Some people have a very rose-colored view of the “good old days.” In reality, a lot of things have gotten better in the lifetime of a 20, 40, or 60 year old person. But some things haven’t.
IMPROVED: Cars, across the board. Cars in the 80s were your choice of American landboats that guzzled gas and broke down constantly for no reason, or more mechanically reliable imports that were too small to fit in if you were a hair over 5’10" and achieved a lot of their size reduction by skimping on safety features. Almost any car you can buy today is immensely better in every way. Honda and Toyota models from the early 2000s are still on the road with minimal maintenance, and today you can even buy a Ford that will likely last 20+ years.
DECLINED: Wendy’s. When Dave Thomas was alive Wendy’s was a high-end casual restaurant serving some of the best-quality, best-prepared hamburgers and chicken you could get anywhere, and a full, fresh salad bar, disguised and priced as a McDonalds-tier fast food joint. Now it costs as much as going to a Panera or Chipotle type place and cuts corners on everything from the cuts of chicken to the process for getting orders right. It’s a true emblem of how one person’s vision to do things right can make a difference and what happens when that person is no longer around.
IMPROVED: Information access and the availability of communication. Used to be if your encyclopedia was out of date and the library was closed you were gonna stay ignorant. Used to be if you tried someone’s home phone line and they didn’t answer, you had no recourse but to try again later–no answering machines. Access to people and knowledge is vastly improved.
DECLINED: Fruit. Fruit was incredibly better back in the day. Fruit was picked off the tree or vine WHEN IT WAS RIPE, not picked hard for shipping and you just hope it gets better after it softens up on your kitchen counter. Which it mostly does not because the sugar content is vastly inferior in picked green fruit. I miss good fruit.
My finances have gotten a lot better. I’ve emerged from 7+ years of credit-card debt which I was stuck in and just couldn’t get out of, and may finally have some substantial savings by the end of this year, and a good amount of $$ padding by next year’s end.
On the other hand, my relationships have been pretty disastrous, a series of short-lived dating relationships that flamed out, often under difficult (long-distance), frustrating or miscommunication circumstances.
IMPROVED: My income. Hey, it matters, to me at least.
DECLINED: The visual quality of american television animation. This is not 100% across the board, but back in the 80s animation was hand-drawn and a lot of it tended to be fairly detailed and/or fluid. Since then (and notably accelerated with the introduction of Flash animated shows) character designs have simplified enormously and often become more static as well. How much of this is driven by cost and how much is purely due to stylistic choices is unclear, but I see it as a step down.
Whilst I agree entirely (and would argue the case for you to be named thread winner already), I’ll go:
IMPROVED: Fruit. Time was, where I grew up* at least, fruit in stores pretty much consisted of apples, oranges, pears (short season) and grapes (short season, luxury item). Occasionally a pomegranate or a peach. Beyond that, you were looking at tins. Lord, I still shiver at the thought of tinned diced fruit salad. Now we have access to fabulous fruits from all over the world.
DECLINED: Information access. No wonder we’re in the state we’re in - the internet, which should be a beautiful thing, is clogged solid with misinformation. Some of it just innocently stupid, but believed and repeated by the credulous; and some of it is put out there with the specific intention of causing us injury. We now have endless access to harmful nonsense and vicious lies.
I think I’ll give a better “improved” than my previous one, which (being my income) is awfully specific to me. The new “improved” will match my “declined” in that it too is about frivolous things that don’t matter:
IMPROVED: The quality of LEGO sets. Over the decades the size, complexity, and accuracy of lego models has improved markedly. This can be compared directly in their Star Wars subline, where there are only so many ships to make so they keep going back to the same wells, allowing similar models from the same year to be compared side-by-side. The improvements are stark. (So is the increase in prices, but you can’t have everything.)
Well, I grew up in California in the Central Valley so yeah, my POV is somewhat skewed but trust me, you may have access to lots of different fruits than you used to but I can assure you what you’re eating sucks ass compared to what it was like forty years ago. The high CO2 levels make plants grow really big and fast but they are disastrous when it comes to stopping vegetative growth and concentrating on fruit production. Fruit LOOKS great and tends to be super huge but I’m so sick of mealy tasteless fruit that’s just a pure waste of money. Sigh.
One thing I’ve noticed recently that has improved by leaps and bounds is hockey on TV. In the 70s I used to watch Da Broonz on a little B&W TV with lousy reception and boy, you couldn’t see a damn thing. Couldn’t see the puck at all, and no replays on a goal scored. Now the reception is crystal clear and they show replays of the goals 12 ways from Sunday.
Improved: The medium for enjoying music. I can load a little stick with 100 hours of damned high-quality music and shove it in my stereo in the Jeep and crawl over boulders in the heat and dust. No 8-tracks or cassettes would last a week in my environment, and you would needs hundreds of them. No rewinding or searching. No skipping and jamming up.
Declined: Just about everything else. Levi’s are like tissue paper, everything is disposable crap made from crappier crap in China. Movies suck. Sure, cars are more reliable, but they don’t seem as fun. The ‘music’ sucks. Cell phones sure are handy, but they have completely ruined motorcycling for me. I guess I don’t mind dying, but I don’t wanna do it on my motorcycle being run down by a texting teenager.
Improved:
Power tools.
Cordless tools are now better than their corded counterparts used to be. And, there are whole new categories, like impact wrenches, which used to be purely air-driven.
Declined:
Lumber.
These days, lumber is expensive, knotty, and warped. It used to be a lot better.
IMPROVED: pens. Gel roller ball pens are such a vast improvement over ballpoints, I can’t believe people still use anything else. Also: Sharpies.
DECLINED: big household appliances. Sure, they’re glitzier, and vastly more efficient, but they break down like crazy and have to be replaced. When I was a kid, you could expect a fridge or oven to last 30 years; now, you’re lucky if you get 5.
IMPROVED: Television technology. When I was growing up, there were only eight channels in the Chicago area: 2, 5, 7, 9, 11, 26, 32, and 44. I liked a lot of the programming, but if you liked two programs that showed at the same time, that was just too bad. You’d watch one, and hope the other had summer reruns. I think a much ballyhooed event was the premier of the movie Gone with the Wind on NBC, while The Carol Burnett Show show presented their Went with the Wind Parody (which would become a classic) played on CBS. Video recorders were a boon, and now the TV itself records everything you could want. And now there are hundreds of channels. Plus cartoons are for adults now, which are better than kids’ shows. Although I will say, The Flintstones had better writing than I remembered.
DECLINED: Childhood. People weren’t afraid to let their kids run around the neighborhood back in the old days. Kids didn’t sit around the house getting fat. You don’t see kids running around playing anymore. The playgrounds just sit empty most of the time. If the kids take a walk to the park on their own, the police bring them back home, and the parents are in trouble. It’s creepy. And this was before Covid that I’m talking about.
Improved: Television. Rewatching hit show from the 80s and 90s, they’re fairly mediocre compared to what is available nowadays. Seinfeld would just be another reasonably good show that got lost in the noise.
Also video games. Not just because the graphics are better but because they’ve gotten so cheap and there is a huge used market now. That didn’t exist when I was a kid, you had to buy the games new for $50. I can get tons of fun games for $5 or less now.
Declined: social events. Not a product, but these aren’t anything like they used to be. Everyone is distracted on their phone or sitting at home watching netflix. Of course I was a kid when I was younger, but I don’t know if adults were as isolated back then as they are now.
Improved: hypodermic needles. So much smaller and less painful than they used to be.
Declined: the availability of certain very useful drugs. Used to be you could easily get cough syrup with codeine and pseudoephedrine over the counter without having to show ID, and your doctor could give you some really good painkillers that are no longer available. But I guess we have OTC Plan B and medical marijuana now, so I can’t complain too much.