The "Good Old Days" Paradox...
It seems that once you reach a certain age, you yearn to relive your time in a world that mostly no longer exists.
While some simply mourn their childhood and wish to return to a sheltered life where somebody else was responsible for their well being, others recognize the loss of many actual things from quality of life to enjoyed freedoms.
Most of us will never know the freedoms our parents enjoyed and even fewer can comprehend the freedoms out grandparents enjoyed. And almost without exception, life was "mostly" better. Now obviously if you were a child during the depression of the 1930s you probably vastly preferred life in post war America and if you were born into slavery but found a better life after abolition then obviously your "good old days" wouldn't have been so grand.
But the result for most of us is we feel like we were born too late, that we mostly "missed it" and are now living in the decline of our civilization despite any technological advances we might enjoy. Some of us would chuck it all, M4s and modern medicine included, for a chance to have lived in the 1950s or even frontier America because we feel we would have enjoyed a higher quality of life and been more fulfilled.
But there is a problem, say you could have gone back to be born at a time when you'd have been young during the 50s, lived your middle age in the 80s and passed on before everything went to shit culturally. Even during the 80s, when most of us consider things to have been "almost perfect" you would have a new perspective and still miss the 50s even more and you'd be willing to trade it all to have gone back "one generation" prior.
Even if you went back to frontier days when land was given free to homesteaders and you were able to live as you wished, hunt and gather to survive and live an existence that some millionaire would give everything to have been able to have known, you'd still have an earlier experience that was likely idealized and preferred (unless of course you lived through some great difficulty as a child) and you'd probably be willing to trade it all to have gone back "one generation" prior.
Now I'm not saying everyone in the 80s desperately wanted to return to the 70s, most of us realized that with few "specific exceptions" it sucked. But we might have traded video games, 80's new wave and Reagan for malt shops, 50's rock and Eisenhower because it seemed like a simpler time when we might have been more successful, more fulfilled. Some of us would have willingly gone back even further. Myself, I still think I'd have needed television.
Now I think the future will always be a mix of great leaps in technology, some cultural advances and possibly even some new guarantees on freedoms not completely enjoyed, but always with the eventual increase in governmental control and as a result we will always miss the "good old days" even if we don't realize that no matter when we are born, we'd still probably be nostalgic about a period of our youth or even a time before we were born that we only heard about from our parents or grandparents.
It's hard to be a ACLU hating, philosophically Libertarian, socially liberal, fiscally conservative, scientifically grounded, agnostic, porn admiring gun owner who believes in self determination.
Chuck, we miss ya man.
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Originally Posted by AKDoug
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