Happy 10 years of Earth Day posts!
I'm a little alarmed to find myself rapidly approaching (or already passing) the decade mark for several writing milestones here on the internet. We reach one today, with this, my tenth Overpopulation Blog Earth Day post in a row. (Which is being posted not on Earth Day, as usual.)
2016 is another year of me having little to say in the wake of having too much to say. Politics, climate change, the improbable continuing existence of Twitter...we live in strange times for which I have an abundance of opinions, but a growing understanding of the limited benefits of voicing most of them.
I recently read an article about the popularity of (of all things) Friends. The author was intrigued by the fact that Friends continues to be watched by so many people (16 million a week in the U.S., and that's without streaming numbers thrown in), and that a large number of those people are young people - kids who weren't born when the show originally aired, and who don't remember the pre-social media and pre-smartphone world that Friends exists in.
I agree with him that this is interesting...but I don't agree with his secondary argument that this is unusual. I spent my teenaged years, back in the '90s, in a blur of '60s and '70s nostalgia. Back then, it was the Beatles Anthology and the Brady Bunch movies and Welcome Back, Kotter on Nick at Nite. The current generation seems only as fascinated by the past as our generation used to be. Smash Mouth, a '90s band if ever there was one, memorialized us as "hippie chicks, all hypocrites," because for all our interest, we somehow missed the point of the peace and love movement. Likewise, I'm guessing that the kids of today are missing the point of the pre-internet world, because I imagine they're watching Friends from the internet, on devices they're addicted to.
Ten years ago, I started this blog because...well, probably because I wanted to prove that I could. Ten years is long enough to warrant its own brand of nostalgia (the O.C. theme, which I was so proud of, is now neither cool nor recognizable), but the older I get, the less I find myself looking backward.
On Friday, while I was doing things other than posting here, I stopped to thank my Earth for being such a good home to me, despite the abuse we put her through, and I hope you did too. After all, in an era when we devote so much of ourselves to looking back in affection or ahead in fear, the present is often neglected. But the here and now is really all we've got.
I don't know that I will continue writing here on a yearly basis. Maybe, but...maybe not. I am very thankful, however, for this little corner on the internet, and for all that it has given me. So Happy Earth Day 2016! May all of you find peace with where you are right now! May you be present, may you be compassionate toward yourself and others...and may you never forget that there are too many damned people on this planet, for how else to explain the continued popularity of Friends?!
:)
Smash Mouth from here.
2016 is another year of me having little to say in the wake of having too much to say. Politics, climate change, the improbable continuing existence of Twitter...we live in strange times for which I have an abundance of opinions, but a growing understanding of the limited benefits of voicing most of them.
I recently read an article about the popularity of (of all things) Friends. The author was intrigued by the fact that Friends continues to be watched by so many people (16 million a week in the U.S., and that's without streaming numbers thrown in), and that a large number of those people are young people - kids who weren't born when the show originally aired, and who don't remember the pre-social media and pre-smartphone world that Friends exists in.
I agree with him that this is interesting...but I don't agree with his secondary argument that this is unusual. I spent my teenaged years, back in the '90s, in a blur of '60s and '70s nostalgia. Back then, it was the Beatles Anthology and the Brady Bunch movies and Welcome Back, Kotter on Nick at Nite. The current generation seems only as fascinated by the past as our generation used to be. Smash Mouth, a '90s band if ever there was one, memorialized us as "hippie chicks, all hypocrites," because for all our interest, we somehow missed the point of the peace and love movement. Likewise, I'm guessing that the kids of today are missing the point of the pre-internet world, because I imagine they're watching Friends from the internet, on devices they're addicted to.Ten years ago, I started this blog because...well, probably because I wanted to prove that I could. Ten years is long enough to warrant its own brand of nostalgia (the O.C. theme, which I was so proud of, is now neither cool nor recognizable), but the older I get, the less I find myself looking backward.
On Friday, while I was doing things other than posting here, I stopped to thank my Earth for being such a good home to me, despite the abuse we put her through, and I hope you did too. After all, in an era when we devote so much of ourselves to looking back in affection or ahead in fear, the present is often neglected. But the here and now is really all we've got.
I don't know that I will continue writing here on a yearly basis. Maybe, but...maybe not. I am very thankful, however, for this little corner on the internet, and for all that it has given me. So Happy Earth Day 2016! May all of you find peace with where you are right now! May you be present, may you be compassionate toward yourself and others...and may you never forget that there are too many damned people on this planet, for how else to explain the continued popularity of Friends?!
:)
Smash Mouth from here.
posted by Becky Heineke at 4/24/2016 07:25:00 PM
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