence, mass shootings have become more common since the 90s (although notice the Y-axis, we’re talking about an extremely small subset of all crime):
Baby names have gotten a lot more unique:
And when you look at timelines of fashion, you certainly see a lot more change from the 1960s to the 2010s than you do from the 1860s to 1910s:
That at least hints the decline of deviance isn’t a monotonic, centuries-long trend. And indeed, lots of the data we have suggest that things started getting more homogenous somewhere between the 1980s and 2000s.
There are a few people who disagree at least with parts of the cultural stagnation hypothesis. Literature Substacker reports that “literature is booming”, and music Substacker is skeptical about stagnation in his industry. The internet ethnographer Katherine Dee argues that the most interesting art is happening in domains we don’t yet consider “art”, like social media personalities, TikTok sketch comedy, and Pinterest mood boards. I’m sure there’s some truth to all of this, but I’m also pretty sure it’s not enough to cancel out the massive trends we see everywhere else.
Maybe I’m missing all the new and exciting things because I’m just not cool and plugged in enough? After all, I’ll be the first to tell you there’s a lot of writing on Substack (and the blogosphere more generally) that’s very good and very idiosyncratic—just look at the winners of my blog competitions this year and last year. But I only know about that stuff because I read tons of blogs. If I was as deep into YouTube or podcasts, maybe I’d see the same thing there too, and maybe I’d change my tune.
Anyway, I know that it’s easy to perceive a trend when there isn’t any (see: The Illusion of Moral Decline, You’re Probably Wrong About How Things Have Changed). There’s no way of randomly sampling all of society and objectively measuring its deviance over time. The data we don’t have might contradict the data we do have. But it would have to be a lot of data, and it would all have to point in the opposite direction.
It really does seem like we’re experiencing a decline of deviance, so what’s driving it? Any major social trend is going to have lots of causes, but I think one in particular deserves most of the credit and the blame:
Life is worth more now. Not morally, but literally. This fact alone can, I think, go a long way toward explaining why our weirdness is waning.
When federal agencies do cost-benefit analyses, they have to figure out how much a human life is worth. (Otherwise, how do you know if it’s worth building, say, a new interstate that will help millions get to work on time but might cause some excess deaths due to air pollution?) They do this by asking people how much they would be willing to pay to reduce their risk of dying, which they then use to calculate the “value of a statistical life”. According to an analysis by the Substacker , those statistical lives have gotten a lot more valuable over time:
There are, I suspect, two reasons we hold onto life more dearly now. First: we’re richer. Generations of economic development have put more cash in people’s pockets, and that makes them more willing to pay to de-risk their lives—both because they can afford it, and because the life they’re insuring is going to be more pleasant. But as Linch points out, the value of a statistical life has increased faster than GDP, so that can’t be the whole story.
Second: life is a lot less dangerous than it used to be. If you have a nontrivial risk of dying from polio, smallpox, snake bites, tainted water, raids from marauding bandits, literally slipping on a banana peel, and a million other things, would you really bother to wear your seatbelt? Once all those other dangers go away, though, doing 80mph in your Kia Sorento might suddenly become the riskiest part of your day, and you might consider buckling up for the occasion.
Our super-safe environments may fundamentally shift our psychology. When you’re born into a land of milk and honey, it makes sense to adopt what ecologists refer to as a “slow life history strategy”—instead of driving drunk and having unprotected sex, you go to Pilates and worry about your 401(k). People who are playing life on slow mode care a lot more about whether their lives end, and they care a lot more about whether their lives get ruined. Everything’s gotta last: your joints, your skin, and most importantly, your reputation. That makes it way less enticing to screw around, lest you screw up the rest of your time on Earth.
(“What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Make sure I stand up from my desk chair every 20-30 minutes!)
I think about it this way: both of my grandfathers died in their 60s, which was basically on track with their life expectancy the year they were born. I’m sure they hoped to live much longer than that, but they knew they might not make it to their first Social Security check. Imagine how you differently you might live if you thought you were going to die at 65 rather than 95. And those 65 years weren’t easy, especially at the beginning: they were born during the Depression, and one of them grew up without electricity or indoor plumbing.
Plus, both of my grandpas were drafted to fight in the Korean War, which couldn’t have surprised them much—the same thing had happened to their parents’ generation in the 1940s and their grandparents’ generation in the 1910s. When you can reasonably expect your government to ship you off to the other side of the world to shoot people and be shot at in return, you just can’t be so precious about your life.
My life is nothing like theirs was. Nobody has ever asked me to shoot anybody. I’ve got a big-screen TV. I could get sushi delivered to my house in 30 minutes. The Social Security Administration thinks I might make it to 80. Why would I risk all this? The things my grandparents did casually—smoking, hitching a ride in the back of a pickup truck, postponing medical treatment until absolutely necessary—all of those feel unthinkable to me now. I have a miniature heart attack just looking at the kinds of playgrounds they had back then:
I know life doesn’t feel particularly easy, safe, or comfortable. What about climate change, nuclear war, authoritarianism, income inequality, etc.? Dangers and disadvantages still abound, no doubt. But look, 100 years ago, you could die from a splinter. We just don’t live in that world anymore, and some part of us picks that up and behaves accordingly.
In fact, adopting a slow life strategy doesn’t have to be a conscious act, and probably isn’t. Like most mental operations, it works better if you can’t consciously muck it up. It operates in the background, nudging each decision toward the safer option. Those choices compound over time, constraining the trajectory of your life like bumpers on a bowling lane. Eventually this cycle becomes self-reinforcing, because divergent thinking comes from divergent living, and vice versa.
This is, I think, how we end up in our very normie world. You start out following the rules, then you never stop, then you forget that it’s possible to break the rules in the first place. Most rule-breaking is bad, but some of it is necessary. We seem to have lost both kinds at the same time.
The sculptor Arturo di Modica ran away from his home in Sicily to go study art in Florence. He later immigrated to the US, working as a mechanic and a hospital technician to support himself while he did his art. Eventually he saved up enough to buy a dilapidated building in lower Manhattan, which he tore it down so he could illegally build his own studio—including two sub-basements—by hand, becoming an underground artist in the literal sense. He refused to work with an art dealer until 2012, when he was in his 70s. His most famous work, the Charging Bull statue that now lives on Wall Street, was deposited there without permission or payment; it was originally impounded before public outcry caused the city to put it back. Di Modica didn’t mean it as an avatar of capitalism—the stock market had tanked in 1987, and he intended the bull to symbolize resilience and self-reliance:
My point was to show people that if you want to do something in a moment things are very bad, you can do it. You can do it by yourself. My point was that you must be strong.
Meanwhile, “Fearless Girl”, the statue of a girl standing defiantly with her hands on her hips that was installed in front of the bull in 2017, was commissioned by an investment company to promote a new index fund.
Who would live di Modica’s life now? Every step was inadvisable: don’t run away from home, don’t study art, definitely don’t study sculpture, don’t dig your own basement, don’t dump your art on the street! Even if someone was crazy enough to pull a di Modica today, who could? The art school would force you to return home to your parents, the real estate would be unaffordable, the city would shut you down.
The decline of deviance is mainly a good thing. Our lives have gotten longer, safer, healthier, and richer. But the rise of mass prosperity and disappearance of everyday dangers has also made trivial risks seem terrifying. So as we tame every frontier of human life, we have to find a way to keep the good kinds of weirdness alive. We need new institutions, new eddies and corners and tucked-away spaces where strange things can grow.
All of this is within our power, but we must decide to do it. For the first time in history, weirdness is a choice. And it’s a hard one, because we have more to lose than ever. If we want a more interesting future, if we want art that excites us and science that enlightens us, then we’ll have to tolerate a few illegal holes in the basement, and somebody will have to be brave enough to climb down into them.
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Comments
A big part of this IMO is that “money won”, for lack of a better phrase. There is no real concept of selling out anymore. Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago.
Someone will probably say this is because current generations have less financial security, and I’m sure that’s a factor. But I think it’s a cultural shift that is much older and tracks better to the decline of traditional sources of values (community, cultural groups, religion, etc.) and their replacement by the easily understandable dollar. So it becomes harder and harder for a cultural definition of success to not mean financially successful. And being financially successful is difficult if you have deviant, counter cultural ideas (and aren’t interested in monetizing them.)
There's also the issue of gatekeepers squashing deviance. Payment processors killing payments to various legal adult websits. Information-discovery gatekeepers squashing discoverability of deviant material. Social media....has had a dual affect of being subject to the gatekeeper's restrictions and the risk of self-appointed moral busybodies searching for deviant content to threaten peoples' lives/livelihoods over.
Cultural gatekeepers are able to exert influence over more people now than they have ever had before in human history. In many cases the ability to be deviant is becoming more difficult to even attempt.
By 4gotunameagain 2025-10-298:154 reply Labeling pornography as "deviance" is simply funny. It is one of the most prevalent things that exist right now.
Which imo is also an outcome of late stage capitalism (money won, as aptly phrased above). You body is a commodity to be monetised, sacrifice everything in the name of money.
By tavavex 2025-10-2917:19 It's a little telling that the only association you make with "adult content" is immediately "pornography" (and only the kind where you film yourself). There's a lot of stuff that's not advertiser- or corporate-friendly that's being financially squeezed out. Adult content includes many types of goods and services, and many of them are out on the fringes that are part of what the post describes as deviance.
By el_benhameen 2025-10-2915:25 > Your body is a commodity to be monetised
That’s my favorite John Mayer song
By actionfromafar 2025-10-2913:04 You put the finger on it - there's something sad about "if only deviance was more easily monetized". Money perverts everything, in a much sadder way than kinks ever can on their own. When you do the thing to get another thing, the inherent joy can so easily seep away.
See every content producer following the posting schedule exactly, because the Algorithm punishes deviance from the schedule. Not everyone can be Captain Disillusion.
By rockskon 2025-10-307:39 And yet it is routinely taken down, subject constant attacks worldwide who believe they need to prevent others from seeing a nipple on the Internet at all costs, adult toy vendors are routinely removed from vending platforms, age gating by boomer politicians listening to religiously motivated political activists.
compounding gains has also become the only strategy to stay afloat.
Look at the performance of broad index funds since 2008. You either dumped everything you had in the market over the last 15 years or literally lost out on 4Xing your money.
That kind of dynamic is pretty shitty for risk, why would I sink my money into any kind of risky venture when the market keeps spitting out 15% a year returns on safe investments.
All expenditures also get warped by this, move across the country? Buy a new car/house? Better to play it safe and keep the wheels spinning and watch the numbers go up and to the right.
That’s a good point too. You increasingly need to participate in the system or you get left behind and can’t afford the things you could 5-6 years prior. So doing something crazy like wandering the country in your car or working at a cafe to fund your artist lifestyle is a constant ticking clock.
Also you could wander much more easily in the past. These days digital surveillance has creeped in everywhere. Stay in one place over a day and you'll get a ticket. Pay is better monitored so you cant easily do under the table work. Your customers probably use cards so your transactions are monitored and will be taxed. It's a different world from what us older people grew up in.
Yeah; I was reading Kerouac recently and just thought to myself, this kind of wandering free existence just isn’t even possible anymore. Everything is mapped and reviewed, so you’d need to deliberately be counter-cultural and turn off your phone.
Not had a smartphone in 5 years, and would never go back. I get lost sometimes and explore new areas, I enjoy concerts with my own eyes, I can wait to deal with work when I am back home and enjoy dinner with my family, and I am always present in whatever I am doing not allowing the internet to ever tear me away.
It has changed a lot about my life, and I am so much happier. And have so much more privacy, given I also only use cash in public. I am mostly invisible when away from home, digitally.
> .. I am always present in whatever I am doing not allowing the internet to ever tear me away.
Yet here you are. Oops.
By lrvick 2025-10-319:43 Yes, I make a decision when to be at my desk, and when I walk away I live in the real world.
Turns out you do not need to be reachable or stay connected with the lives of far away people every second of every day.
By rich66man 2025-10-3020:29 So many people are like "I have quit all social media! I'm free from DA INTERNET!" while posting this on Hacker News or Reddit
Turning off your phone just the easiest way to track you. With more AI based facial recognition cameras and data sharing between corporations you're still being tracked in public. The digital world has shrunk the analog world to a very small place.
Not that I'm pro being tracked or anything, but what difference does that make to your general existence and daily adventure if there is some sort of behind the scenes tracking going on. Why would that prevent you from wandering?
Tracking is a necessary precursor to being able to hassle wanderers.
Absent mass automated surveillance, the state's ability to do so at scale was limited.
Once implemented (and processed and stored), norms on use erode over time... and then anyone anomalous is being auto background-checked when showing up in a new area.
Or do we think someone won't find a use for all the dark datacenter GPU power after AI pops?
By thaumasiotes 2025-10-2911:512 reply > and then anyone anomalous is being auto background-checked when showing up in a new area.
That is the historical norm. Is it supposed to be a new concept?
When has that ever been the historical norm?
Even the most closed societies (say, East Germany, the USSR, and the DPRK) only accomplished a fraction of what's now technically possible, and that historical analogue through a massive human labor force.
By thaumasiotes 2025-10-3016:542 reply It's been the historical norm for all of time, except the extremely recent past.
The norm is that you're born somewhere and you stay there forever. Everyone there knows you and they've known you since you, or they, were born. If a traveler happens to show up, everyone can recognize immediately, by looking at their face, that they're from somewhere else. Strangers get low levels of trust.
By pixl97 2025-10-2917:48 I mean, slavery is a historical norm. I'd rather not have it back.
In Australia, it feels to me like "participate in the system" is owning property. And unless you have a shrewd alternative path, you want to be in that game because the growth in value is aggressive (~ doubles in value every 10 years; enough that every month you wait puts you behind).
That said, while wandering off jobless is a ticking clock, it is easier than ever to work remotely while wandering. And if you have property rented while you're away, you can get some of the deviance without digging too much of a hole for yourself.
By keiferski 2025-10-2911:02 It is definitely easier to work remotely, and I have taken advantage of that to travel, but realistically most remote jobs are for people that are already in demand economically. There isn’t really a remote equivalent to the cafe job for the average non-finance, non-technical person.
That used to be support, graphic design, and writing, but all are being offshored or replaced by AI. Marketing more broadly probably is one of the few career paths I can think of that is still viable remotely, excluding the groups I mentioned before.
> why would I sink my money into any kind of risky venture when the market keeps spitting out 15% a year returns on safe investments
If it returns 15% it isn't a safe investment. The rate of return for a safe investment is in the 1-3% real range. Someone is offering you 15% real that implies they think it is a risky enterprise to sign on with. 15% nominal isn't so hard to find (gold yields at 10% nominal - but that isn't actually coming out ahead as much as treading water). It isn't a very impressive nominal rate of return in that sense but it is still not all that safe.
By potato3732842 2025-10-2910:18 It's only returning a few percent. The rest is the dollar devaluing.
By terminalbraid 2025-10-2910:48 There's a book "Against Creativity" by Oli Mould which is on this topic. The title is about the redirection of creativity into monetizing everything. It hypothesizes that any current counterculture gets bought out by the system and sold back to society while those creators effectively get golden handcuffs to not rock the boat meaningfully.
https://www.amazon.com/Against-Creativity-Oli-Mould-ebook/dp...
It looks cyclical to me. The materialism of the postwar era led into the civil rights movement of the late 60s and 70s, which turned into the materialistic 80s, which was rejected by the countercultural late 90s and 2000s, after which there was a slight deviation in which transgression rather than anti-materialism was rejected, and now we're back to materialism.
My guess is that in a decade or two society will elevate an ideology that directly opposes material wealth again. If nobody has any damn money then they can't exactly use wealth as a measure of worth.
> It looks cyclical to me. The materialism of the postwar era led into the civil rights movement of the late 60s and 70s, which turned into the materialistic 80s, which was rejected by the countercultural late 90s and 2000s, after which there was a slight deviation in which transgression rather than anti-materialism was rejected, and now we're back to materialism.
The post has loads of graphs going back to the 50's, with trend lines continually going down, not cycling up and down during those time frames.
By strken 2025-10-2912:02 Sorry, to clarify, wealth-seeking in mainstream culture looks cyclical to me. I was replying to a comment that said that "money won".
I agree that there's a general decline in criminality (which is good) and general risk-taking (which is mixed). I don't see that this is strongly connected to wealth-seeking, given that overall wealth has increased for the majority of people and offset some of the risk involved when sacrificing income and wealth for other values.
By ambicapter 2025-10-2911:55 The graphs are about alcohol usage, teen pregnancy and crime rates. You can be counter-cultural without doing those things.
By reaperducer 2025-10-2817:381 reply Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago.
In the 70's the expression was "He who dies with the most toys wins."
Today, replace "toys" with "dollars."
People seem to be using raw money as some kind of measure of success, as if life was a big video game, trying to rack up the highest score.
It's part of the gamification of everything: Politics, dining, shopping. Everything is a game now, and everyone is expected to keep score.
By dominicrose 2025-10-2910:10 When you need to borrow a hundred times your salary to own a decent home, you need three hundred months to pay it back, that's 25 years in an economy were you're lucky to keep the same job for a couple of years. And I'm not even talking about all the related or other fixed or mandatory costs.
It may be a game for someone who's already rich, but it's not for most people, and if you add kids to the equation, well, that's much more difficult because it requires time which we don't have, or if we have it then it means we don't have money.
By inglor_cz 2025-10-299:20 I don't really believe this explanation, it is too narrow (in the usual "the US is the whole world" sense typical for US-based forums), and the same trend seems to be happening in many countries and cultures at once.
My explanations would be:
a. A lot of your current life is recorded online and visible to others, and people in general behave more carefully when under de facto surveillance. Similar to self-censorship in authoritarian countries.
b. Personal contact has been supplanted by virtual contact over apps, especially among the young, and doing risky things, including sex and booze, faces a lot more obstacles when your main gateway to the rest of humanity, including friends, is a screen.
Quite a lot of my, uh, non-standard behavior in my 20s was initiated by an impulsive decision in company of others, who came up with some ...idea... This is what just does not happen when everyone is in their room alone.
By lo_zamoyski 2025-10-2918:13 Our culture is certainly commercialized - with the ancien régime out, the merchants began to dominate, and with it a cultural shift toward commerce. Commercialism embraces industrialization and industrialization produces homogeneity. Profit becomes the sole measure of "success", giving way to streamlining and predictability.
By andrewrn 2025-10-2917:48 This aligns fairly closely with one of the main theses of “The Technological Republic,” Alex Karp’s new book.
Basically, our abandonment of shared identities (national, religious, cultural) has allowed status and market forces to rush in to give people meaning and identity.
Obviously a take that will ruffle some feathers, but I found it fairly convincing.
> Someone will probably say this is because current generations have less financial security, and I’m sure that’s a factor.
Than the previous couple of generations, sure. But, in most places, far _more_ than those born late in the 19th century, say. That in itself isn't a great explanation.
By keiferski 2025-10-2912:21 Agreed but I think the comparison is ultimately what matters. Being poorer than your parents makes you more cautious about money, even if you're 5x as wealthy as your great-grandparents.
By potato3732842 2025-10-2913:231 reply If you are destitute for any length of time these days you'll likely wind up entrapped by various sorts of welfare systems one of which probably has some sort of cliff you can't scale on your way out. If it's not the food stamps that gets ya it's sec8.
If you were totally destitute in 1900 or 1800 you might starve. But the costs incurred on your way back up were more like steps than cliffs.
By rsynnott 2025-10-2914:33 > If you were totally destitute in 1900 or 1800 you might starve. But the costs incurred on your way back up were more like steps than cliffs.
"Back up?" Ever heard of workhouses, or debtors' prisons? There wasn't a 'back up', generally.
By antoniojtorres 2025-10-296:34 Mark Fisher describes this as precorporation in Capitalist Realism. The idea that at a certain point capital will anticipate and ahead of time incorporate the behavior, thus absorbing it into the overall mechanism.
By igleria 2025-10-2911:30 > Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago
Has anyone here had the chance to have a frank conversation which such types? Morbid curiosity...
Let's do the traditional thing and blame it on music! US hip hop videos of the early 2000s were full of garish displays of wealth.
By brazukadev 2025-10-2817:59 But the people trying to show off weren't actually that rich it was a genuine counter-culture movement. Today they are rich af.
By DuperPower 2025-10-298:25 no, the romantic narrative of Life was just a facade used by cynical boomers to club to the top, its true many were earnest in the way they focused on quality of their Jobs (doing that also lead you to money) so its not that now its about money, It always was It just the romantic layers were removed so even if you are passionated about something if you are not cold with money as the hard reality of everything you Will seem deluded
By mjbale116 2025-10-294:35 > A big part of this IMO is that “money won”, for lack of a better phrase. There is no real concept of selling out anymore. Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago.
Fifty years ago you had Soviet Union.
An entity which provided an alternative to the US and Western Europe vassals freemarketeering shenanigans.
With the Soviet Union gone, and the communists in retreat, the Capitalists can shove their ideologies down the populace's collective throat.
It has already been established that "what we have here is the best system" and any failure to ascend in said system is a failure of the individual rather than the system's.
"Here is a feel good story of an immigrant that learned python and made it big in America, why can't you do the same?"
This isn’t true and hasn’t been true fifty years ago either. A handful of the most well-known books regarding getting wealthy and having a high status were written almost a century ago. The practice of wealth accumulation was already established by anyone who was above room temperature IQ for as long as we have existed.
Deviance is all around, the author is too trapped in a bubble to see it.
There used to be much more tension between creating culture (art, music, etc.) and making money from it. I think that tension has pretty much evaporated.
By moritzwarhier 2025-10-2818:131 reply There is a term for this, at least some people used to use it, I think it would appear as tied to certain kind of "ideology" to most though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry
I also guess it is just a wordy description of the combination of commercial entertainment and industrialization.
I like your point, although I feel that in some contexts, it was probably _easier_ for people to create something they feel is valuable as art and also can earn them money, a few decades ago.
I don't think the tension has evaporated, it's just the difference between "art" and "entertainment". Sure, you can always say that entertainment is art. No matter if you're Christopher Nolan or a street musician who knows what to play to get some money.
The tension is still there, there's just a mass-scale production of commercial art that hasn't been there before.
But I'd say that probably, with these products that have giant budgets and are feeding thousands of people, there are just a few people involved who consider themselves artists in a sense that isn't the same in that a baker or sewer is also an artist.
No coincidence we're discussing this in a forum that has software development as a main subject.
Christopher Nolan's movies are "art" the same way Microsofts UI design is art, IMHO.
I didn't bring Nolan into this in order to be smug about him, his work just feels like it symbolizes this kind of industrial cultural production well, especially because many people might consider him a top-notch _artist_.
By gsf_emergency_4 2025-10-293:132 reply How about Hans Zimmer and the gen-Z Swedish musician Nolan went with for Oppenheimer? Not dissonant enough?
I'm more curious if the periphery has declined in coherence thanks to "autocuration" as by TikTok & YouTube.
(creators of GangnamStyle or BabyShark have industrial funding to outdo themselves on their preferred axes just like Nolan but..?)
Opposite, less quantitative take:
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-new-systems-of-s...
(author sorta argued that we're deep in the Perma_weirdo_cene)
It's easy on HN where "votes have won".. evenso I've given up and have resorted to reviewing what 1-pointers PaulHoule and his machine deign coherent enough to respond to
By moritzwarhier 2025-10-2910:08 I just wanted to give an example for mass culture that some people consider "artsy", not dive too deep into some kind of taste discussion. :)
By cindyllm 2025-10-2913:09 [dead]
By jhbadger 2025-10-291:29 I don't think there was ever really such a tension in terms of making money from art, but rather how. The idea of "selling out" was that, say, selling the rights to your songs to advertisers was viewed as crass. That I agree has pretty much evaporated -- nobody calls musicians who allow their songs to be used in ads "sellouts" anymore.
By chemotaxis 2025-10-292:531 reply For whom - for Taylor Swift? The average artist experience is pretty miserable: it's harder than ever to break through because there is more competition - two or three generations who looked up to rock and pop stars and imagined that this could be a viable career.
One in a thousand talented artists will get lucky, but I suspect the ratio is historically low. Everyone else more or less needs to find another job.
There are other things that probably push artists toward the cultural mean. You're no longer trying to cater to the tastes of a wealthy patron or even a record studio executive. Now, you gotta get enough clicks on YouTube first. The surest way to do this is to look nice and do some unoffensive covers of well-known pop songs.
By margalabargala 2025-10-294:55 The tension the parent referred to is the concept of "selling out" as a bad thing.
Your comment supports this. While you may talk about how it's harder to "break through" or "get lucky" than it was, it presents both of those as good things.
There used to be other measures of success for musicians other than financial.
By reaperducer 2025-10-2817:407 reply Deviance is all around, the author is too trapped in a bubble to see it.
Show me the modern counter-culture movement. Show me the modern Firesign Theater. Show me today's National Lampoon. Show me the modern Anarchist's Cookbook.
No, 2600 doesn't count. It's a toothless parody of what it once was that you can buy on the shelf at Barnes and Noble next to Taylor Swift magazines.
Heck, even the 2000's had hipsters.
Where are the protest songs? I think this is the first generation that doesn't have mainstream protest songs.
Other zines have filled the void left by 2600, one of my favorites being PoC||GTFO. (pocorgtfo.hacke.rs)
I think the author isn't considering that people's bubbles have gotten smaller and more opaque. There's still plenty of weird hackers innovating, they just do it with their chosen peers, not in mass-culture.
As predicted "The revolutions are not being televised."
By listenfaster 2025-10-2915:17 Thanks for the reco for pocgtfo. I had no idea.
By JackMorgan 2025-10-2911:001 reply I generally agree with you.
Which is why this Jesse Welles's stuff hits me like a freight train
By filoeleven 2025-10-2915:43 This is who I thought of too.
it’s your own damn fault you’re so damn fat / Shame shame shame
All the food on the shelf was engineered for your health / So you’re gonna have to take the blame
By lubujackson 2025-10-2818:272 reply Give me a break with this "where are the protest songs" stuff. I'm an old fart, but even I know stuff like Childish Gambino's "This Is America", a bunch of Kendrick Lamar songs (not to mention his Super Bowl performance), Beyonce's "Ameriican Requiem", etc.
And let's not forget that protest songs aren't usually promoted by those in power...
It's crazy to think that "This is America" was released 7 years ago.
By 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2025-10-292:47 2001 and 2016 have been unfortunately been very long years thus far
By bobthepanda 2025-10-293:13 Also this kind of stuff is still happening, look at all the blowback to Bad Bunny performing at the next Super Bowl
By engeljohnb 2025-10-2919:57 I suppose he is modern, but he's distinctly a millennial star. I don't think gen z/a cares aboht him.
By hypokite 2025-10-2916:11 If you were to submit any writing daring original creation and significance today you are going to jail. Such was the demise of zwei sei zed /dev/null.
By vixen99 2025-10-297:07 You have a point. Deviance is tending not to stick its head above the parapet.
By reaperducer 2025-10-2821:202 reply Mainstream protest songs?
The last century was full of them. From Bob Dylan to Marvin Gaye to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young to Sting to U2.
There were probably hundreds that made the Top 40 charts.
By marcosdumay 2025-10-291:351 reply Hum... Have you not noticed the problem?
That's exactly the kind of stuff everybody is saying that doesn't count. It's not deviant if everybody is doing it.
By satellite2 2025-10-292:28 Your meta-analysis is one degree too high. You were going to have the long tail anyway. It just shows there was an interest for the deviant.
By foul 2025-10-2914:58 That's a folk music wave, a conscious soul album, conflated with more pop social commentary. Not much protest songs. Products made out of popular discontent. Now if you said Woody Guthrie... But in pre-war times was there a non-mainstream?
The only thing that this may say is that in USA the regime fights dissent in mainstream media. Like, if you want to catch signs of a product made out of popular discontent, you can't e.g. find in UK charts the Sleaford Mods or Kneecap?
By mihaic 2025-10-2819:02 I think you're missing that deviants have to interact with people in the normal sphere for them to count socially, and the fact that you're arguing that the author is in a bubble pretty much is making his case actually.
By GuinansEyebrows 2025-10-2818:111 reply > The practice of wealth accumulation was already established by anyone who was above room temperature IQ for as long as we have existed
i can't tell if you're trying to make a point about people who don't practice wealth accumulation. probably because i have a room temperature IQ.
By GuinansEyebrows 2025-10-2818:552 reply celsius
> Deviance is all around, the author is too trapped in a bubble to see it.
Let's send the author to a furry con.
By omnicognate 2025-10-2818:493 reply Furry conventions have been going for 40 years. There are more than 50 of them catering to a worldwide "furry fandom" of millions. Is there a boiling cauldron of innovation there that I'm not aware of? From the outside it looks almost mainstream at this point.
By pfdietz 2025-10-2913:00 Hmm. I wonder if the real issue is we've run out of deviations? The space of innovative new deviations that are sufficiently attractive to matter may have been mined out.
By ChickeNES 2025-10-291:56 Right? When Spencer's Gifts is using the word "yiff" in advertising, you can't quite call it underground now lol
By readthenotes1 2025-10-2818:02 I wonder if you were to plot out the costume variations if they would be increasing or decreasing over time.
By delusional 2025-10-2817:23 > But I think it’s a cultural shift that is much older and tracks better to the decline of traditional sources of values (community, cultural groups, religion, etc.) and their replacement by the easily understandable dollar.
I think about that in the complete opposite direction. I think the dollar displaced traditional values. The cause I'd attribute would be our increasing reliance on "reason", especially short term cause-and-effect "reason".
Most of my perspective on this comes from "Dialectic on enlightenment", which I can recommend if you can stomach an incredibly dense and boring book.
By armchairhacker 2025-10-2817:262 reply I disagree that people are less weird and deviant today. I believe they’re less weird offline, because weirdness is easier, safer, and less embarrassing to express online.
I also disagree that online has become less weird. It’s less weird proportionally, because the internet used to consist of mostly weird people, then normal people joined. Big companies are less weird because they used to cater to weird people (those online), now they cater to normal people. But there are still plenty of weird people, websites, and companies.
Culture is still constantly changing, and what is “weird” if not “different”? Ideas that used to be unpopular and niche have become mainstream, ex. 4chan, gmod (Skibidi Toilet), and Twitch streamers. I’m sure ideas that are unpopular and niche today will be mainstream tomorrow. I predict that within the next 10 years, mainstream companies will change their brands again to embrace a new fad; albeit all similarly, but niche groups will also change differently and re-organize.
(And if online becomes less anonymous and more restrictive, people will become weirder under their real ID or in real life.)
Weirdness isn’t really deviance. Punk was deviance, anti-system. Modern internet weirdness is mostly just having weird consumer tastes and sociopolitical opinions.
By a-french-anon 2025-10-298:181 reply The total opposite, large movements like punks or hippies weren't really deviance, it was choosing another large group to belong to. It's conveniently cellophane-wrapped rebellion for people who need an identity but can't bear to stand alone and truly think for themselves.
"The underground is a lie" was right then and still is: https://www.jimgoad.net/goadabode/issue%202/undergnd.html
By PaulDavisThe1st 2025-10-294:461 reply I think it is useful to differentiate between transgressive and "deviance" in the sense it was used in TFA.
Punk was primarily transgressive from my POV (growing up in London as punk exploded there). It concerned itself with rule breaking, norms breaking and generally doing things you weren't supposed to do, all just for the sake of doing those things, and mostly because life fucking sucked.
The way "deviance" is used in TFA seems much more related to people making non-transgressive but neverthless uncommon choices, closer to ideas about statistical distributions ("standard deviation") than the sort of scream of anger that drove punk forward.
I should probably view that even though I don't like much if any real punk for its aesthetics, I think it was and is a really good thing, particularly in terms of its focus on a DIY model which spread beyond just music.
Punk was invented by Malcolm McLaren to sell Vivienne Westwood clothes.
It was a recipe for people that wanted that identity, with both the music and the looks being where the money was made.
This happened at a time when there was no internet, and with no cynical clowns like me to piss in the punch, to claim that punk was just marketing.
This was not the first 'off the shelf' identity for young people to take up, however, punk was the most planned, even though it is all about not conforming to the rules of society. Compare with the 'hipster' trend where there was no mastermind planning it, but more of a convergence of influences.
By PaulDavisThe1st 2025-10-2919:52 > This happened at a time when there was no internet, and with no cynical clowns like me to piss in the punch, to claim that punk was just marketing.
Apparently, you weren't there. London in 76/77 was full of people claiming that punk was just marketing.
Mclaren was instrumental in fomenting the UK/London punk scene, but he was not in control of it, and probably not even the mastermind, had there actually been one. Ditto for Westwood.
By 10729287 2025-10-2817:48 Punk is still strong. The internet destroyed Geek tho.
By Synaesthesia 2025-10-307:40 The internet used to have all kinds of crazy sites, anyone remember rotten.com?
It was a lot more uncensored and anarchistic. It wasn't dedicated to consumerism and sold out to corporations.
We had personal websites, blogs and such. No, it has definitely changed for the worse in terms of personal freedom. Enshittification is real.
Others are saying the end of leaded gasoline, I’ll add that around 2008 when the trend accelerates schools started becoming more locked down and consequences for being a kid can now follow you into adulthood much easier due to social media.
I think we’re seeing a natural result of kids being scared of that one bad night being immortalized or that one fight turning into an arrest.
You’re just not allowed to be a kid really.
Interesting; for what it's worth, as a black person who grew up in a relatively privileged environment, the "one bad fight" rule was subconsciously our entire existence in a way that it wasn't for many people around us.
What does that mean? One is enought to ruin your reputation and chances later as an adult?
By RichardCA 2025-10-2819:17 More likely to get hit with a Zero Tolerance punishment for a single isolated incident, which derails your entire trajectory through the school system.
https://www.reddit.com/r/lansing/comments/1no5rtl/lansing_pa...
By jrm4 2025-10-2914:51 Right -- like "later" is one of the luckier outcomes.
Win or lose, start or end the fight, regardless of what actually happened -- there's always the extremely lopsided chance that I'm seen as the aggressor and get strongly punished; especially in the days before cell phones.
+1 for the Lead Hypothesis. Apart from negative health effects, lead exposure leads to more impulsive behavior and reduced inhibition - which kind of covers nearly everything here.
Have to say, I am glad that the world is safer and less wild, but I do miss the creative energy and "real world" social engagement of 1980s-1990s
By PaulDavisThe1st 2025-10-294:47 and in the 80s and 90s, we missed the creative energy and "real world" social engagement of the 60s and 70s ...
plus ca change, plus le meme chose ...
That generation were a bunch of mindless, selfish dicks. Free from poisoning, the new generations can think clearly about how to be selfish dicks, and plan it out more deliberately.
By AvAn12 2025-11-0117:30 Generalizations about generations are pretty silly. Every generation, baby boom, X, Z, millennial, etc. has a pretty heterogeneous mix of mindless, selfish dicks, geniuses, morons, artists, business people, wizards, creeps, and normies.
> I think we’re seeing a natural result of kids being scared of that one bad night being immortalized or that one fight turning into an arrest.
> You’re just not allowed to be a kid really.
I learned yesterday about the skull breaker challenge, where you and two friends line up and jump at the same time to see who jumps highest, except the outside two people conspire to kick the legs out of the middle one. Is that being a kid? If anything, the proliferation of social media is enabling the normalization of deviance in the form of these meme challenges. People are going around spraying bug spray on the produce at the grocery and posting it on TikTok.
By aj_hackman 2025-10-2817:481 reply > People are going around spraying bug spray on the produce at the grocery and posting it on TikTok.
One single person did this, and was sentenced to a year in prison for it.
By XorNot 2025-10-296:56 Funnily enough not even a new phenomenon due to social media: remember to beware razor blades in candy this Halloween /s
Yeah I would be willing to bet serious money that this is a few kids and that the number is not even greater than a fractional fraction of a percent.
You're seeing point wise incidents, chosen to generate outrage, and trying to apply them like all kids are doing these things, which per all trends they are not.
Sorry some fraction of people will always be stupid, we shouldn't apply constraints on the many to save the few stupid ones.
By hrimfaxi 2025-10-2817:51 How many of these trends are we seeing and how much of a fraction of a fraction do they represent in sum? The article discusses specific declines but doesn't look at data regarding increased incidences of social-media-driven acts of deviance. That's like pointing at the declining use of the saddle while ignoring the rise of the automobile. I guess I should revise my previous hyperbolic statement as I don't know if the deviance is made up for in other ways, I would just have appreciated a broader view.
By watwut 2025-10-298:28 > Is that being a kid?
Imo, it is being an asshole kid, potentially a bully. That totally existed when I was young.
I'm sure you never heard "if your friend jumps off a bridge would you?" question growing up. But it seemed to be very common saying in my family and in others at the time. So it seems like kids were making bad decisions based off of peer pressure well before social media. It's only that it goes "viral" that anyone pays attention at all. Just more ammunition for the "kids these days" type of people I guess.
By buildsjets 2025-10-294:391 reply I jumped off the bridge. Chicken if you didn’t. 27 feet, so a bit less than an olympic high dive.
By defrost 2025-10-294:51 Deep water Jetty's are way more fun - from the deck at a king high tide, barely ten feet, from the top of the service shack at a King low tide, fifty feet and more.
Plenty of time from primary school to junior high to work up to a proper jump.
Bonus salt water sharks and crocodiles.
By Theodores 2025-10-2914:07 The lead in gasoline hypothesis is certainly plausible, however, I blame the larger picture of car dependency as well as the Thatcher/Reagan revolution, when 'stranger danger' was the big fear.
The article does go into this aspect, with a map of Sheffield in the footnotes showing how far eight year old kids were able to travel over the different generations. There was a time when the child could go across to the other side of the city to go fishing, whereas now, a child is essentially imprisoned and not expected to be going very far.
The Thatcher/Reagan revolution created exceptional oppositional culture in the UK, with 'rave' being the thing. The last 'free range' children grew up to be the original ravers and they had considerable organisational ability, needed to put on parties and other events. Furthermore, the music of the rave scene was banned by the BBC and the government ('repetitive beats').
In time, most of the rave generation grew up, got day jobs, had kids and all of that fun stuff. They got old and moved on, however, there was nobody to fill their shoes. Instead of illegal rave events and lots of house parties, organised festivals and city nightclubs took over. The cost aspect meant going with a small handful of friends rather than just the closest two hundred friends.
A good party should be heard from a considerable distance away (sorry neighbours) and I am surprised at how few parties there are these days. I travel by bicycle on residential roads, often late at night. Rarely do I find myself stumbling across people having house parties. This doesn't mean that parties aren't happening, but, equally, it doesn't mean I am old and out of touch.
I would suggest that another trend which contributes to this "one bad fight" is the growing personal disposable income in the US, which allows parents to be highly litigious, demanding things like arrests of kids their kids get in fights with:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96
Anecdotally, teachers have been talking about fear of getting sued by parents for a long time now. I suspect this is a big driving force behind the "everyone gets a trophy" mentality and not at all liberalism. Teachers have been kowtowing to moneyed tiger/helicopter parents in ever more egregious ways.
My own pet theory anyways.
By rangestransform 2025-10-303:52 You’ve been downvoted but my company’s legal aid insurance started offering coverage for school related matters
