As an afficionado of old music, I would LOVE to go back to 1922. For a little while.
But when my teeth start hurting, I would hurry back.
I don’t know, didn’t dentists still use cocaine back then?
If advances in medicine is the point, why harp on the lack of electronic entertainment?
thorny_locust makes a strong point, but to no avail.
I spend c. 60 % of my free time in the woods, without a cell phone, internet access, GPS etc. I would spend more of my free time there, if destruction of natural habitats hadn’t advanced as far as it has in the past 100 years, and I didn’t have to travel to get to them.
I spend maybe 30 % of my free time in my wood / metal shop, crafting and tuning weapons and hunting gear that all existed in the 1920’s, using tools that mostly existed then.
My main passion is bowhunting using wooden bows and arrows. The bowhunting scene in the 1920’s was booming, with Arthur Young making films about big game bowhunting in Alaska, Saxton Pope writing hands-on manuals on how to hunt with a bow and arrow etc. etc. Living in the 1920’s, these guys had actual indigenous bowhunters as their models; those are almost completely gone alongside the natural world. I’d be right at home in that scene.
Sex, drugs, action movies, fast cars, wild music, it was all available in the 1920’s. With a billion bucks, right at one’s fingertips.
P.S. I haven’t been to the dentist or doctor’s office once in about 10 years and counting. No need to, as I lead a simple, healthy lifestyle.
If Tin Pan Alley isn’t your cup of tea, there were certainly fine concert composers at that time, like Rachmaninoff. And, the 20s and 30s were the age of jazz—jazz kicks rock and roll’s butt.
And, what’s wrong with atonality? Schönberg, Scriabin, Prokofiev, Debussy, Stravinsky et al all wrote atonal music and they are among my favorites.
The earlier period was pretty bad. I know my mother (b. 1911) never really got over the Great Depression. So many bad things hit in rapid succession that seriously affected a large segment of the population. My mother graduated high school in 1929, with aspirations to go to college and study music. Four months later the economy collapsed and all hopes of school went with it, as she had to find work to help keep the family home over their heads. Then the Dust Bowl happened, which just deepened the misery, quickly followed by WWII and the rationing. The Depression wasn’t just a short duration; it lasted for at least a decade and impacted a lot of people.
Thirded.
If anyone were trying to claim that 2022 was worse than one of the worst periods in modern history, in absolute terms, considering all aspects of life, then most people would agree that they are clearly wrong.
However, that’s not to say that the sudden and dramatic collapse of half of the US’ main political parties, wars of conquest in Europe, and belief by the population in infowars-level lunacy, is not something to worry about. Things might not be as bad as the world wars or depression now, but it looks like a realistic prospect in the near term.
And as recently as 2015 I never would have said such a thing. 
Worse than the period from Kennedy’s assassination up through the Reagan recession in 1982?
What do you think the Internet would have done with the 1960s assassinations? Then you’ve got Watergate as well in a 10 year period. Plus Vietnam, and the economy in the 1970s.
Is Kennedy getting assassinated worse than 1/6? I think yes? I think Obama getting assassinated would have been worse than 1/6. But it didn’t happen.
Personally, I have concerns about Internet kvetching and bubbles and that is a real change to our existence. But the Internet kvetching doesn’t impact people’s lives all that much compared to other events. We’ve got Covid, but Covid isn’t as bad as the Spanish Flu was. Economically there is no comparison. Politically, our history isn’t as squeaky clean as we like to think. Civil War is the nadir, but that’s not the only such event.
I don’t.
Nearly everybody in all political parties was in agreement in the 1960’s that assassinating presidents is a Bad Thing. Line of succession was in place, effective, and not argued about. The USA’s system of governance was in no danger from the assassination of any individual president by either a single person or a small group.
Large portions of one of the two major parties, a party with significant power in the country overall and overwhelming political power in large parts of it, have refused to object to 1/6. That does endanger the entire system. There’s no comparison.
Good Lord. Vietnam?
The same party, the wildly popular Democratic Party of the 1960s, that passed the Civil Right Act, also was escalating the war in Vietnam. It’s how The Establishment became dirty words. “The Establishment” was in favor of the war in Vietnam, in agreement. It broke the party and led to Nixon’s election. And Nixon as president. Nixon didn’t end the draft right away either and you’ve still got Kent State to look forward to.
Now we’re in a different time and the kooks likely have gone too far. But that doesn’t mean that you can count on a “Good Guy” Establishment to keep you all warm and cozy. Vietnam blew that notion away in the 1960s.
I didn’t say they were good guys or that everything was hunky-dory. I said that the basic structure of how the USA chooses its government was not endangered.
I didn’t claim that 2022 was worse than any other time period, but, since you ask, yes, I agree with thorny_locust that the JFK assassination was not as serious an existential threat as the dissolving of one political party and war on reality itself.
The OP is specifically about 1914-1945 though. Why are you changing the topic?
Isn’t that conceding the point?
We’re in a terrible place right now, because millions of people get their “news” from sources that just confirm, and inflame, their own biases. It is one of the side effects of the internet and social media.
It’s at a point where we can’t even tackle obvious and demonstrable problems like climate change, because millions of people don’t “believe” in it, and elect people that promise to do nothing.
If you’re asking what if the internet existed earlier in history…yeah this problem may well have manifest earlier. How is that a retort to those of us pointing out this problem?
And there was ALSO music with titles like “If The Man In The Moon Was A Coon.” .
I knew many Japanese who lived through the war, mostly people who were children, but a couple of people who fought in it. My ex-wife’s parents both lived in Tokyo as children and both were involved in the firebombing. Many of their neighbors didn’t survive. I also knew people who lived in Nagasaki at the time of the bombing.
I’m not going to weigh existential threats very heavily against substantial threats and actual human misery. It’s like saying the 1950s were miserable because the USSR had the bomb. Yeah they did, but they didn’t use it. If they’d used it then it leads to an awful time for a lot of people, but that didn’t happen. Some Baby Boomer who did duck and cover drills in school wasn’t going to be thrilled that he was dying in a Vietnamese rice paddy so he didn’t have to fear any more. Vietnam was far worse than the bomb.
If 1/6 leads to worse then that’s a worse outcome. But just fear that something will happen, I don’t care much about that versus Vietnam or the 1914-1945 maladies.
Firstly, I would make an important distinction between external threats and internal, endemic problems.
Terrorists trying to storm the capitol would be far less significant than the American public themselves doing so, plus millions now considering those people “patriots” and the Republican party also seeming to excuse these crimes (and inspire more such events).
And I am much more concerned about disinformation about climate change than climate change itself. Because I have enough faith in human hard work and innovation that we can ultimately reduce emissions substantially and ameliorate many of the effects of climate change. But, if the general public wants to pull funding from any attempt to fight climate change, we’ve hamstrung ourselves.
More obviously, substantially reducing mass shootings would be trivial without silly misinformation and memes. It’s another disease of ignorance at this point.
Secondly, it’s not just a “threat” at this point, it’s already happening. The only question at this point is how far all this will go.
Your post is thought provoking.
So, if you extend that line of reasoning to a comparison with the period between 1814 and 1845, would it still have been a ‘bad’ time to live? Will 2114 to 2145 make today look bad?
I just had to point out that 1) indoor plumbing was most certainly available for lots of people in the U.S. in 1921; you didn’t have to be rich. It helped if you weren’t a farmer living smack in the middle of nowhere. 2) Gershwin is probably the greatest composer in American history if not the best of all composers in the 20th century.
Living within reasonable traveling distance of a major U.S. city in 1921 would have been far better than residing in Warsaw in 1944.
I don’t actually think there was a universally ‘bad’ time to be alive - there were only regionally bad periods in history and bad personal situations. Even during WWI and WWII there were lots of peaceful places on Earth where people lived meanngful, happy lives. And plenty of people made it through the depression just fine, or even thrived on new opportunities.
I actually lived a 1920’s style life for a time as a child. I lived on a poor farm in Saskatchewan in a small prairie house built in the 1890’s. We did not have running water or central heat. Bathing required boiling water on the wood stove and laboriously filling a galvanized portable tub. My grandmother had a wringer washer and no dryer, and she worked like crazy. And yet, we were all extremely happy.
We put a lot of focus on technology and creature comforts in this thread, but human happiness has always been about health, love, and finding meaning in life.
Let’s ask it this way: Would you rather live in 2022 in a loveless marriage with an angry spouse, or live in 1922 with your soul mate? Would you rather be a poor farmer in 1890 in a peaceful country, or live today in a war-torn hellhole? There are a lot of miserable people in the world today, and lots of very happy people in every era.
So the question is probably meaningless without a lot of context.
Did you have access to 1920s-style death rays?
I’d rather not live in the 1920s with my soul mate, if she was planning my murder while carrying on with a corset salesman.
Corset salesmen are the worst.