GOOD OL' DAYS

My mom was born at a unique time in the United States of America. From fear of an apocalyptic nuclear war to cultural revolutions, she has seen a great many changes, and it comes to no surprise to me that she can barely recognize the world she grew up in. Think about it: 50's to 2010? How amazing is that? She'll be turning 60 within the month.

We are children of the silicon chip. No matter your interests, we are all affected by it. By default, this is a new age for humanity. Of course my mom can't recognize this world, because the entire attitude has changed, even if it is still motivated by the base desires of humanity. So, I have to ask y'all. Are we going to get to experience times like the 50's, 60's, and 70's? Will we have shit to tell our offspring?

Or what? What is the point to any of this?

Global warming will kill us!

The Good Old Days are not gone, because they never were, we just tend to whine a lot more then people did back then, and usually at more irrelevant things.

But hey, I bet historian will find something really important next 100 years into the future.

The world is changing faster then ever before, thing is that you can't see it right away, and even if you can, it gets buried under the tons of information rubbish that we have today.

That aside, we have the LHC, advent of social networks, Communism got fucked and buried, religious/ideological showdown (West vs Islamists), new rising superpowers (India and China) and now U.S are building lasers. I'd say some big stuff happened last two decades, yeah.

I would say it's more important to look at what will be then what their was. They had their era, and now we have ours. In the lifespan you live compared to your mother's, you'll see alot of changes as well and when you look back on them, it'll seem like so much has changed as well, so just keep looking ahead and all will be alright.

Good Ol' Days: When we were serving the Crown.
It all went downhill after America was founded.

Face is a bit off.

On a side note, I agree with Room101, the past was just as bad, people nowadays just bitch more.

Are we going to experience times like the 60's, 60's, and 70's? Nope. Just like those living in those ages never got to experience times like the 1900's, 10's, and 20's.

Nostalgia for the good old days is a bit silly in that it has ALWAYS existed in every single era of humanity. Are you familiar with various greek creation myths? Hesiod, a poet living in 700 BC ancient Greece tells us of the ages of man. First there was the Golden age, where humans were perfect and lived in a perfect world and lived for hundreds of years and never got old or sick, and all died peacefully. Later there came the Silver age, where things were still pretty good, but they lived shorter than the golden race of humans, and strife defined their adult lives. It continues on like this for successive ages until the fifth and current age, which was miserable and people were terrible and in general, the world was shit.

That was 2800 years ago. Apparently civilization has been going down hill for THOUSANDS OF YEARS. Everyone has this notion of "the good old days" where life was better. And then they get old and their kids develop that same notion about a period during THEIR early lives.

We humans have poor perception of change, and tend to be less able to change as time goes on. While a sapling might bend and sway, a full grown oak tree either remains still or falls down. It is just in the nature of aging. But our perception is, of course, subjective by nature, and we fail to see that it isn't the world itself that is moving outside our car, but rather our car moving in relation to the world.

In general, the world gets better. We don't NEED to go back to the 50's, 60's, and 70's because the 2020's, 2030's, and 2040's await us and while things will definitely be different, we humans are just so fucking incredible at adapting that we will deal with it. Despite our constant warning of the apocalypse that is about to befall society (Something that has stuck around for just as long as memories of a better time), we will do fine. Thrive even.

Of course, all that being said...the 90's were CLEARLY the best times ever, I remember the mid-90s being so great!

Yes, They Are Gone For Good, it's a shame.

I have plenty to tell future children about. Genocides, black presidents, the sybian, black presidents on sybians, howard stern, MP3s coming into existence. There's always a "good ol' day" for everybody.

They're gone, but they still lives inside our memories. I remember when I was a kid, running around the yard chasing butterflies, getting scolded by our parents for poking on dead animals, cried when we fell down and bleeding. Ahhh. . .Those days are never coming back.

Have you guys forgotten?

"Days will be gone, but not forgotten" or something

Ehehehe

Hearing about your mom del reminds me on my grandfather and that he turns 84 soon. I mean when he was around my age he fought in the second world war and became prisoner of war during it. I mean from the mid 20s to 2011...wow if I think about what changed during that time and what he has experienced, I wonder how it'll be when I'm in his age.

Ah but in general as for the good old days, and that people tend to think more positive about the past than about the presence is a psychological thing. It's kind of a defensive mechanism that we kind of glorify the past and think more about the positive things from it and tend to forget or put away the negative things from it in a far and dark corner, since who want to remind himself on the bad things when thinking about the past.

I believe that people always use the whole 'good ol' days' comment because they either:
A) Think about their childhood, which was a time where they were carefree and innocent.
or
B) Are only thinking of the positive sides that happened in a time period - ignoring or not realizing all the bad shit that actually happened during that time.

Every decade had it's pros and cons. When you have children their will believe their decade was the best and ours was terrible (or they might believe some other generation had it better).

There were no good old days, we just tend to remember the positive events that happened to us in the past rather than the negative events.

I was not even alive during the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Yet, their music and culture influences me. They weren't perfect times, but they were certainly more exciting times to be alive. What do I have? See processors grow in strength? Even western comics, my most favorite hobby, are cheapened with the times. We have yearly world changing events. The world is always at stake, once a year, and now these fantastic characters and stories have grown old and redundant. Lots of our film are recycled from groundbreaking films of days gone by, y'know?

Invasion of the Body Snatchers comes to mind, or War of the Worlds. I hope that we a decade at least half as interesting as any of the mentioned above.

Awesome childhood memory; one that I don't see kids these days participating in: Catching fireflies during the summer. I mean, why catch fireflies when you can play a game on your video game console, but the fact remains. :

The Present is always "worse" than the past because we can skip over the bad parts in the past and only focus on things we want to remember, but are forced to take in reality with all it's complications and problems while we live it in the present. Let's just name three shitty things about the immediate past:
>Advent of the drug culture
>Racism and general intolerance
>No internet

But no, they were great I'm sure. To anybody with a scientific mindset, these times are orders of magnitude greater than past eras. Our age is called the goddam INFORMATION AGE. We are slowly creeping forward as a species both scientifically and culturally, and looking to the past for the "Good Ol' Days" seems foolish and maudlin. Does every age have it's Pros and Cons? Of course. It would be a ridiculous over-dramatization though to take this and turn it into "This past age was perfect and we'll never experience such greatness!"

TL;DR You people only think this way about the past because you are nostalgic or simply too blind to see how fantastic the world of the present is.

The "Roaring 20's" is an excellent example of this. The Roaring 20's was the period between 1920-1929, approximately. It was the era right after the Progressive Era and World War I and was basically known for the great cultural and social boom, with flapper girls and jazz music. However, not everyone shared in the prosperity, with farmers in the South and Midwest basically facing rising prices for manufactured goods and lowering prices for the sales of their produce. Many historians have debated calling this era the "Roaring 20's" at all.

There gone...at least for me. Now I'm just trying to believe in " the best has yet to come" bs.

There were and will continue to be problems for every generation. New problems come up as old ones (hopefully) slowly die out.