Wow - great answer.
I’d love to hear about this… Stats don’t have much life as stories, and I’m very curious being born in the early 80s.
It appears like many, perhaps enough people to elect a president, sees that as a feature and not a bug. People really do support “segregation, more racism, more sexism, less environmental protection, etc.” and see it as a positive. The environmental aspect is easy to see in statements like “drill baby drill”. Sexism, many believe that women are to be subservient to men and that ‘grab them by the pussy’ is what should be. I don’t even what to have to think about the return of KKK orgs.
For them it was better back then when they were the elite white male class, and that is what Trump is playing to and has their vote.
I don’t know what was different about cigarettes back then, but they were clearly healthier. Nowadays, there’s warnings on the packs about death and cancer and birth defects, but back then, doctors used to advertise for smoking. What a world that must have been.
In what way? Also, your access to them was far, far more limited. And there were a lot fewer of them. My guess here is you are cherry picking the few really, really exceptional movies and then saying they were all better, not realizing there were plenty of stinkers and that there were just a lot fewer options.
It’s funny, but even the richest person back then couldn’t bring up a list, world wide, of all the movies out for the past 50 years and choose to watch any of them any time they chose. They could, maybe, have someone set up a projector and watch a movie, maybe, in their own room set up for that…and the experience would suck.
I wonder if maybe the rise in mental stress these days is partly related to how complex society has become. With many things, you can be overwhelmed by the variety of choices, or have to consider numerous factors for this or that, whereas in the old days things were more simple, clear-cut and direct. Perhaps a lot less fair in the old days, but at least, fairly simple and easy to understand. Back then, the expectation was go to school, get married, have kids, work a stable career (maybe always with the same employer), retire and die. Men were men, women were women. Fads were relatively few and far in between. Many people never traveled outside of America. Now some people become Internet sensations or millionaires in their teens, you can get doxxed on the Internet by complete strangers, there are 57 (or however many) genders instead of two, many people job-hop every few months or years instead of sticking with the same employer or career, many people don’t get married until their 40s or perhaps even ever, what’s popular today can be out of style or even looked down upon tomorrow, you get exposed to far more different ideas, many Americans travel to many nations abroad even at a young age, etc. It just is befuddling or perhaps overwhelming to some.
I don’t remember fax machines in the 50s, but maybe that’s because of all the drugs in the 60s.
-
You’d fax over your resume in the 50s, would you?
-
It simply was not easier to get a job. The unemployment rate was VERY low in the early 1950s but by the latter part of the decade it was actually higher than it is now, and of course the work force at the time disproportionately was made up of men; it was vastly harder to get a job if you were a woman, and the jobs you could get were much more limited.
There’s no question that in most places and overall, the situation was better for wildlife and the environment in general back when the earth had less than half the nearly 8 billion humans that it supports today.
Yes, back then there were a bunch of specific environmental problems that have now been fixed, but the sheer magnitude of the pressure on most of the non-human world was considerably less. Most humans nowadays interact physically with a comparatively very impoverished natural world, even though it’s much easier for us to see the natural world (including various extremely rare and magnificent bits of it) in virtual form.
(this post has been brought to you by childhood memories of hearing the call of whippoorwills in the night)
In many ways, life is much easier now, possibly even simpler. If I wanted some obscure part for some device then, I had to search the back of trade magazines, classifieds, etc. Now, get on eBay and you’re good. Forget to take money from the bank on Friday? I guess you’re out of luck for the weekend - now, I pop over to the ATM, or just use a card. Every month, you’re writing checks, rather than just autopaying. Need some information? Off to the library, or if you had money, your encyclopedia. Now, just open up Wikipedia. Photography is much, much simpler. Food gets delivered to your door if you want.
All seems simpler and more convenient to me.
College and healthcare were incredibly cheaper. You could pay for college by working part-time during it.
You could get away with crime way easier (back before states actively shared information and also way WAY before the use of computerized central databases)
There was a brief respite from people advocating for pure Communism due to how obviously evil the Soviet Union was.
I miss seeing little old men and little old women with bandy legs. Bring back rickets, I say!
Fewer incels.
The newspapers surely weren’t more honest back then:
(and I have my doubts about the people…)
Fewer food allergies, or at least seemingly fewer.
I think it’s probably true that people in general were more optimistic – the war was over, the US was investing in infrastructure, the military, and the space programs. Brown vs. Board of Education even probably gave African Americans reason to hope that things were going to be better. I don’t think that there were whole sections of the media dedicated to making people angry and pessimistic (Last Week Tonight, Bill Maher, parts of Fox News, talk radio, probably MSNBC if anyone watched it). (On that topic, I don’t understand why people spend so much time consuming media that is designed to piss them off)
Countering that, though, was a real fear of nuclear war, real fear that communists were everywhere and had infiltrated our government and other institutions, lots of terrible diseases still around. Contemporary works like The Crucible and Death of a Salesman seem to indicate that things weren’t really that great – one talked about the quiet desperation that a middle class white man lived with and the other was about the red scare. I honestly don’t really watch or read much from that particular time period – were other contemporaneous works generally more optimistic, less dystopian? Sci-fi from that time period did seem much more optimistic and much less dystopian, I guess.
Most of this is from the point of view of a straight white male. Minorities, women, LGBTQ people all had it much, much, much worse back then.
So okay, when I read the thread title “olden days” I was thinking my olden days of the late seventies/early eighties. Excuuuuuuuuse meeeeeee…
Just because there was less worry about pedophilia didn’t mean it wasn’t going on.
In many parts of the U.S., there was also a lot of prejudice against Jews and Catholics, among other religions.
I remember one liberal commentator (it might have been in one of Al Franken’s books)saying that a lot of the conservatives who wish for a return to the 1950s were all children in that era and everything seems a lot simpler when you were a kid.
I know as a child of 1980s it does seem at times that the 80s were better time than the present day. But actually thinking about objectively makes me realize today is a lot better in most ways. Improved health care. The Internet(access to unlimited shopping options, access to more news sources, access to soo much information it’s easier to become overloaded.)
I’ve had people who were your age or younger tell me, a tail-end-of-the-baby-boomer, that they wish they had been alive during the 1980s, or could remember it. I reply, “No, you don’t. AIDS, Reagan, Chernobyl, the Cold War, etc. Enjoy the music and laugh at the fashions, and be grateful you missed it.”
I have been told the same thing about the 1960s. The main thing I remember about it was watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, and I was as excited about that as I was about being allowed to eat breakfast in the living room. 
It was also much easier to study and qualify for a *better *job, at least a better one than your parents probably had. Most any college degree would put you in the running for a middle class income while you were young. You didn’t have to be in the top tier like kids today do.