Maybe this should be in great debates or maybe there is a concrete answer but why do we yearn for times we have never experienced firsthand?
Well for one thing, we can remember all the things that sucked during the times we have experienced!
There is of course a cultural memory as parents and grand parents share stories of the good old days. Also, now that we have examined the past through the lens of time, it seems simpler than our own chaotic present. Of course, our time will likely seem clear cut to future generations.
Only the highs get passed on.
Yes, it is really impossible to know all of the complexities of a period through which we didn’t live. This includes especially things like the hassles of day-to-day life that we all experience in varying levels of severity. Naturally, if you cut things like that out, life will seem a whole lot nicer.
I’d guess the primary reason would be that most of our exposure to earlier times comes from books and film, most of which tend to glorify life in telling their stories.
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I have a strange memory of moving this thread to IMHO.
Oh wait, that was Deja Vu.
Moved.
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Ah I forgot about IMHO. Although I thought there might be a precise factual answer to my query. There mustn’t be. Well I should go to bed. G’night 
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I dissent.
For thousands of years, life was simple, self-evident, and didn’t change much from one generation to another. Hell, from one millennium to another.
For anything that humans did, if you were more than mildly curious you could watch what people did and understand the whole process.
In just the last 150 years, that’s changed, and it’s changed at an accelerated pace. Our ancestors had a sense that they could not only use a stove, they could create a stove if they had to. You wanna create a microwave oven from scratch?
My Dad’s (USA) generation may have been the last where the vast majority of human tasks and techniques were all things that you could understand with a high school degree and a bit of staring at the task or technique. He and my Mom remember butter-churning, make their own ice cream, make thier own pickles and can their own vegetables, smoke their own meats, etc.; my Dad developed nuclear weaponry for the US during the Cold War and neither he nor my Mom are strangers to computers per se, but modern computers are both simpler (in the “just use it and don’t try to understand it” sense) and more complicated (in the “how does it boot and how does it use the files” sense) and both of them are alienated from modern computers. They aren’t like butter churns; they don’t understand how they work. Of course neither do most 14 year olds but most 14 year olds don’t expect to understand things in that sense.
World lit is full of allegorical stories of a people who have a New Magic and it brings benefits and wonders but not without a tradeoff. That would be us. Our technology is magic to us. We as individuals could NOT create it from scratch. Much more of it is “black box” stuff we use but don’t understand how it does what it does, compared to previous generations.
Our yearning is for “world that makes sense”. In all fairness it has been thousands of years since the social aspects of life were fully comprehensible to people, and that’s probably the most important thing to understand, but our still-living ancestors understood a lot about how things WORKED, and expected to, and that’s gone now.
I think there is a word for this in Brazil – in the Portuguese. I’m not sure how to spell it, but it is something like saldogi. I hope that someone who knows what I’m talking about can come along and correct my spelling. It doesn’t translate exactly, but it essentially means nostalgia for something that we’ve never had. (Maybe I’m close.) It’s a beautiful word.
I’m not trying to be flip with you or overly romanticize your culture, but isn’t it possible that you are in touch with part of what has made so many of the Irish gifted in literature and the arts? That deep sensitivity for time and place?
Because we have never experienced them firsthand we can convince ourselves that such past times were better than they were. And we typically think of ourselves as being one of the lucky ones when we think of the past; one of the privileged, not a slave, for example.
How many women would really want to be second class citizens, or outright chattel like in the "good old days ? How many people really want to live without antibiotics and painkillers ? And so on and so forth.
Good thread. Humans romanticize the past, and the bad stuff is (mostly) forgotten. We have movies set in the past, but they never show the lousy side of life in the “good old days”. The old “TWILIGHT ZONE” show had an episode about this-a millionaire pays the devil to send him back to the town of his youth-and the man finds things to be quite UNPLEASANT. let’s face it WE are living a life our ancesters could never dream of! Most of us have advanced degress, live in nice homes, and have more than enough to eat. Plus 9thanks to the Internet0, we have access to more information that a university professor of 100 years ago.
Granted-there are some things about 1920’s Chicago that I like (gangsters, speakeasies, and jazz (plus 3 pice suits). But i don’t think i’d trade life in that era for what i have today!
It’s a nice notion that and I suppose our society has changed as much if not more than most in recent years but I think that this feeling is common across the world. It’s manifest in various ways, in fashion, in music, in literature, in politics etc.
I would also add that for somebody that doesn’t fit in to todays society well, they may think of a different time fitting their lifestyle better. It may too. Is their some reason you should think they wouldn’t like it better in a different era?
It’s like the need to believe we had loving parents or the need to believe in God. If there was perfection in the past then it can be achieved again. If things were always in chaos then they will always remain that way.
Because of so many pure quality of life issues, for one thing, especially when you get seriously pre-modern. And as I said, people typically put themselves in the place of the privileged; one of Aristotle’s students, not one of his slaves.
There are persons that do buck modern society. They just don’t know what they’re missing out on I guess. Those are exactly the type of person I think really would like to change centuries. For them I say the main population doesn’t realize that some people would give up modern society, to be a pioneer, or live in a different era.
Well I’m flabbergasted. I’m drunk and rowdy and yearn for the past! Huzzah!
Sorry my friends 
for my idiocy.
Semi Related story, from (grin) years ago…
My step father was a few years older than my mom. One day, he and his cronies were sitting around , talking about how things were “better, cheaper, easier, more honest… etc etc” in the good old days. Mean while my mom was ironing, bringing laundry in off the line, and doing the 1001 small and large jobs that a farm wife does.
She was lugging a load of laundry, past these gentlemen, out to the clothes line. She was a tad fed up. So she turned to them and said “Yeah, and back in the good old days, they didn’t have pennecilian, so you lot would have died from the clap…”
Gotta love her!
FML