From the Editor’s Desk: Symptoms, Problems, and Solutions ⭐

Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer apparently shares my obsession with Notepad and how it's evolved in Windows 11. But where I've struggled to create clones of Notepad in various Microsoft developer frameworks, Plummer has gone in the opposite direction. This kind of nostalgia is interesting to tech enthusiasts of a certain age, but obsessing over such a small and irrelevant part of Windows while ignoring the real problems feels pointless and unhelpful. And I'm finding it difficult not to respond in a way that is just as unhelpful.

Nostalgia comes up a lot these days--for example, in From the Editor’s Desk: Inconvenient ⭐️--but I once defined a hipster as someone who is nostalgic for a past they never experienced. That's my shortcut for describing a common idea throughout time. It was the theme of the movie Midnight Paris, for example. It's the source of the most dangerous and stupid political movement in U.S. history and a topic in Stephen King's excellent time travel book, 11-22-63. And it's what's behind the younger generations of today, some of whom reject modern technology in favor of analog technology from the past like vinyl records and iPods that predate their lifetimes.

Anyone can be nostalgic, and even those who did live through the past they are nostalgic for can, as an older person, fall into the same trap as those I call hipsters or worse. It's foolhardy to believe that some random time period from your youth was somehow "better" than today when what was really better was usually you being young and having no responsibilities. We all long for simpler times and associate that with the absence of the stress that accompanies or even defines adult life.

This also comes up a lot these days, but I feel compelled to remind anyone reading this for the umpteenth time (apologies) that my generation was the first to experience home videogames and home computers. And that we then went on to experience the modern Internet and web, the mobile revolution, the shift from physical media to digital and then streaming services, and, of course, the endgame for all that forward progress with Big Tech and enshittification. Between the COVID pandemic of 2020, an event no one alive at the time ever believed was possible, to our broken politics, the ongoing component crisis triggered by an AI boom no one asked for, and whatever else, it's no surprise that we're all feeling nostalgic for the past these days. Who doesn't want to wind the clock back?

Nostalgia is one thing. But acting on nostalgia can be problematic. Conversely, accurately remembering what was good about some past and then seeking that, or at least something similar, today can be beneficial. You just need to have some common sense and really think it through.

In From the Editor’s Desk: What We’ve Lost ⭐, I wrote about how wonderful it was to grow up in a world where anything felt possible. That world, to me, was in the late 1970s and 1980s, when I was, of course, young...