Nothing like a bit of suffering to make you appreciate the good things, huh? 
The reason things were better back then is because we don’t suffer enough these days, so we have nothing to contrast against all of the awesomeness of the modern day. It’s just awesome-on-awesome.
When I was a teenager, disco was hot. There were five television stations I could get on my 13" black and white television (my parents were Luddites and thought color TV was a frivolous luxury). Phones were attached to a wall, and dialed using an actual dial. Computers took up whole rooms in universities and businesses, and were programmed using punch cards, though personal computers were just starting to become available. People drove AMC Pacers and Ford Pintos. CBS owned Fender.
Things are much better now.
In that thread someone claimed that it is natural to think that everything was best from when you were 13-20. My rebuttal to this was:
I was born in 1970. For the record, IMO the best music was in the 60s, the movies that most interest me are from the 2000s, the best tv is right now (and it’s getting better every year), and the best video games are from the 90s. Not a one from the 13-20 age bracket, but then again that was the 80s so who could blame me.
But we don’t have AIDS today, like when I was young. AIDS is nothing today. When I was 20 you got AIDS, you were dead inside two years. When’s the last time you heard of anyone dying of AIDS?
We don’t have terrorist nukes, but we had the Russian and Chinese nukes.
Music? It’s not a fair comparison, because the Rock Era ended and mainstream pop stopped being Rock music. Just like around 1955 Rock pushed out “tin pan alley”, by 2003 R&B music totally pushed out Rock music from mainstream.
Oh sure you have rock music getting into the charts, but even in the last 60s, “tin pan alley” still had hits. After all it was Louis Armstrong’s “Hello Dolly,” that ended the Beatles string of #1 hits.
Billboards method of compling charts changed dramtically around 1995, so you can’t compare any chart hits prior to those dates. This give false information.
For instance, I recall in a Billboard magazine article comparing the two, they said songs like “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John (10 weeks #1) and Bette Davis Eyes (9 weeks at #1) using the new chart methods would’ve easily went over 30 weeks at number one.
So when Mariah Carey suddenly hit 16 weeks at #1 with “One Sweet Day” in 1995 you can’t compare it to older songs. Yet people do, so you get false comparisons that lead you to think things that aren’t so.
I personally feel better isn’t alway so. Yes, computer games, their graphics are outstanding. But does seeing blood portrayed more realistically make the game any better when the whole point of the game is to blow up the object?
Same with HDTV, does seeing Eli Manning catch a pass, any clearer matter? Would he have dropped it in standard def TV. Is Seinfeld any funnier if it’s clearer.
Another big thing is people are now aware of change more.
Take HDTV. The screen aspect ratio is 16:9, the analog aspect ratio is 4:3
So this means there may be things on either side (left or right) that will get chopped off. So when TV shows are made directors make sure that nothing important is put too far to the right or left so that it doesn’t get chopped off by people cropping their screen or using a converter box
Same for TV writing.
Let’s take sitcoms. They run 30 minutes WITH commericals. But we all know in reruns some things get chopped off.
So now sitcom writers write for 18 minutes. That means there will be some time left over. Writers then put “filler” in there. This way they know the filler will be chopped for for future commerical edit and it won’t matter to the plot overall.
This is a great example of why people say “In my day tv shows weren’t full of garbage.” Of course not, because that “filler” is put their on purpose and it’s made to be disposable (after all what is garbage but stuff we dispose of) so that future cuts can be made.
On the flip side we now say old sitcoms and show make no sense because the cuts are random.
I think that’s the biggest gripe, things are made to be able to change.
No one cared about Y2K, till it happend.
Overall things are MUCH better than when I was a kid, but since most things are made with the idea they will later change and must be adaptable it just seems like they are junk.
No, I’ve often thought, especially over about the last 15 years, that I was born 20 or 30 years too soon. I love the age of technology and wish I were a 20 or 30 something now. There are so many fascinating fields, or fields made more fascinating because of the computer age.
There were some things that were better, TV sitcom content for instance. All of them today are as if they were written by dirty-minded, horny, and illiterate 13 year old boys. I’m not a prude, but dirty isn’t funny if it’s not clever, but instead is just stupid “scraping the bottom of the barrel” crap used in most sitcoms. The last one that was decent was Home Improvement.
That said, other TV is MUCH better. Crime shows, and all of the TLC and Discovery type stuff is great. All we had was “Mutual of Omaha’s WILD Kingdom”! (although, there was the mildly funny “watch out for that Rhino Jim” tagline that came from it :D).
All in all, most of the quality of life is vastly improved from when I was a kid. Medical advances, safety, communications…(my grandmother would have been thrilled to have been able to talk to and “see” her grandkids via webcam whenever she wanted to). Sorry, long story longer, no.
FTR, I was born in 1959, the same year Alaska became the 49th state. I have to admit, when I was a teenager, pot was legal, or as near legal as to make no difference here. So that part may have been “better” 
Where the hell do you live? The rain ain’t polluted here and except for bacteria problems when it gets really hot, you can still eat the fish you catch most places I have been.
Around here, all the streams have a “Caution! _______ Contamination!” signs.
Hell no. Today is pretty awesome.
Where is that?
The one place where today beats my childhood hands down is availability. We can watch anything we want whenever we want! We can sit around all day watching All Creatures Great and Small if we like, and we don’t have to leave the house once! A magical cable brings it inside somehow! And if we see an actor on there that we know we know and we don’t know how, we have six or seven devices within ten feet that can give us the answer in less than a minute! God, it’s beautiful. Easy to take for granted.
Watching TV may have the most linear progression. We can debate whether the shows themselves steadily improve over time – I say they do – but the incremental technological improvements seem to never stop. From black & white to color, add in a remote control, a vcr for timeshifting, kick up the number of channels, give us a hard drive and an on-screen channel guide for integrated time-shifting, kick us up to high definition…just, wow. IMO the on-screen channel guide for taping shows is the greatest single innovation.
My old fogeyness looks suspiciously at 3D television as a clusterfuck of monumental proportion.
John Carpenter’s Vampires is awesome. It wasn’t a bad movie, it was a good movie that wasn’t as good as The Thing, so people thought it was a bad movie.
I’m sorry, you keep saying this, and you keep being wrong.
Rock music outsells all forms of rap and R&B combined. If you consider “alternative” and “metal” as subsets of rock and not their own genres, rock music outsells the combined sales of rap, R&B, country, christian/gospel music and a bunch of other smaller genres.
Worldwide, about two million people die from AIDS each year.
I’d say one thing that was better “back then” were Disney movies. By “back then” I mean the 90s (I was born in '86). But nowadays we have Pixar, so I guess it’s a trade off.
Overall I’m really happy to be alive now as opposed to even 50 years ago. Fifty years ago, within my parents lifetime, I could have, no shit in certain parts of the South, been lynched because I, being black/mexican married a white girl.
I like not being strung up on a tree.
It’s not that things were better for me. Just that they were newer.
Face it, there are only so many variations on a given movie plot and after awhile it becomes so predictable. Example: Mickey Rourke in “The Wrestler.” How many times have I already seen that movie?
And when you’ve seen broad shoulders, halter tops, platform shoes, long skirts, skinny pants come into and fall out of style a couple of times you realize that there are only so many different ways to dress a body.
Even people. Most of the jobs I’ve had involved serving people because I had hoped never to be bored. But after a while I realized that there are some basic personality types and you can nearly predict what will come out of people’s mouths in different situations after a while.
So, like that.
One thing I know was better when I was younger is the way my taste buds worked. 
What stays new and fresh is nature and the outdoors.
I think the answer is “Some things are better, some are not”.
I was 13 in 1977 and 20 in 1984. A much higher percentage of music that came out during that period is an abomination than what comes out now. The best selling single of 1977 was (ugh) “You Light Up My Life”, which is worse than any song to even make the charts in the 2000s (except maybe “My Humps” and “Tik Tok”). Plus, if I don’t like current hit music, I can go to Pandora and iTunes and find new music I do like.
I really agree with the poster that talked about cars. If someone offered me a new car right now that was built to the specs of cars in the late 70’s, for free, I wouldn’t take it. I remember when GM was pushing the Chevy Citation and its clones as their next big car. What a POS!
Sports is a different story. As a horse racing fan, I have to admit that the 70s were far better than now. Star horses ran much more often, and not a lot of tracks were on the verge of going under. However, now you can bet from home.
Football has changed a lot, particularly at QB. I don’t remember quarterbacks doing what Peyton does now at the line of scrimmage. Plays seem much more complex now.
OK, I’ll play. Born in late '60.
I have no real opinion on television programming quality, but quantity has really gotten better. We had three channels until '72ish when that increased to 11 with cable. Now I get about a hundred.
Televisions are much better. We were constantly having to repair our TV before the 80’s.
Recorded music has gotten more convenient, but the best sounding equipment for the price happened in the mid-late 80’s, IMHO.
McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and other fast food joints don’t taste good to me anymore. McDonald’s fries were best when they were fried in beef tallow!
Major appliances (A/C, washers, dryers, dishwashers, microwaves, etc.) are generally much better and more affordable than they were in the 60’s and 70’s.
Home computers and video recorders and games were unheard of when I was a child. When I was a junior in HS, the drama department had a vcr. It cost thousands.
Cars of the 90’s to present are much better than the 60’s through 80’s cars. I put a '67 Malibu together back in college- I used an El Camino engine, Impala transmission, Olds front bench seat- yes, it was easy to work on, but it was only thirteen years old and the original trans and engine were dead. I have a '97 Mercury that’s in fine shape which has only had tires and brakes and shocks replaced.
I love me some 50’s-70’s American iron, but don’t try to tell me they were more reliable.
Almost everything is better today, so I’ll focus on a few things that I think have gotten worse:
When I was a kid (born in 1963), children had a lot of freedom to just be children. We didn’t have all our time structured for us. We spent a significant part of our childhood outdoors and away from parents. Today, the combination of the internet and overprotective parents and schools worried about litigation has really shackled children to the home. We drive them to various lessons, and when they want to hang out with friends they get set up with ‘play dates’. Our neighborhood is filled with children, but in the evening it looks like a ghost town. When I was a kid, the neighborhood was full of playing children when school was out.
I think this does a lot of harm to child development. They’re not being socialized as well, and they’re not learning enough independence and problem solving.
Slurpees have gotten worse. The Coke slurpees of my childhood were thick, heavy things that were immensely satisfying. A Coke Slurpee today is a light-brown mess high in CO2. Yuck.
Coke itself is much worse. You can blame sugar tariffs for that. High fructose corn syrup is now used instead of cane sugar, to appease the agricultural lobby. The result is crappy Coke.
But by and large, things are much better now. Cars are much, much better.
Science fiction novels also seem to have taken a turn for the worse. Too much Harry Potter, too many vampires, not enough Heinlein or Asimov.
TV’s miles better. Just hands down better. I put this down to increased choice, but yeah, it can’t compare to my youth, when we couldn’t even get any new British shows because of sanctions.
Music’s had its ups and downs. Although '79-'81 was, and will be, the ne plus ultra of my personal music, other, more recent blips have been good, too. But right now, I’m liking the ability to choose music based on small online samples.
Movies are just getting better all the time.
Animation’s better.
The only thing that seems to have diminished (slightly) is music videos. Or rather, they’ve been ghettoised by the stations they birthed, shoved aside in favour of Cribs and TRW and the like. But even there, there’s the likes of OK, Go! and Gorillaz and the like to keep the flag flying.
Where I grew almost everybody around me were relatives or friends of the family whose houses we were all in and out of, and almost everybody had a garden. There were so many tomaties, that I think people put them out like that in bowls (not fruit baskets) to encourage people take them.