Pretty much. I'm sure Hollywood execs have always wanted to make as much money as they could, but they also (formerly) didn't want to be known as guys who only made terrible movies. Prestige, vanity, relationships, reputation...unanalyzable human factors are really important for the production of human-centric products like art and entertainment.
Hollywood always been a dirty and money-focused business, but it seems like the latest crop of execs are hellbent on entirely divorcing the creative enterprise from its human elements. Now studios are just exotic financial instruments that seek to turn "content" into stock prices.
American Millenials and Gen Z are having less sex than the generations before them.
They've also grown up with frequent mass school shootings and the "tactical", "everyday carry", amateur-soldier, military worship culture that really got rolling after 9/11.
No wonder sex scenes squick them out -- it's a world that's distant, unfamiliar, and uncomfortable for them.
Violence, though? Pile it on. Now you're speaking their language.
People act like the only point of narrative work is to tell a story and advance a plot, forgetting that some of the greatest novels, plays, and movies of all time have creaky plots and barely-there stories, and plenty of "unnecessary" stuff.
So it's not surprising that young Americans, who are generally liberal, don't consider themselves religious.
And as for having kids? Not only is it more expensive and stressful than ever before, but we're slowly moving away from the mindset that a woman's primary purpose is to raise children.
That, and I think a lot of folks have started to reflect on how having kids didn't seem to make their unhappy parents any more fulfilled.
Older people grew up during the Cold War, when the USA perceived itself as a bulwark of freedom and democracy in a world of opaque, totalitarian regimes, and when the country was further ahead than most of the rest of the world in development.
These days, a lot of the rest of the world has caught up, and a lot of younger Americans feel discouraged about the state of democracy in their own country. We aren't at the vanguard of freedom and functional government anymore.
Plus, over the past few decades, "patriotism" has been increasingly associated with flag/anthem worship, military boosting, and a kind of rah-rah "USA! USA!" attitude that has little to do with freedom and democracy. It's been turned into a marketing tool and a cudgel that right-wing political groups have used against their opponents since the Vietnam War.
I guess to me, it makes no moral difference. The means corrupt the end. The Nazis managed to get some useful science out of the Jews during the Holocaust, but it's hard to see that as a silver lining.
I think that if you're at the level of making those kinds of choices, you're already living in hell.
You might as well suggest that people who need organs should be able to kill a random person on the street to get them.
Most of the greatest mass atrocities in world history have been framed as a "tradeoff". Destroying some lives to save others isn't a functioning society, it's a living nightmare.
"The true source of drug addiction: a society organized around the quest for wealth and geopolitical power, which creates enormous dislocation. This pursuit of wealth and power inevitably produces widespread addiction, which we insist on calling a “drug problem.”"
We live in a society where record numbers of people are lonely, depressed, and disconnected. We worship consumerism and the economy, and idolize weirdo greedlords like Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump.
Increased opioid regulation has had the effect of forcing a lot of people who are in pain to suffer even more. The addictions that plague our society won't go away until we fix the underlying problems that make people so vulnerable in the first place.
I’m a software engineer at a well-known, respected company who has zero formal education in the field (my degree is in print journalism).Before I got my current job, I had always been pretty tech-savvy, and had even done a little experimental programming and web design, but never took any classes or boot camps. A few years ago, during a 6-week stint on disability, I brushed up on my minimal...
Maybe there would be less anti-tech sentiment if tech culture stopped taking itself quite so seriously and had a little perspective. A sense of humor would go a long way. It's possible to both enjoy these kinds of events and understand why some people might find them sad or weird.
The self-seriousness of the tech crowd, in my opinion, invites these kinds of hit pieces.
Then they advocate plowing those savings into home ownership, as if that itself isn't a consumerist decision. As if there isn't a multi-billion dollar real estate industry pushing the idea of home ownership as "the American dream".
Certainly, it's possible to err too much on the side of irresponsibility, but the author of this blog post has a point. Of all the joys we have in this short existence, "buying a house with cash" seems like a pretty lame one to build your whole life around.