I found fschmidt's dating of the inception of the decline of modern culture interesting because I myself have always placed the date at around the mid 2000s. I was in sixth form college and around that time I started to notice that popular music, movies, TV shows and pretty much every other medium of entertainment had gotten worse than what it was just a few years earlier and seemed to be progressively deteriorating. Times were changing and not for the better.
Why do our dates differ by about 5 years? I don't know. Maybe I was still holding on to some of the half-decent cultural overflow of the 90s that persisted into the early 2000s and therefore perceived that period to be somewhat better than what it really was in conjunction with my youthful nostalgia. In retrospect, I'm of the view that the early 2000s were okay precisely because they were in many ways an extension of the 90s and had more or less the same vibe. The latter half of the decade felt completely different and was quite unremarkable.
So I largely agree with fschmidt that modern culture began to significantly decline at the turn of the century (no need to quibble over the exact date).
People, in your opinion, which aspects of modern culture have declined and which, if any, have improved?
My view:
Technology - Obvious improvement
Technology is probably the only area of improvement that we can all agree on (even if some of us dislike certain aspects of today's technology such as, in fschmidt's case, the quality of programming languages). Today we enjoy the benefits of smartphones vs. the atrocious mobile phones of the 90s, wireless internet access almost everywhere, computers with way more RAM and storage memory, the current AI boom and ever-evolving robotics, etc.
Music - Tremendous decline
In my opinion, music reached its peak in the 80s, was okay for the most part in the 90s and then started to rapidly decline in the 2000s. The early 2000s still had some decent R&B with smooth female vocals but was progressively infected with rap music beginning around 2001. At the same time, pop was getting more vacuous with stuff like Britney Spears and countless other plastic female idols and annoying boy bands. Meanwhile, on the metal side you had the aggressive and psychotic subgenre of Nu Metal enjoying its final few years of popularity. After around 2005, most music just became increasingly hideous, unlistenable, indecent and degenerate. If you thought Britney was bad then the likes of Nicki, Katy and then Cardi (uhhhh) were 100 times worse. Nowadays the whole music scene sounds so homogenous with all of the same soulless clones that pass for "artists" and that horrible trap sound.
Movies and TV shows - Mostly in decline
The movies of the 80s and 90s were awesome and original and told a story. You had many iconic classics and even the less artistically brilliant ones were still often captivating and touched you in some way. The movies of the 80s were more fantastic and over the top like The Karate Kid, Rocky, Rambo and Top Gun while those of the 90s had a lot more realism and included things like Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, American Beauty and Fight Club. The early 2000s still had good movies such as Gladiator, Training Day and Kill Bill (similar in tone to the 90s). However, I remember movies being worse in the late 2000s and then in the decades after things got even worse with the introduction of all of the woke BS in modern entertainment and countless rehashed franchises and formulaic superhero shit.
Art and aesthetics - Unsure, already subverted
The subversion of art and aesthetics arguably began in the early 20th century with the emergence of the likes of Dadaism and the promotion of all kinds of postmodern pseudo-art financed by globalist elites such as the Rockefellers. Art was already dead long before our period of interest. It was one of the first things to be subverted. Miles Mathis has written some very in-depth articles on the process. Therefore, I'm really not sure how the quality of art has change in the last half century.
Women - Atrocious decline
This one is obvious. Women were much more beautiful and classier on the 80s and 90s and still looked okay in the early 2000s. They dressed well, spoke better, had more feminine mannerisms, didn't hate men and very few had trashy tattoos. I find many women from that period genuinely attractive. Just look how much more wholesome models and celebrities looked back then. Now a large percentage of Western Wymminz are ugly, obese, tattoed beasts who look almost indistinguishable from men.
Men - Another atrocious decline
Don't think that I'm just a "misogynist", people. I think that many of the men today are also shit and utterly worthless. A large subset of millennials and Gen-Z'ers are pathetic low-test dweeby pussies with test levels of 300dl/ng or less and lack any genuine masculine qualities. Studies show that test levels have been dropping incrementally since the 80s (most likely due to all of the endocrine disruptors and xenoestrogens in the environment). The men today are objectively worse from a biological standpoint.
Pro wrestling - Near-universally recognized decline
The 80s had the Golden Era of WWF with icons such as Hulk Hogan, "Macho Man" Randy Savage and The Ultimate Warrior, and the late 90s had the legendary Attitude Era with "Stone Cold" Steve Austin and The Rock. Those were two major wrestling booms. In the early 2000s WWF/WWE continued to be decent with the Ruthless Aggression Era and the emergence of many new wrestling superstars, but the product turned into a PG circus shortly after the Benoit incident in 2007 and has progressively deteriorated since. Nowadays wrestling has been taken over by the "Indy scene" and largely caters to fat smelly dorky incels who mark out to garbage like AEW and New Japan Pro Wrestling and cheer on their favorite boring vanilla midgets. I hate modern wrestling.
Martial Arts - Tremendous Improvement
Since the 2000s (or even earlier in some parts of the world) we've been enjoying a golden age of martial arts. Gone are the days of goofy Karate fighting and cheesy Kung Fu movies that the naïve confused with real life. Now we have Brazilian Jiujitsu, Muay Thai and MMA gyms in any sizeable town, wrestling (freestyle) being taken seriously as a combat art, and countless technical innovations being showcased on YouTube from all around the world. What a time to be a martial artist! As for the UFC, it saw a tremendous improvement in the mid 2000s and continues to evolve in quality to this day.
These are my assessments. What are yours? Please add new categories if necessary.
