I talked about why our society is losing its color in Why The World Is Quietly Losing Its Color, my previous piece. I mentioned that people demand photos with an old analog vibe much more than high quality pictures these days. I actually make my own thumbnails with that exact analog feel lately. The reason is remarkably simple. I just miss the past. The past was certainly harder to live in and much less convenient but I still miss it deeply. I have a more stable job now, my quality of life is perfectly comfortable, and I lack very little in the present. I have no idea why I miss that unstable past so much but one thing is certain. I am not the only one feeling this same kind of nostalgia. Even the coworkers around me seem to feel the same split, missing the past while rarely feeling satisfied with the present.
The Strange Trend Of Missing Yesterday
A trend called 2016 vibes recently blew up among teenagers and young adults. They upload videos talking about how much they miss the year 2016. They share the songs, the videos, and the events from that specific time. I understand why content reminiscing about the past gets popular but there is something slightly unusual here. The generation looking back is strikingly young.
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| Nostalgia used to take decades to show up, and this generation felt it after just ten years |
People in their late teens are missing a time just ten years ago. Normally the generations that deeply miss the past are at least in their thirties or forties. When you reach that age it is completely natural to miss your energetic youth. But with 2016 vibes you have very young people longing for the past. When I looked into why this was happening, the explanation I kept running into was that it is closely tied to how short a trend's life cycle has become in modern society.
There used to be a formula that a trend cycle basically lasted thirty years. For the young generation leading the trends, looking at content or fashion from thirty years ago feels entirely different from what they know. They think it looks great and feels entirely new. They consume it heavily and that naturally settles into a new trend cycle. But these days that cycle is shrinking rapidly to twenty years and even down to ten years. When you look at the present where new things appear and change every single day the year 2016 feels like an entirely different world. The reason 2016 vibes emerged is partly because watching videos from ten years ago makes people realize how drastically the world has changed and that brings out a very faint, nostalgic emotion. This is just a sudden thought I had but even if trends are getting shorter things are just moving way too fast. I often watch a viral video and think about how long ago it happened. Then I check the date and get honestly shocked to see it was posted only one month ago. We live in a world where huge things happen and fade in just a single month.
How The Broadcast System Ruled Us
I have come to believe this phenomenon where trends get shorter and sporadically flash in and out of existence is heavily tied to how our social structure has transformed. I read a book called Virtual Society by Herman Narula a while ago, and I discovered something quite fascinating inside it. The book distinguishes between a broadcast system and a network system. The word broadcast literally means to throw something broadly. So broadcasting is a system where the center produces a product or piece of content and scatters it widely.
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| One room like this used to decide what an entire country watched at the exact same moment |
Television is the classic example. A broadcasting station makes a program and throws it across the entire country. The movie industry runs on a central studio that can inject a huge amount of capital. That studio pours an enormous amount of money, time, and energy into one ambitious project and then distributes it globally. Traditional pop music works the same way. They invest heavily to produce an album and scatter it to countless people. Publishing follows this rule and fashion still retains parts of this system today.
The main characteristic of this broadcast system is that it produces a fully self contained product. This means things like documentaries, movies, books, and albums exist as products bound together with a consistent flow, a unified structure, and a sense of completion. Those products are delivered perfectly intact for huge crowds to enjoy. The next characteristic is that a creator exists with the authority of an author. There is a television producer, a movie director, a book author, and a fashion designer. These people are protected by copyright laws and they hold vastly more public authority in their fields than ordinary people. Each field is centralized around these figures while being tightly controlled and managed. To exercise any real influence within that field you have to advance into that authoritative center yourself. For example if I want to become a published author I have to make my debut by winning a prestigious literary contest hosted by a famous newspaper. That is the only way to reach the center of power. I honestly dislike this system because it is controlled by the center and has a very rigid hierarchy. It is a structure where the people who already hold authority and power get to decide what spreads through our society next. If we fail to enter that center we are naturally at a massive disadvantage regarding both power and information.
The Shift To A Network Society
If you think about the advantages of the broadcast system it does guarantee a baseline of trust and quality. Since central experts decide what gets transmitted they have to fact check the products and content along the way. I know many people will strongly disagree with me on this. I completely understand why because legacy media often distorts the facts even worse and movie studios frequently churn out terrible movies with zero artistic value just to please the crowds. But regardless of its flaws the broadcast system undeniably distributed products that had their own completeness, structure, and unity.
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| One story became a thousand unfinished fragments |
My explanation got a bit long but my main point is this. Modern society has left the broadcast system behind and transitioned into a network system. In our current society this centralized management system simply does not exist. We have entered an era where anyone can sporadically say whatever they want on the internet. Fragmented information ends up filling our entire lives. We no longer hear stories with a proper beginning, middle, and end like a legacy media news report. We just read a single line of text on X or Threads. Instead of watching a well structured drama with a clear start and finish we just log into YouTube every day and watch whatever livestream happens to be running. I believe the absolute core of this network system is that it flows endlessly and changes rapidly.
As our society shifted into this network system the flow of trends accelerated with it and that is why we feel like things are just passing us by too quickly. In the old broadcast system the center had to plan a project once and scatter it downwards so a single work naturally maintained its longevity as it spread through the world. Because the center condensed an enormous amount of money, time, and energy into one huge project at a time they could not afford to let it disappear quickly. It was a society where a trend had to spread far and wide and exert its influence for a very long time to actually be profitable. That naturally elevated the authority of those central institutions.
The Death Of The Modern Classic
But the situation flips upside down entirely in a network system. Those centralized authorities and institutions simply do not hold the sway they used to have. Small scale creators and even everyday consumers are constantly generating an incredibly diverse range of things in real time and scattering them everywhere. Even as a simple blogger with nothing special I can now share my own thoughts and insights. Because of this it became impossible for a single subject to exert long lasting influence in our society. Everything must constantly be replaced by something new.
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| This gatekeeping no longer decides what actually gets read |
I personally believe the publishing industry is one of the places taking the heaviest hits from this generational shift. The publishing world still follows the broadcast system today. A publisher plans a project, prints a book, and distributes it across the country. But the authority that the traditional publishing world used to hold has weakened immensely. Even if a big publisher discovers a new writer and releases them into the market people simply do not pay much attention. Nobody really cares if someone wins first place in a prestigious literary contest anymore. We are in a highly ironic situation where a self help essay written anonymously by an entirely unverified person gains vastly more explosive traction in the market than those traditional books. But the truth is that even the trends for those highly impactful books do not last very long. They shine brightly for a brief moment, cool off rapidly, and then something else takes the spotlight.
What I find truly unfortunate here is that this environment makes it genuinely difficult for a new classic to emerge. Looking beyond publishing to the music industry, the video industry, and every other field, new classics constantly appeared in every past era. But these days the moment a trend gets enough attention to become something great it gets instantly replaced by the next trend so a classic simply cannot be born. That is a big part of why I miss the past when classics were abundant. We miss old songs and we search for old videos and I truly think this is an emotion shared by almost everyone living today. As a writer myself I was deeply curious about this situation so I actually asked the director of a major publishing company about it when we met recently. I asked him if a new classic could ever emerge in this era. He told me it would be exceedingly difficult. The reason was obviously that trends just change far too quickly.
How Rapid Trends Erase Deep Thought
My single biggest worry today as this network system dominates us is that deep thinking is quietly disappearing. Humans are obviously still thinking right now and we will continue to think in the future. But the meaning of the activity we traditionally called thinking, reasoning, and contemplating will likely see its influence shrink steadily. Back in the broadcast system a steady supply of fully completed works gave people the breathing room to think deeply with a long attention span as they enjoyed them. We had the time to digest things like books at a slow pace and properly organize our thoughts.
Today an endless stream of new information floods into our minds long before we can even form a single unified thought. Because of this we are undeniably being pushed to think in a much shorter and more immediate way than we did in the past. We think briefly, express it instantly, move straight to the next topic, and just repeat this entire cognitive loop endlessly. The literacy issue everyone is talking about lately is definitely tied to this phenomenon. True literacy is not just understanding a single fragmented sentence. It is the ability to understand a piece of writing, grasp the intentions of the author, and properly structure the message within a much larger context. But these days it is exceptionally difficult to carve out the time and mental stamina needed to piece together thoughts like that.
This is close to what I explored in Why Your Daily Habits Are Quietly Destroying Your Business Brain, that the small, repetitive things you expose your mind to every single day quietly reshape how it actually works.
I am definitely not claiming the past was unconditionally better. I personally just view this as the natural changing of the times. Every era carries its own unique strengths and weaknesses. The broadcast system was great for systematic and complete thinking but it suffered from severe centralization and heavy authoritarianism. In contrast today we see countless authorities crumbling down and information definitely flows much more freely than before. I honestly consider this a positive shift overall.
Preserving Meaning In A Fast World
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| Even focused reading is starting to look like a punchline now |
But at the same time the weakening of our literacy and our fading ability to weave together thoughts that hold complete meaning is an undeniably serious problem. I dug into why deep reading still matters more than ever in this climate in I Used AI Like Crazy And Learned One Big Lesson. There are many reasons why this is dangerous but I personally believe the biggest one is the loss of meaning. I think the kind of meaning humans feel as they navigate life is fundamentally a narrative written over a sufficiently long period of time. But in an era where we are forced to constantly replace one sentence with the next, one topic with another, and one trend with a new one in such absurdly short cycles it will be incredibly difficult to hold onto our own unique identity and role. Future generations will probably have to put in a lot of extra effort just to find the meaning of their own lives.
I believe that trying to expand your influence and properly utilizing the traits of this network system to match the flow of the times is immensely important for personal growth. But beyond just adapting I think it will be absolutely crucial to constantly stay alert so this system does not strip away the things that truly matter in our lives, while we try our best to preserve those traditionally meaningful abilities without losing them entirely.
We have to master riding the speed of this new world without letting it wash away the slow and quiet spaces where we actually find ourselves.
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