I don’t understand nostalgia, I just don’t. I’m about to turn 51, so I consider myself old. I don’t think things were better in the past just different.
This is more of a rant, but I just watched a video of 40’s NYC in color, and I found the comments to be quite odd.
One was oh, they all dressed so nice back then. Well yea, they didn’t really have much choice in that. I live near the Collar City, and younger generations don’t understand why it’s called that. Clothing back then was made to the same standards using the same materials in a few factories. The Collar City made the collars conform to the shirts the tech could produce at the time. So, everyone dressed the same more or less.
Another one is there was no graffiti back then. Well yea, there were no spray paints back then. Well, there were, but extremely expensive. No one was wasting it on railroad cars or bridge abutments, they made do with chalk.
I see my generation buying into this notion that things were better in the past thing more and more now.
I was born in 1971, so I don’t really know anything about how it was to actually live as an adult in the 70’s or 80’s. Or even most of the '90’s. I have no nostalgia for these times, no sense things were better back then, just different.
I don’t understand the let’s go back to the past mentality.
Older people yearn for the simplicity of the past. That doesn’t mean the past was better, just that everything was less complicated in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Think of all of the things that weren’t invented yet. Young people don’t get that. They grew up in an age of gadgets that make their lives easier. They don’t have nostalgia for a simpler time because they never had the chance to experience it.
I’m a few years older than the OP, but I’ve found that, especially in the highly weird past three years, I’ve increasingly been feeling nostalgic for the years of my youth.
As @dolphinboy suggests, part of it is probably that life felt simpler – but, then, I was also a kid back then, so life was, for me, simpler. The past few years have been highly stressful, and I’ve increasingly felt myself being “tired of adulting,” so I think that that’s a big part of it.
Note that, rationally, I know that the '60s and '70s were not necessarily better in the U.S., especially if one was something other than a straight cis white Christian male. It doesn’t stop me for yearning for a time when I had less stress in my life.
Nobody took color video of the bad parts of cities in the 1940s. The slums, the smoke, the dirt, the people who didn’t “fit in”, were all left out. I’d bet large sums that nobody commenting on that video were old enough to remember the reality of that time.
Perhaps so, but it’s not just better or worse. Everything has a golden age. A time that allows access before it becomes completely professional or commercial. Like heavier than air flight in the 1800s or air racing in the 1920s; mountain climbing before the conquest of Everest; tropical fish collecting when new imports were exciting; Chuck Manning racing hot rods against European sports cars on the 17 mile drive (I recall a wheel to wheel battle between Manning and a Ferrari that drew cheers from spectators); around the world mail races by stamp collectors; each an era that gave humans access to activities they found exciting.
It’s not a matter of better or worse. It’s a matter of enjoying familiarity. It’s a shame you missed it.
And then you get things like people complaining about how high crime rates have gotten, when crime rates have actually been going down for decades. The facts are irrelevant: People feel like crime was lower when they were young, and so that’s all that matters.
There was a time when the airlines were regulated. You could always do a rough calculation of ticket cost based on distance. Flights were not all hubs. The only way they could compete was with service. That’s what started the frequent flyer clubs and miles. Also your earned miles did not expire. I used them for years after I retired.
Most flights were not crowded and passengers dressed for the event. There was a time on United Airlines when you ordered dinner from a Trader Vic’s menu.
On a recent airline flight I had a feeling of nostalgia. It was like a Trailways Bus in 1960s Alabama.
Nostalgia just means that there are things you miss about the past—and that’s a feeling that I can certainly understand.
It doesn’t necessarily mean you think that those things are better than what we have now, let alone that you think everything was better back then. (On the other hand, I find it very hard to believe that everything has been consistently getting better and better over time.)
Nostalgia is the ability to remember yesterday’s costs while forgetting yesterday’s wages.
I think that a person from today who was transported to life decades ago would be routinely frustrated by just how slow everything moves. From our perspective, basic tasks would seem wholly inefficient and interminable. I bet it would color our perception of the “good old days” - people were expected to get less done, so they’ll seem “lazy” by comparison to the modern day worker who’s overwhelmed with tasks.
And the smell. The old times reeked of cigarettes. And, depending on how far back, manure.
No it wasn’t. But the complications of one’s childhood are familiar, and people by adulthood have mostly learned to deal with them; and many have forgotten that they needed to learn to deal with them, and so think that they were simple.
Yeah, I think that’s a lot of it.
Plus which – we know that when we were six we didn’t need to worry about a lot of the stuff we have to worry about as adults. But we forget what it was like to actually be afraid of the dark, or of the little kid at the next desk over.
My now-deceased first wife grew up in rural heavy snow country. I met her when we both lived in the tropics and she loved to wax ecstatic about the joys of winter and all that beautiful fun snow wrapping everything in a nice white blanket of lovely. And the glories of temps at and below freezing where soaking in sweat just wasn’t a problem.
Fast forward 15 years, we’re married and we move from Las Vegas to the Midwest where winter is real, snow is a factor 2-3 months of the year, and sub-freezing overnights are 4+ months a year, and sub-freezing daily highs last ~6 weeks.
She was much less enamored of snow the second time around. Though she did enjoy the “not sweating” part.
Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Life is all fun and games when you’re a 6yo or 10yo in a caring family.
I’m 75. I don’t yearn for the past, because it’s a pointless exercise. Also, it wasn’t better, it was just different. There is a lot wrong with today’s world, but there was a lot wrong with it in 1492. Different times, different issues. Granted, issues today seem more complex, and people seem way more self-involved, but that doesn’t make me pine for my youth. My knee makes me pine for my youth.
By and large, children are partly sheltered from the ugly side of life. People feel that crime was lower when they were young, because they were not as exposed to all the news about crime.
In addition, for people of a certain age, only the most heinous crimes made the national news. So even for avid consumers of the news, they still were not exposed to as many stories.
There are some things I miss from my youth, but I wouldn’t actually want to go back and live there. I’m not even sure I’d want to visit.
In many ways today’s world is science fiction compared to when I was growing up. It’s not a SF paradise, but it’s not a dystopia, either. It’s just different. And there are some things about today’s world I very much like and enjoy that just didn’t exist 40 years ago.
