Maybe that everyone didn’t almost HAVE to have and pay for all kinds of technology that we do now? Sure it’s possible not to have cable/satellite/Netflix/whatever, Internet service, cell phones, etc., but I sure wouldn’t be satisfied without them, now that they’re so widely-used. And even if an adult can do without them, any kids they have will think they’re being tortured if they don’t have them.
I love all of that technology and I’m glad it’s there, but my mom complains about her bills for those things, and says she was just as satisfied when they didn’t exist.
Oh yeah? Where’s my jetpack? And don’t point me at those deathtraps that have never flown for more than 30 seconds, if at all, and usually aren’t even jets. I want that thing that’s about the size of a football that I can strap on my back and go flying. We’re not even close. The future was all hype.
Not many. There’s a book by Otto Betteman The Good Old Days - They Were Terrible. For example, when the automobile started to become common, people were thrilled that streets would be cleaner and the cities less stinky without all the horse manure.
One of the few things I can think of: no fear of nuclear war (pre 1945, of course). Tradeoffs, especially for first-world countries, are many. As a woman I have had a far better life than my mother dreamed of. The list of diseases we no longer have to fear is huge.
I suppose that people living in current “third world” countries may have been better off before Europeans interfered. Certainly this is true for inhabitants of the western hemisphere, most of whom died from European diseases.
You could live a more walkable lifestyle in small and medium sized towns. As long as you lived within a couple blocks of a downtown you didn’t necessarily have to take a car everywhere and could buy all your clothes, hardware, and other goods by leisurely strolling downtown. Now, it’s rare to find a town that is like that unless it is big enough to call a small city, like Ithaca NY. (And even some of those do not have any walkable places.)
Now, there is an increase in completely walkable communities but it is in big cities rather than in smallish towns.
In the United States, housing affordability among the middle class in many parts of the country.
Up until the early 1990s, there wasn’t much of a disparity in the housing prices between what would have been considered an “expensive city” and a “cheap city”. There were always pricier places to live, but housing in those regions wasn’t out of reach among the middle or lower-middle class. One could buy a new house in the suburbs of a declining Rust Belt city for not much less than a similarly sized house outside of Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, or even NYC.
*Ludovic, even Ithaca is having problems with housing affordability, thanks to the massive student population, NIMBY zoning, and gentrification of most city neighborhoods. Many parts of town still look ragged, but that’s the way the hippies like it. Authentic, you know. Unless you want to live in an unzoned town with neighbors that lead a … uhh, stereotypically Appalachian lifestyle, you’ll either have to commute from Horeheads or Cortland, settle for something much smaller than what you would otherwise be used to, or get a battered fixer-upper…
There’s always good that balances out bad but even in my adult life I can think of a lot that people think is good that really isn’t if looked at more closely.
Goods are cheap but at the cost of jobs for Americans. I started buying my own clothing in high school and the price of it has not gone up a whole lot since then. Cheap goods lead people to buy too many things, spend too much time shopping, and put a value on acquiring posessions instead of acquiring lasting friendships and experiences.
Jobs are less plentiful and you can no longer have a certainty of making a good living through hard work even if you have a college degree. I see this changing a little as companies scramble to keep workirs who can show up on time and stay off their smart phones while at work, though wages are still low.
People are busier. No one has time for friends or hanging around their neighborhoods meeting people and socializing. I blame a lot of this on technology and the draw of the internet and the ease of watching anything on TV at any time. Air conditioning has also reduced the amount of time people spent outdoors.
Low interest rates have made it hard to accumulate wealth through saving reducing people’s hopes of retiring which also leads to less jobs for the younger generation.
Ahhh, the good 'ol days, before the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, when there were no auto emissions standards, littering was socially acceptable, Lake Erie was dead, the Cuyahoga River caught fire, LA was covered in thick smog through the entire year, and in many cities you could tell what neighborhood you were in by the smell. People smoked everywhere, wetlands were drained at a breakneck pace, and both gasoline and paint included generous quantifies of lead. You couldn’t buy certified organic products at supermarkets, but you could at least wash the DDT off of what you did get. But, hey, TV stations aired PSAs on “ecology” during Saturday morning cartoons. Much more real, don’t you think?
I think most things have a bit of a trade off. For example, cars 30 years ago didn’t have so many regulations to adhere to and, many would argue, were much more fun to drive. The flip side is they are now safer and more economical.
I don’t have data obviously (no one does) but I think that a far greater percentage of marriages were abusive in the past, both because the abused one couldn’t get out and because of now-only-partially-outmoded attitudes toward women and their value.
I think that the average person’s environment 100 years ago was far more polluted than it is now–for anyone who lived in a large community ever, and for rural people too beginning with the industrial revolution. There were few regulations if any, and very little understanding of how harmful certain chemicals can be.
I would also argue that the average person’s diet improved enormously in the mid-20th century, and while in recent decades it may have become overly fatty, sweet, and laden with chemicals, there are far fewer people suffering from food shortages and even those that do have a less monotonous and more nutritious diet than they would have.
I also think that people now are, on the whole, more likely to be ethical than in the past. If you do wrong you are more likely to be told on (especially if the ones you’re doing wrong are women and children) and people are also more likely to be educated with high standards for respecting the rights and boundaries of others.
In the past, there was time to reflect on the choices you made, it seems to me, the lifestyles actually encouraged it, in some ways. To learn the lessons of your actions possibly. To maybe see some things, differently than you first judged them to be, with increased distance from them.
In today’s world there does not seem to be time to reflect on anything, to any real extent, and it’s on to the next decision.
Chevrolet Citations and other GM X-body cars, Ford Granadas, K-Cars, Japanese econoboxes, mostly with carbureted engines crippled by jerry-rigged pollution controls … those were the days. The DeLorean had 130 whopping horsepower, 8 hp less than a base 2013 Kia Rio. But … yuo could work on them. Yeah. Often, because they were so unreliable.
There’s a reason enthusiasts call the 1970s and early 1980s the Malaise Era, the most sucktastic period of time in automotive history.
I feel like people were more polite and more discreet. These days, there seems to be an attitude that if you’re not mean and aggressive, you’ll become a victim or you’ll be cheated or everyone will take advantage of you. People with a grandiose sense of entitlement seem far more numerous than when I was younger.
And thanks to “reality” TV and social media abuse, the norm seems to be sharing everything, and not in a good way. Women didn’t announce their PMS. Conversations about bowel movements tended to be limited to doctor-patient or parent-child, at least in my world. People didn’t feel the need to recount very personal events for public consumption. Of course, the downside to that was hushing up “shameful” or embarrassing things like abuse, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, divorces, drinking problems…
Oh, and it was considered inappropriate to swear in public or in polite company. One did not go out on public with hair curlers or in pajamas or ratty, dirty clothes.
Maybe my hindsight isn’t completely accurate, but I remember society in general being classier when I was young.
I completely agree. People are never just with their thoughts anymore. The time we used to be with our thoughts we’re now reading emaills and facebook or talking on our cell phones. I think people would do a lot of things differently if they took the time to be thoughtful.
My 86 year old Granny just died. She was a button-factory worker, then a school teacher. My grandad was a coal miner, then a painter at a hospital. IOW, they weren’t rich. Quite the contrary.
We just went through her house to divvy up her possessions. The bedroom sets were the first to be claimed because after 50 years, they still looked great. Granted, Granny took care of them by Pledging them once a week, but the craftsmanship is obviously much better than it is today. Today much of it is pressboard and veneers, held together with screws and glue. What granny had was made of solid wood, and had dovetailed drawers and brass or steel hinges, drawer pulls. etc. There is a HUGE difference in quality between her bedroom pieces and ours, which were probably the same price, relative to income.
Then we have our old washer, that lasted 25 years vs. our current washer that is about 2 years old and already needs to be serviced.
To answer the OP, one of the things that I miss the most from yesterday was the lack of “select” teams. Back when I was a kid, we played wiffle ball or kickball with whoever showed up in the neighbor’s backyard. All were welcome to play, whether we sucked or were Olympic bound. And it was all good.
Then, a handful of parents got a bug up their ass that their Prince/ss was being deterred from realizing his full potential as an athlete by having to play with “sucky” players, and the rest was history. Neighborhood pick-up games died, and morphed from being a casual, social, and entertaining way to kill time into this crazy time-and-money-sucking, ultra-competitive MACHINE that it is today.
I’ve seen friendships ruined over “select” sports teams because a kid who’d played with one group for years, was one day deemed no longer One of the Chosen. I’ve seen families skip holidays with their grandparents to attend yet another out-of-city tournament. You know, because they can’t find equal competition in a city of 2 million. I’ve seen 15 year old kids burned out from something that should be a stress reliever, not a stress inducer. I’ve seen pre-teens with ruined elbows and knees from over use. I’ve seen parents pick up second jobs in order to pay for their kids’ (private tennis coach/pitching coach/Cheerleading “academy”/Junior Olympic volleyball team/traveling soccer team) instead of spending that time, you know, just being with their kids.
Yeah, take your Olympic-track (ha!) sports and give me back Wiffle Ball, please.
There was more privacy, at least if you didn’t live in the kind of small town where everybody knew everybody else. If you did something in public, the chances were that nobody was taking photos or video of it. Even if they were, those photos or video could not go viral on the internet.
If you talked to your friends about something dumb you did, it was not likely that there was going to be any form of permanent record of that. You might get talked about for a while, but that eventually died down. It was very unlikely that it would be recorded in a way that a present or future college or employer could find out about, unless the police got involved.
My mom told me girls used to get out of gym class when they had their periods. I always hated phys ed and would have loved to get out of it for a week every month, so I was jealous.
Also more reliable. My Honda Civic is eight years old. That’s not particularly old for a Honda or Toyota, but there was a time when that would have been a really old car that was probably developing serious reliability problems.
Of course, I grew up in the 70s and early 80s, so I got to see a really sucky generation of cars when I was growing up. My Civic looks really good by comparison to those.
And, you know, it’s not like more of the kids going out for sports are going to make it to the Olympics or into professional sports than did back in the day. There’s only so much of a market for Olympic and professional athletes, and there are lots of people trying to get those jobs. Most of those kids are still never going to get any kind of fame or compensation for playing sports, just like most kids who play sports in the neighbor’s backyard won’t.
I remember flying coach from Dayton to L.A. in 1977, and one of the dinner options was filet mignon. Even though I was only 9 years old at the time, I am not imagining this, as I recall it was the first time I had ever heard of “filet mignon” and I asked my dad about it. I also recall it was a pretty small slice of beef, probably less than 4 ounces. But still…
My stepfather has a cabinet full of Craftsman[sup]®[/sup] electric hand drills that were made in the 1950s and 1960s. The housings are 100% steel, and the ball bearings and brushes can be serviced & replaced.
New drills are made in China and are supposed to be thrown away when they fail.