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Do you think life was better in the past?
I've seen discussions on here about nostalgia or nostalgic moments. It seems not only in this site, but others find themselves reminiscing about a time long passed. I've seen it popping up more and more. Some brush it aside as people being nostalgic about a time when they didn't have to work, but I find myself thinking that the increased rise of people reminiscing about the past is because the quality of life and/or the world itself feels so much worse than it did in the past. I've done this as well, too many times.
What're your thoughts on this?
Which life? Which past?
Is Bill Gates' life better than the life of a Black slave in the USA in the 1600s? Absolutely!
Is a modern homeless person's life better than the life of a plantation owner in the USA in the 1600s? Absolutely not!
We can extend that to any modern person, and any historical person in any historical period in any historical civilisation: Roman slaves in 200BC, Chinese public servants in 1400AD, Mesopotamian farmers in 1800BC, English peasants in 1350AD, Italian nobles in 1500AD, Australian convicts in 1800AD, and so on. And, we can pick any person today, from Jeff Bezos to an Ethiopian civilian.
We can find people who are living better lives today than selected people in history, and people who are living worse lives today than selected people in history.
I would usually interpret the question as "was life better for a person of roughly the same socioeconomic status in the past." I think comparing Bill Gates to a slave is basically never the interpretation that anyone is going for, or a typical minimum wage earner to King Louis the XVI. I think it's patently true that life for a rich person is better than life for a poor person, and adding timelines to the equation doesn't change the calculation very much at all.
Bill Gate's life is definitely better than King Henry VIII's life. But is the life of a North Korean worker better than the life of... well, I'm having trouble even thinking of the equivalent. Is the life of kidnapped worker in Dubai better than the life of the workers who built the pyramids? Does it matter that Bill Gate's life is so wonderfully better than King Henry's to someone being human trafficked in 2023?
This is such a difficult comparison. What does a typical minimum wage earner even look like today? Someone making $16 / hour in NYC? How many jobs are they working, how many hours? Where are they living and what do they spend on housing? Do they have housing? Does a single mother of 3 who works 3 part time jobs, and no health coverage have a better life than King Louis the XVI because she has a cell phone? I'd say no, personally.
If you start counting free time an individual has without stress from external factors, like worrying about what you're going to eat tomorrow, this conversation is different. I'd personally argue that is one of the main necessities of happiness.
From the site of the UK org that looks after its palaces:
Looking purely through the perspective of pain, I think that life before modern medicine—especially anesthetics and painkillers—was quite horrible. Even the elite were subject to horribly grueling physical pain and suffering. In modern times, even the most destitute have access to basic painkillers.
Pre-1900s health care is one of the most persuasive arguments you could ever make for medically assisted death because a lot of the time it would have been a preferable alternative... since they were basically killing you anyway, just incredibly slowly and painfully.
Yes, I chose extreme examples to make my point clearer, but I think the basic point still stands: without some sort of context for which lives are being compared, it's hard to say whether life was better in the past.
In the context of nostalgia I think they’re talking about within (your own) living memory.
That might be true.
However, with my particular background, a question like this is ambiguous enough that I'm not sure it is about personal nostalgia. My first impression of this question was that it's about a more amorphous sense of "the past", when people's lives in general were easier. I saw your interpretation on my second reading of the question but, ultimately, I was left not knowing which interpretation was the intended one, so I decided to go with my first impression.
However, @Cadmium can set me straight if they want to.
That's a rather silly take. If somebody asks you "Is Zimbabwe richer than the US?" you don't reply with "Well, it depends, a homeless person in the US is poorer than the richest in Zimbabwe."
The actual answer is that the US is richer. A lot richer.
Just like the actual answer is that life is better now compared to the past. Yes, you'll find outliers, but for the overwhelming majority of people it's true. Not losing half of your children to painful disease because of modern medicine alone would drastically improve your mood I bet.
In part that's because we have countries with well-defined borders. So, roughly speaking, you know whose wealth you're adding up.
Comparing the US now and a specific year like 1950 would also let you compare GNP pretty easily, and GNP nearly always goes up.
"Better" is vaguer than "richer" though. You could compare something else.
For example, for poor countries with a lot of inequality and where economic statistics are sketchy, one method of comparison is calories. Are people better fed?
I think you're right that most statistics usually improve, though there are exceptions. Life expectancy usually goes up, but has gone down a bit in the US recently.
I also think it was a poorly defined question, though.
I agree with your main point but science and technology have improved the general quality of life for everyone. The wealthy 1600s plantation owner could only dream of air conditioning, high-speed transportation, electronic communication, modern medicine, food availability, instant access to the world’s knowledge, etc. Things that even many poor people have access to today, to some degree (in the first world particularly). The wealthiest ancient kings were still at the mercy of famine and superstition and preventable disease.
There’s definitely something to be said for good old-fashioned power, from riches or royalty or other privilege. And the playing field today is still far from level, and trending in the wrong direction. But I’d argue that on average quality of life is still the highest it’s ever been. Life expectancy is up, medical research is bringing miracles to the masses, food is available on every street corner, and comforts and entertainment abound.
Something I thought of reading your comment was how conditions are in "third world countries". Where kids and families don't have a roof over their head to call their own and possibly only have the one set of clothes they are currently wearing. Where water is in short supply, and there's practically no backing economy. But you will still see plenty of smart phones out there in the hands of a lot of people in those situations. Might not be doing them much good, but it at least provides some sort of improvement in connecting them to others and opportunity when it presents.
Something I don’t think everyone realises is that a lot of people only have a smart phone and not a laptop or desktop. Kind of the reverse of how first world countries progressed.
It's different but not less. They don't need a laptop or desktop because an ecosystem of phone based solutions has developed.
Anecdotally even in developed Asian countries the smartphone is the primary tool of internet access.
They have improved quality of life, but I wonder if really for everyone, if there aren't as many that didn't have a chance to get these technologies due inequality in the world.
Also, I am often wondering if this instant access to the information, which was caricaturized by corporations so that it became a Instagram/whatever rat race on who has the finest life isn't kind of curse nowadays. In my country lots of people, also youngsters, have psychological problems and I read that it's becoming worse and worse. Humanity didn't have it earlier. You were poor, but among the poor. Now you see everybody, everything in the corporate social media, from the whole world, and people there are trying to picture and show their lives as the best.
I think it depends. The far past? Absolutely not. Modern medicine, plumbing, etc, etc have increased the standard of living for the average human by orders of magnitude. The poorest modern human lives better off than an ancient king.
Additionally, I do think that people tend to think that whatever time period they grew up in was the best one, and we must acknowledge nostalgia bias.
That being said, when you start looking at recent history such as the 1980s - 2000s, I think there are a couple crucial factors that made life more enjoyable in that time period.
Modern technology was in its infancy. Personal computers and the internet in particular were so young that we were not yet able to appreciate their consequences. At this point in time, we could look at these devices with a sort of blind hope that they would unite the world. In reality, these technologies have indeed solved many problems, but also created many new ones that we have no idea how to solve. Thus, a source of hope has been removed and instead a general anxiety about new technology exists. Additionally, these technologies are now ingrained into modern life, causing humans to live in less and less “natural” ways. To quote Dr. King who was quoting someone unnamed “
“You call your thousand material devices “labor-saving machinery,” yet you are forever “busy.” With the multiplying of your machinery you grow increasingly fatigued, anxious, nervous, dissatisfied. Whatever you have, you want more; and wherever you are you want to go somewhere else … your devices are neither time-saving nor soul-saving machinery. They are so many sharp spurs which urge you on to invent more machinery and to do more business.”
Western power and democracy were probably the strongest they’ve ever been after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This lead to a general hope that the whole world would eventually move to the “superior system” of democracy. Whereas today, democracy is on the decline the world over and totalitarianism is on the rise.
It is harder in general to remain ignorant of the problems of the world. I can get daily updates about war atrocities being committed on the other side of the world.
Humanity is facing the unprecedented existential threat of climate change and despite having known about it for decades, nothing has been done and very little solutions are on the horizon. Therefore, I think many people think (know?) that we are doomed which is an obvious source of anxiety.
I could go on, but perhaps this is enough for now. Obviously this is just my opinion.
You may be underestimating things here. There are still slaves in the modern era. There are still people who never see a doctor in their lives. There are still people born in rural areas of China, India, North Korea who live short, suffering lives without medical attention. Children are still dying from diarrhea in 2023 in some parts of the world.
The poorest modern human could live better than an ancient king, I'll give you that. But exploitation, unequal distribution, and access makes it so some of them definitely don't.
Yeah I don’t disagree. I should have been a bit more specific in my claim.
It certainly encouraged conversation, I absolutely appreciate your responses! It gives us all a lot to think about.
If it’s not prying too much, i’m curious about how old you are. Having been born around the turn of the century, I can’t really speak to your points 1 and 2, but 3 and 4 definitely resonated. Anxiety about the future can be a lot.
Was my life better in the past? Yes.
Sorry, dawg.
No, we just tend to remember the nice bits more than the awful bits when we compare the past to the present, because that gives us something to cling to in times of hardship.
But the past sucked. Nuclear war was just around the corner or regular war was actually happening, we died from all kinds of crap that is now treatable or even curable, racism and discrimination was so normal that nobody even talked about it aside from kids who were traumatising their peers for fun, looking up small pieces of information was real work and educating yourself for free was impossible, and so on and on and on...
I'm not saying everything is better now, but overall, the past is not something we should miss.
Agree.
The Golden Age of Capitalism following WW2 was when one could get a well paying job with a diploma or degree that would pay for a house, car, a family with a stay-at-home spouse and a vacation. The job provided benefits and after 20-30 years at the same company you got your retirement party and gold watch.
Lots of good reasons to be nostalgic for a period of peak purchasing power.
OTOH, the same period of time was one in which women couldn’t open an individual bank account, racial minorities were extremely marginalized, homosexuality was diagnosed as a psychiatric illness and consumerism was born with the invention of charge cards.
On any longer timescales I’d agree, but if I were offered the chance to jump back 20 years and get to be part of my parents’ generation rather than my own I’d be hard pressed to say no.
Obviously this is going to be very country-specific, but for them it was early adulthood in the boom times of the late 80s, a decade of optimism in the 90s as they found their feet and raised a family, a prime position to take advantage of the technological explosion of the early 2000s, and then a place of relative security and stability to weather the increasing cycle of chaos from 2008 onwards.
At the time I smirked at The Matrix using 1999 as the pinnacle of human history, but honestly it does kind of look like a tipping point now where a lot of the big things that impact the average person’s quality of life tipped from trending broadly upwards to slowly eroding again.
None of that is to say everything is worse, by any means - and if nothing else, social attitudes and equality seem like the 2020s saving grace (although even that’s inextricably set against the rise of the far right) - but I look at the average gen X lifestyle and see it as unattainable luxury for most of my millennial peers, and then I look again at the world gen Z are now taking their place in and worry it’s even tougher for them.
No objections from me. Maybe the point is that life isn't necessarily worse or better, it's just different.
But one thing I'd like to point out is that the comfy lifes of the later 1900s were bought with a debt we are now going to pay off slowly and with big interest. Oil and gas provided us with unlimited energy for many decades, you would have be a total dunce if that doesn't make your life better.
All change involves loss.
I think that there have been trade offs, and there are some ways in which our pasts may have been better, and in other ways worse. I also think that when people are nostalgic it's often for the person we once were or how a percieved situation made us feel.
And, this feeling that everything is getting worse has been around for a long time. For example it's encoded into the "three ages" of Ancient Greek mythology, each of which is worse than the last.
Also, nostalgia does not necessarily imply that the past is better. Recently I came across a case of "forbidden nostalgia" where an author was talking about how survivors of a brutal regime felt nostalgic about the songs and foods from that time. A reviewer became extremely upset about this and ranted about how many people had died and how disgusting it was to attribute nostalgia to survivors. The author came back with an empirical study that proved the point about nostalgia.
That sounds intriguing; do you still have a link for that study/studies?
In the lens of working, earning power, etc., I see a lot of that conversation swirling about the American way of life. Endless streams of questions on Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, etc like "What happened to workers rights in America?" and "What happened to a single income supporting an entire family, two cars, and a mortgage?" Frankly, I am getting exhausted by these questions. They drive a narrative that life in the 50s-80s in the US was some sort of utopian, supported landscape. That doesn't line up with reality for most groups of people (even in the preceding 100 years prior).
As a sort of required reading on the topic of American family life (though it touches on some other countries), I highly recommend the book The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz to break out of the mindset that life in the past was just so much better. Through historical and statistical review, Coontz lays out the premise that nuclear, suburban, middle class life was essentially invented and runs counter to many centuries of community. She examines many decades preceding the post-WW2 lifestyle, through to the early '00s. Beyond that, the government essentially engineered communal support/living out of existence, since it was largely occurring within families of immigrants (bootstraps and all that). Hence why it's so difficult to mortgage a house with friends or extended family. She also addresses that poverty was searing for many people with almost no social uplift programs until the late 60s. Wages have started dropping in the last 30-40 years, but with so many people earning far beyond their Great Depression ancestors, I think that has to be taken in perspective. Even so, the kind of wealth that young internet users tout as being widespread just wasn't so. Sure, interest rates are high now, but they aren't the 16% witnessed in the 80s.
Are things perfect right now? Definitely not - we're essentially in the second Guilded Age. Wealth consolidation and hoarding is limiting upward mobility, inflation is squeezing consumers, there are three years of collective pandemic-related trauma that many people will need to work through, and plenty of progress still to make on social issues. But it seems on aggregate, for many groups, that things are better than they were 60 years ago.
My dad lived a middle class life as an adult (after 1965) but between 1945 (when he was born) and 1965 he lived with his mom in a tiny rent-controlled apartment in NYC while his extended family (2 grandparents, aunt, uncle, and 4 cousins) all lived together in an (also rent-controlled) two bedroom apartment (so 8 people for 2 bedrooms) in the same neighborhood. My dad's mom was a single working parent (who had to lie about her age on job apps because age discrimination was legal and real, and could only work certain jobs because gender discrimination was legal and real) so he spent much of his time in the crowded apartment with his extended family.
Similarly, his mom also grew up in a crowded apartment in the city.
His mom's parents grew up in a shtetl in an increasingly hostile Europe.
On the flip side, my dad went to a good college for free and he went to law school for what adjusted for inflation would have been about $1000 per semester. He moved out of his mom's place at 20 and never had to move back. He had a constant flow of work, and was able to take off two years from working to travel. In 1985, he and my mom bought a nice house in the suburbs to raise us.
Meanwhile I'm not living as well as my dad, but I'm living in their nice suburban house while I go to grad school. Would it have been nice to have what my dad had? Sure. But living in the suburbs sure beats living as a group of 8 in a 2 bedroom apartment in NYC or living as a Jew in Europe at that time.
Live is good. It may not be great, but it sure is good.
The 50s onward were a golden age for those in a position to earn or be okay with relying on someone who could earn. Prior to that, not so much. And as mentioned by plenty, if you weren't a white man that presented some major hurdles to self-sufficiency, and because so many were barred or severely limited in the labor market it made conditions more favorable for white men.
My grandparents (born in the 1910s/1920s) grew up in hard, hard times. My mom's parents lived a comfortable life once they were adults, they were able to raise 5 kids in a single home with my grandfather working for a single company, bringing home a single salary, earning a pension as well. My dad's parents had a similar experience... until my grandfather died in the mid-1960s. My grandmother was left with no income and 4 children... #1 had already moved out, #2 was forced to move out at 17 because his mom could no longer support him... and she and my aunt and my father were very poor, living on a shoestring budget, until they were old enough to move out as well. And they were still somewhat fortunate because her and her late husband owned a home (which she was able to sell and buy a smaller one).
The story of 8 people crammed into a small apartment in the olden days was not uncommon. Even in my mom's parents' house, they had 5 kids and still had to cram them in (2 girls to 2 rooms each, and my uncle sleeping in the basement without a bedroom)... one of my college professors lives in a home in the city and his home is from the early 1900s, and the family that originally lived there had essentially divided the tiny basement into what were practically tiny jail cells to house their 8 children (may as well have been a little barracks).
I feel as long as things change (which is always), people will miss things from the past. When it comes to the world feeling so much worse than it did, I strongly believe that feeling comes almost entirely from media consumption. Generally speaking, things get better than in the past. There are absolutely terrible things still occurring, and change is not linear, but ignorance continually becomes less of an option.
It is harder to hone in on a single issue and to become passionate about working on it, because we are blasted from all sides with the terrible things happening around us. There are pros and cons of this, but I'm not here to say if it's good or bad.
The ignorance I mentioned, or even the ability to be present in the moment, is something many of us are losing with our technological world. I believe sense of joy is often counteracted by algorithms - "doomscrolling" is such a common phrase, yet it is something we technically are choosing to do to ourselves. I've seen some recent Tildes discussion about the Reddit algorithm now that people have stepped away, and so many posts that are pushed are designed for emotional reaction. This is everywhere and I am glad people are starting to see that.
These exact algorithms give voice to the most extreme individuals and organizations, which of course exacerbates the problem. There are of course many other issues intersecting with this one, but I believe this one is at the center of how we engage with news and each other.
No, overall life was not better in the past. My ancestors on my dad's side barely dodged genocide and my ancestors on my mom's side fled famine and prior to that were victims of what could have been considered a small genocide.
I'm American myself, but I think this nostalgia about the past is very US-centric. I don't think Poland (where my family immigrated from) is dying to turn back the clock.
I think a lot of this comes from internet communities. I too have noticed a ton of reminiscing for the internet of old recently in various online groups. And honestly, I think the answer is yes, "online life" was better in the past and has steadily declined. Corporate greed has ruined a lot of what used to be a place for communication and creativity. And it's on a path to only get worse, to the point that the modern internet will be AI bots advertising to AI bots.
Outside of online life, I'm not sure. I think life is better than the distant past, as others have said, but I feel things might be slightly worse than the recent past. It seems people are losing their sense of community and respect for fellow humans more and more.
yes absolutely. It's been a slow decline and then a very fast one - people have always been awful online, but the recent proliferation of generative AI has made the public Internet basically unusable. Search is essentially useless for some things, SEO'd AI generated nonsense pages are the top results for a huge variety of queries that you'd easily find stuff for not that long ago. That's not even getting into what it's done to social media...
And yes I would say that even offline, if you ask the average person "are you better off than 3 years ago" (pre-COVID) they would generally say no.
Since you mention nostalgia specifically a few times, I will assume you mean this question as "Do I think the past was better in my lifetime" and will answer as such.
I think with age comes extra worries. When I was in my 20s I didn't have kids so I didn't have the same worries as I do now. Then it was like "I'm worried I won't get out of work in time to make the drive to Daytona Beach today" and now its more like "I'm worried that my kids ever be able to afford rent." In my 20s I wasn't worried about my retirement since I had decades to make more money but I see that as a mistake and I'm worried now if I'm doing enough or even the right thing about it.
I remember my parents going through economic downturns at the restaurant as well as the economic highs. However, they were vague about how bad "bad" was. Now that I'm the head of my own household I understand it all better.
On the other hand I don't worry about having to hide from the 3 brothers who bullied everyone at my bus stop. I think that's also due to how a question is framed. That memory also rarely comes up when people ask about "What do you miss most about your childhood?" or another question with a positive connotation.
Now if you want to talk specific things, that's where it gets murkier about which age was "better" overall.
I think politics was more civil until recently. Before Newt, it felt like things got accomplished and both sides were willing to at least try to work together. Now the only platform the R's seem to have IMO is "vote against anything put forth by a Dem (while also taking credit if it fails or the benefits if it passes)" along with spreading hate laws while removing rights from people. Collectively, we a society once deemed someone too dumb for office when they misspelt "potato" but now politicians actively flout the laws and aren't only not punished--they're seemingly rewarded by donations from rabid supporters.
Financially, it seemed like money was better in the past. While I made less money per hour, things didn't cost as much. Going back to being a teen I was making killer money and I paid for things like my own landline and car insurance. I paid for my own college with around 2 weeks of pay per semester. Used books were like $20 used and $80 new and you could sell back if you wanted to helped.
Now, every corporation who can seems to have gamified the system. Last time I got a college book (~4 or 5 years ago) it was over $300 for loose papers (not even put in a binder) and an online code that was good for something like 8 months.
From a technological perspective, we used to routinely put people into space with the Shuttles to the point it was commonplace enough tomaybe get an article on page 3 of the newspaper. Before SpaceX, I think we were asking Russia to help us put astronauts on the space station. Computers are so much faster now and do so much more however the sense of wonder and exploration aren't there anymore.
I could go on and on but, to me, it really all depends on the topic in question as well as what day you ask me and what mood I'm in. There are things I certainly miss and there are certainly things I don't miss. There are things I certainly like better now and there are certainly things I wish were like how I remember them. That's also a key distinction.
As someone who is part of multiple groups of people that in a past not too long before I was born, were killed, locked away and forced to be "cured" by conversion therapy, lobotomized, thrown onto the streets for being a
"burden" or "difficult", spit in their faces by random people, forbidden to engage with necessary institutions and many things more, no, no it was not better in the past. It's still shitty today but at least psychology, general medicine and social stigma for mental health & developmental disorders started to fade and they are more understood and accepted today.
If I lived in that past that many people today still call better, I would have likely died before I even got the chance to know I wanted to die.
i am absolutely without a doubt not nostalgic. i was born in a small post-ussr country, and i remember how it was back then way too well. i also remember what it was like to live without internet, and pretty much everything good in my life happened because i gained access to it. the rise of technology gave me OPTIONS, something i haven't got for a while, and now i appreciate every second of it. i am looking forward to the future.
Yes and No. I miss my Dad and would give anything to go back 5, 10, 15, 20 years and see him again in his prime. And certainly things were alot better when housing was so much more affordable and the world wasn't in the state it is today, BUT at the same time, there's so much we didn't know before, things that weren't being done right, or people that were being mistreated. There's real progress that's been made in some areas, but in some cases, progress is painful and messy. Like yeah, if we could go back to a happier time, we'd find some comfort in one thing, but in others, we'd lose out on whatever progress had been made in the world. Maybe going back to my childhood in the 80s and 90s would be great for me, but holy crap were those different times with their own sets of issues.
I would like to talk about only one aspect here that I feel has peaked around the millennium: intellectualism, and a general trust of science/reason.
While I was much younger at a time, I definitely remember that proper political discussions were aired on TV. Maybe I extrapolate from my country’s media overtake, but having followed US politics, it may be even worse there: there is zero nuance and common ground, the other side is simply evil (and reading some news about red states, certain parts of one party is definitely evil, but that is besides the point. I’m just saying I’m not some “enlightened centrist”/“both sides” people, because that’s the dumbest stance). My gripe is that.. even if I disagree with another party’s views on certain things, clearly a government has plenty operations where the populist views don’t matter and is a concern for both sides, that we have to solve. There is ample ground to discuss and argue on that, and that should be an “old-school” political argument with reasoning, not tantrum throwing.
Another area where we could clearly see this decline is the recent COVID-vaccination/masking. I don’t even want to comment on masking, like honestly, that was a major disappointment in the general populace for me — they honestly care more about a temporary, minor inconvenience than the health of other people?! And I get it, many did it simply as a tribal mentality thing, but it is still just sad. But the vaccination? In my country we have like 10s of mandatory vaccines for newborns in the first 2 years (and it is quite common in other legislatures as well). I liked to believe that people are generally trusting of proper medicine. But the amount of anti-intellectualism that spread across the internet in recent years is absurd.
And I get it that there is more disinformation on the internet than ever (and just wait until GPT-like agents spread even more!), and people lost their trust in many things and try to regain it.. but it’s just overall sad to see a promising rise in intellect with the early internet having resulted in this.
My own life, definitely. The quality of life? Well, we have more information, better technology, and better medicine.
While I don't want to sound too negative, and perhaps nostalgia is contributing to my opinion, it feels like (in the US at least, I can't speak to the rest of the world) some of that progress is wasted because of poor -- and worsening -- social policy.
Environmental protections are still almost meaningless, personal financial stability and individual rights are being lost. Maybe it's that I am getting older, and consume more media, but I see parallels between what's happening now and some of the most terrible times in history. That makes me wonder about the quality of life I, and more importantly my kids, will have in the future.
So yeah...the past sounds good to me.
Most of us have imperfect memories. When we look back at events from our past, we don't usually dwell on the mundane or the unhappy, we like to remember those moments when life seemed or felt perfect.
Let's say someone has a memory of a great Christmas when they were a kid. Most of that is probably taken up by opening gifts and the general feeling they had at the time. They won't remember if they fought with a sibling later in the day, got sick from eating too many sweets, and probably didn't even know if their parents had any money worries.
A similar thing happens with history. We all know that history is written by the winners, but AI research is also teaching us that people don't tend to write down things that we see as a given. If you were to write a book that included the protagonist eating a banana, would you bother describing the peel as yellow and the inside as white?
If I lived in the 1700's and was too tired to cook, what would I do? The answer starts with, "Light a fire." There was no ordering a pizza, grabbing something out of the fridge, etc. Maybe I have some bread, but everything else probably needs cooking. Or maybe I'm wrong and just have no idea what people's relationship with food was like back then; surely there were leftovers before there was refrigeration.
Then there's the whole outhouse thing. My grandpa installed indoor plumbing into his house when he was a teenager less than 100 years ago. Before that there were no hot showers for the family; a hot bath meant hearing a bunch of water first. Usually bathwater was shared because it was so much work.
No, I don't think life was better in the past, even talking into account making sure you weren't extremely disadvantaged by race, gender, location, etc. I think there are challenges now and there were challenges then, and folks get tired of dealing with the same challenges every day. Sometimes any change sounds like a positive thing.
For me, nostalgia and actual longing for the past are very different. I might wish I was younger, and feel nostalgic for certain things from my youth (especially pop culture-related things), but I hated being a child, so I don't long for actual childhood. My personal circumstances are pretty inarguably better than they were when I was a young adult, in a lot of ways, so aside from just having more of my life ahead of me, I don't really miss that time, either.
I think another aspect is that, as we get older, there's just more "past" to be nostalgic about.
Ask anyone with a chronic medical or mental health issue if they'd rather be going through it in any past decade. My wife is currently on second generation antipsychotics. Do you know what the side effects of first generation antipsychotics are? They're not pleasant. Of course, they're what replaced lobotomies, so who's to complain? And don't forget the man who invented the lobotomy won a Nobel Prize because it was considered such a revolutionary improvement over how we treated the "mentally infirm" prior to that.
Me? I have hyperthyroidism, so I'd be good any time after the patent for my medication expired in the 70's, though my ADHD treatment would be another story.
Not to mention other little things like drunk driving being legal, cars not having seat belts, smoking on airplanes, etc.
I would love to live in a time where my technology skills would be deemed irrelevant…for like 1-3 weeks. Overall I think times are better but I do feel our artistic expression has been constrained by corporations sucking all the creative energy out of the room and the powers that be inciting division and culture wars. But I do appreciate modern medicine and sanitation practices.
I think it’s a thing that we tend to project our own experiences and feelings to the masses. It could be simply that you’re reading more of such things because algorithms are feeding you this, or because you’re just getting to a “nostalgic age”. Not saying you are right or wrong on this, but it sounds like that’s where you could be coming from.
Nostalgia can be a wistful longing for the halcyon days of yore, where all our memories are bathed in golden-hour sunlight. It can be the shared sense of camaraderie geeking out over social phenomena of the past. Maybe we think about how things were easier or people were more friendly.
But as others here say, outside of the subjective feeling upon which nostalgia is expressed, and the people who do find confirmation bias in other. It’s hard to equate that to “better” in more concrete terms of societal outcomes, if that’s even the correct area of analysis.
I feel nostalgic over things of my childhood, but I think simply because they were childhood memories.
Playgrounds during my childhood were huge monstrosities of metal and wood climbing adventure. We would run along narrow metal tubes in the rain, Capri Sun in one hand and a ball of Fruit Rollups tucked away in our cheeks. Somehow we never really died or became paralyzed from falling 10+ feet onto loose gravel. Now, playgrounds are so sterile and “safe” lest precious toddlers get a hangnail.
Better = arguable.
A lot of people have already answered things in this way, but I just wanted to state it in my own way.
Happiness is subjective. We are not happier today than we were in any point in history. For all of the sorrows we have learned to mitigate, we have invented new ones to take their place. Things in the past were simpler; we simply didn't know as much then as we do now, but I don't think we're better for such a simple reason.
There are other metrics that we can use for "better" but I don't think they really match what's being asked. Instead, I think the reason why people pine so much over the past and it's simplicity is largely because of exhaustion and people not taking enough time off for vacations or leisure.
In terms of self-actualizing lifestyles -- where people work for their own good and the good of their neighbors and family -- I think we probably peaked somewhere around the late bronze age (no, I'm not kidding). Ideally, we'd go back to that lifestyle, for most people, with the addition of modern medicine and communication. This would probably require a pretty significant reduction in the population, but it seems like we're gonna take care of that pretty soon, anyway.
Huh, first I've heard of this theory. what was the late bronze age like? In particular about work and self actualization. was that peak lifestyle broadly available to everyone or only in certain geographical areas and certain economic classes and sexes?
The answer depends on a lot of factors (e.g what generation you're from, class, race, gender, nationality etc). There are some things that were better, like the non-corporate web, but I also like that there is noticabely more acceptance of minority groups then there was even a decade ago.
I think everyone reminisces it’s just we all have direct, near immediate connections with others to express it so it seems like a greater amount.
With youth comes blissful ignorance and different priorities. Looking back at one’s childhood (happy or not), there’s something about it you miss which is why we have all these “remakes” of popular video games and movies. Looking back to early adulthood there’s bound to be bad parts too, but we remember the fun nights being young and carefree with less joint pain. The world might not have been better or worse, but those weren’t on our priority list.
You know how the brain filters out “nonessential” information and retains what’s valuable? It’s impossible and overwhelming to have 100% input all the time. This is a similar phenomenon I think—the brain simply cannot retain all information about the state of the world’s events in the past—we would never get anything done! We hold on to the “valuable” experiences which we remember fondly and learn what’s necessary from the past, to move forward.
Tbh the world may have been better though..less climate change and blatant, brazen hypocrisy, deception, and greed (as opposed to keeping it in the shadows). In general I think humanity has gotten better—most people are actually decent and reasonable, and being connected lets us amplify this goodness and hold the irl trolls accountable.
I think it's easier to see what you want to see out of the past and to (intentionally or otherwise) blind yourself to or downplay some of the problems depending on your own circumstances and the movie reel circumstances of your imagination. Maybe a little bit of self-soothing for some people; well if I was born at this time, I would have been capable of more or better.
Not my thing, but I have seen it in friends and family pretty often. Humans have always had problems, and of these there have also always been hideous and ghastly problems (and most of these are still alive and well today, though some have taken to wearing different masks, sometimes, and in some places). Some of them I think just miss being young enough they weren't aware of the world's problems. Like that old baseball quote about most fans, when you ask them when baseball was at its best, will almost all roughly give you a timeframe from the years they were ~9-12.
I can also get behind the idea that some people maybe don't really think life was any better back then, but what they would really prefer are different problems to the ones they are facing right now. Whether that would actually be the case or not is immaterial, I think.
Part of me wishes I grew up with millenials/gen z. They seem more like what I would have enjoyed doing, like more geeky stuff/computer stuff. Also was jealous when I saw teens doing stuff like wearing cat ears! I would have totally gone for wearing cat ears as a teen but as a teen when I was one that would be considered extremely weird and while I wasn't as influenced by ebing popular I did try to at least be not standoutish in not being popular either. I joke that I really should have grown up more as a millenial (I'm gen x though admittedly late gen x). Or at least not worried so much about at least not being a "nerd" cause I would have totally fit in nerd culture. I will say sitcoms and young programming have gotten better about making being smart and doing smart things mot look uncool where as when I was young programs aimed at teens was emphasizing smart person = nerd/uncool.
But I will say I do not envy their outlook of what the future brings (Which I may still get to see some of) with global warming looming in the horizon and the way the world looks to be going. Also.... I would do even worse in school if I had distractions like smartphones. I'd have to have parents willing to not give me one or let me take it to school to solve that (Which honestly with my parents I could see that. I mean they did limit my tv watching to an hour each day). Hell, even internet woudl have probably really distracted me from schoolwork and such (but at least without a smartphone Ic ouldn't be distracted in class by it).
I think that's pretty broad. Life for who, in the past when, as another commenter said.
From what I've seen it's usually based on some complaint someone has in the present. For me it's the complexity of systems and bureaucracies involved in modern life.
Certainly I was never alive to remember "simpler times", and depending how far back you go those simpler times probably had disadvantages compared to modern life (especially in terms of comfort and medicine). But when someone is nostalgic they're usually not thinking about dysentery, they're thinking about something they dislike now that people in the past didn't (or are perceived not to) have to deal with.
Life's great, there's too much doomerism posted everywhere. Biggest problem is social media. If you go outside and talk with people you'll have more in common than you think.
Even that's looking at the past with rose colored glasses though. Social media has brought along it's own set of problems, sure, but it's not like people were more pleasant when you had to talk in person. The only real difference back then is that you had to get used to being around assholes because there wasn't a digital space to retreat to.
No, it was just different.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned communism yet. Most people living under communism had to endure a lot of hardship and fear. Living standards increased drastically in countries which managed to move away from it.
No! I would be stuck in the kitchen without being allowed to go to school and be married off. I'll then be pressured into having many kids and then have to watch many of them die before puberty.
And that is only if I survived long enough to get married off. Without modern medicine, pretty sure I'd be dead by now. I'm not the best human specimen physically.
This isn't all that far back, but as a child I remember not having a heater. I hated bathing in the cold. At some point my mother boiled water to mix with the regular cold water for us to shower ourselves in.
I remembered being very happy when we finally installed a heater. It was slowly being more common for people to have.
I also like art and painting. People who could have access to paint it the past were people who could afford the materials and time to do it. You would have to be pretty privileged to get to be a painter.
Based on my current socio economic status, I would not be able to. I'd be at a farm somewhere. My grandmother did at least.
I wanted to say religion would be a big issue, but actually in my area, people were more spiritual? Animistic? Before Abrahamic religions got spread, and even in the era I'm thinking of, they didn't really practice the religions very faithfully. They meshed a lot of cultural, spiritual/supernatural things into it.
I would have been fine with that.
It's interesting how society here got more religious over time and not less.
I like the era I was born in. Late enough to have some amount of freedom, access to medicine and technology, but early enough that I'd die before everything really properly goes to shit.
I'm very sorry Gen Z.
Edit: I mean if you go way way way back. Salt was hard to come by! I really like salt!
And you'd have to deal with merchants who would sell you sub par copper and all you could do was carve a complaint into a tablet and chuck it at him!
Hmm. That doesn't sound too different from now though.
The Atlantic top article addresses this: Goodbye to the Prophets of Doom, The Tale of Rising Inequality Turned Out to Be Wrong.
Some of the key takeaways:
My life is definitely better now then 10, 15 years ago.
I am fitter then ever, having more free time and I am doing more of the things I love.
Sure there are some downsides compared to back then, but overall my life has improved.