Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ep103 1530 days ago
I don't think its age or a change in media currently.

New, innovative, exciting cultural ideas come from small niche groups of people that are motivated by furthering those ideas. The further from those groups you get, the more easily-accessible, lowest common denominator, standardized and banal those ideas get.

I've found when I was young, more ideas were new to me, so I misattributed what really was standard and easy vs what was new and novel. But also, because so many ideas were new, and were new to my peers, if I did take an interest in one, I had a ready group of friends and colleagues that made finding the groups of people who truly were creating new ideas much easier.

As I age, if I haven't kept in touch with such innovative cultural groups, the ideas and media I am exposed to trends towards the standard and easily-mass-acceptible. And the fact that I have knowledge in those ideas already, makes it less likely for me to accidentally accept the mass-standardized ideas as novel.

But there absolutely are new cultural drivers out there. They just, clearly, aren't in the electronic dance music you're being exposed to. Innovative movie ideas aren't being pushed by Netflix and Disney. Etc