I loved this post and think it speaks to an important truth about the human condition (that we are all capable of things we don’t know about, especially when it comes to feelings and thought patterns).
This isn’t an example of a new Cause X, but I wrote a blog post in 2014 that gets at similar ideas: There are things we have that people didn’t in the past, and as a result, people in the past probably missed out on certain feelings we can have now. Meanwhile, we’re missing out on feelings people will have at some point in the future.
In the future, people will invent new genres of music. Those genres will also have fans.
In fact, some people in the future will only like music that hasn’t been invented yet. Some people living now will like music that hasn’t been invented yet.
* * * * *
Maybe some kid in 18th-century Vienna, or Ming Dynasty China, or Egypt in the age of Ramses, would have been the greatest DJ of all time, had they been born in a different century. Instead, they learned to play the harp or the zither, and the only electronic music they heard was the rumble of thunder in distant storms.
I’m not sure whether I’d call that “sad”, since they never knew what they were missing. On the other hand, maybe they’d have been happier today. (Even controlling for indoor plumbing and so on.)
I’m trying to write a script that integrates the concept of my article here, and I read yours attentively only a few minutes ago to see if there were ideas to integrate. I found it beautiful so thank you for linking it.
I also got a similar experience as the one you describe getting while listening to Popcorn. Mine was with World of Warcraft when I was 12. I remember thinking “imagine how sad would it be if I was born in a world without World of Warcraft”. Obviously there would have been way sadder things about being born, say, two centuries earlier, but it’s still true that I would have missed out on something irreplaceable .
I loved this post and think it speaks to an important truth about the human condition (that we are all capable of things we don’t know about, especially when it comes to feelings and thought patterns).
This isn’t an example of a new Cause X, but I wrote a blog post in 2014 that gets at similar ideas: There are things we have that people didn’t in the past, and as a result, people in the past probably missed out on certain feelings we can have now. Meanwhile, we’re missing out on feelings people will have at some point in the future.
I’m trying to write a script that integrates the concept of my article here, and I read yours attentively only a few minutes ago to see if there were ideas to integrate. I found it beautiful so thank you for linking it.
I also got a similar experience as the one you describe getting while listening to Popcorn. Mine was with World of Warcraft when I was 12. I remember thinking “imagine how sad would it be if I was born in a world without World of Warcraft”. Obviously there would have been way sadder things about being born, say, two centuries earlier, but it’s still true that I would have missed out on something irreplaceable .