# Were the “good old days” always better?



## luis masci

As a kid, our doors were unlocked all day.
Today, this would be unthinkable, particularly in big cities. Even in 
rural areas, where crime is not as prevalent, times have changed. At least in this respect, the old saying about “the good old days” really does 
apply.
Do you agree? Is this true for your area? (Would you leave your doors 
unlocked?)

P.S. Thanks ever so much to Valica for her help


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## Miguelillo 87

I think it depends, In mexico city since I live here, Never N E V E R, We leave teh dorr unlocked, But in small towns where my grandmother comes form, They still leave the door unlocked.
I think it depnds in each country.
Besides you always try to remeber the GOOD old days not the BAD old days, That I'm sure everibody had. 
For example someone who lived a war he is not going to say the Good old days of War, but meybe he olnly will remember the days where war wasn't there.


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## maxiogee

It is, as they say, six of one and half a dozen of the other.

There were things in "the good old days" which I miss - such as the openness of people to strangers, the lower level of (reported) crime, the lack of traffic, etc, etc.
BUT - there was a vast amount of deference to the clergy here. This led to the widespread cases of abuse of children by priests and religious, and not just sexual abuse. There was also widespread violence towards children in general, with corporal punishment being the norm in schools. The paucity of outward looking media gave us a very provincial and insular attitude to culture, and I'm glad to see the end of that.

But, I believe that much of what we see in "the good old days" is viewed through the same eyes that now see only sunny summers in the past, and that we ignore much of what we didn't like back then.

I joke to my son that we lived, back then, in black and white. And it was a grimmer time for many. I remember many really cold winters when we had only a fire in one room and going to bed at night was like walking into a fridge, and while we weren't poor by any standards of the time, I remember hunger too. This isn't an attempt to do a "Kids today, don't know they're born!" routine, just a look at how it was. Prosperity here has raised the standard of living phenomenally, and while there is still hunger here, in many cases it is a lack of education which is behind it, and not a lack of money - young parents spend their money on things other than proper food for their families.

I wouldn't leave my doors unlocked, but I don't set the burglar alarm!  What does that say about me?


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## whattheflock

Incredible perspective for a young guy, Miguelillo: And I mean it, okay? No smilies, no rolling eyes, no nothing - straight dope.
I agree, it seems that - generalizing - we enjoy this feeling of melancholy. I'm a very dry and emotionless person most of the time (the only feelings or emotions I experience readily are anger and frustration), so once I had a big argument with one of my sisters-in-law. She said something about "high-school years were the best years of our lives...", with a sh*t-eating grin pasted on her moon face. Since it was the holidays back then, I'd already had been too long in their company. So I told her, "I woulda thought the best years of your life woulda been when you have a husband, and your own children and lived in your own house with everyone enjoying good health, which is _*today*_".
Big argument ensued.
But really, isn't that true? The best time of our lives should be the ones when we are actually alive? I think all memories get reworked in our brain, so that we idealize even the rough patches we had to go through. And we end up longing for the good-ol' days.


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## cuchuflete

In the 'good old days' we were scared of polio and as elementary school children learned about the "necessity" of fallout shelters where we could hide in case of an atomic bomb attack.  In the 'good old days' automobiles were designed to fall apart in about two or three years, and soft and mushy white bread was advertised as healthy.

In the 'good old days' racism was commonplace, and people didn't talk about why it was wrong.

In the 'good old days' people were encouraged or forced by social pressures to support their governments, no matter what stupidities those governments did.


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## Miguelillo 87

whattheflock said:


> Incredible perspective for a young guy, Miguelillo: And I mean it, okay? No smilies, no rolling eyes, no nothing - straight dope.
> I agree, it seems that - generalizing - we enjoy this feeling of melancholy. I'm a very dry and emotionless person most of the time (the only feelings or emotions I experience readily are anger and frustration), so once I had a big argument with one of my sisters-in-law. She said something about "high-school years were the best years of our lives...", with a sh*t-eating grin pasted on her moon face. Since it was the holidays back then, I'd already had been too long in their company. So I told her, "I woulda thought the best years of your life woulda been when you have a husband, and your own children and lived in your own house with everyone enjoying good health, which is _*today*_".
> Big argument ensued.
> But really, isn't that true? The best time of our lives should be the ones when we are actually alive? I think all memories get reworked in our brain, so that we idealize even the rough patches we had to go through. And we end up longing for the good-ol' days.


I think you are giving US a very goos thought, but unfourtunatly some people (icluding me) think what we has before was sth better than we have now, maybe because in this moment you are sufferin a bad actual time, and oyu prefer to remmeber the goos old days, instead to cope with the nowadays suffer


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## ireney

The good old days!

Where you kept your door unlocked so that your nosy neighbour could walk in whenever she wanted! No, I mean it, nobody thinks of the other things. So there we are in a nice village with friends and family. Since I enjoy having some time absolutely sitting alone with a book, I sent everyone outside with a big smile and a heartfelt "Have a great time!" which I meant from the bottom of my sould since that would mean I would have more time to myself.

There I am relaxing as I hadn't had a chance for days and in walks our very friendly and oblidging neighbour Mrs Tasoula. Who sits down for about two hours after taking a look around just so she can say "how nice the place is" and "of course people on vacation are not supposed to have everything in place" etc.

Good old days when Europe was divided in two. Greece still suffers from the trauma of the good old days.

As for the good old days of youth! Well, unless we're talking maybe for the age of 5 when you don't really understand much, you don't go to school yet etc I'd say that I'd rather not go through the nerve racking feeling of having to sit for a test in Physics again in my life. Sure, compared with the problems I have now it may seem small potatoes but it wasn't back then! They don't take 32 years old Uni graduates in high school. I was younger then and THAT was what was bad. That and going through puberty and the "does he love me or does he just wants to get into my pants" thing .

Some things were better "back then". Some things were better "back then" of the "back then" as surely the older persons of every generation think.

I do know that my grandpa had some nasty things to say about my dad's generation's habits! (Dad's born in 1339). Bet you a dollar my grandpa's grandpa thought the sun was hotter when he was young and he, or his dad probably lamented young men's habbit of wearing PANTS!!!


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## Daddyo

ireney said:


> [...](Dad's born in 1339).



A bit confused here: is this a typo or a joke on how old dad is?


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## ElaineG

> I was younger then and THAT was what was bad. That and going through puberty and the "does he love me or does he just wants to get into my pants" thing .


 
Hee! I agree.  Whoever writes those "those were the best days of our lives" songs had a very different high school experience than I did.  So much anxiety over boys, other girls who talked behind your back, being too smart, not being smart enough, being pretty, not being pretty enough...

The problems may be bigger now, but we're so much better equipped to deal with them.

As for the distant past, well, I was born with a couple of now-entirely-fixable health problems that would have killed me before I was 4 in the days before antibiotics and modern surgery, so I've never been able to get too nostalgic about the good-old down on the farm days.


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## ireney

Daddyo said:


> A bit confused here: is this a typo or a joke on how old dad is?




An obvious typo! Sorry about that! Dad's ideas are a bit rusty in some issues but certainly not medieval


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## Chaska Ñawi

In rural Ontario in the 70's, nobody ever locked their doors.  Now most people in the country lock their front door, but only if they'll be gone for a while.

When I was growing up, we had what seems now to be amazing freedom.  I would get off the school bus, saddle my horse, take the dogs, and disappear for a couple of hours.  If I wanted to see a friend, I rode or biked down the road.  Most of our food came from farm stands and our neighbour's cattle and pigs.  The drug of choice at my high school was tobacco, followed by alcohol and pot on a Friday night.  Now my teenaged daughter rides only under supervision, and our children are expected to check in coming and going if they cycle anywhere.  Nobody runs stands anymore, and you have to have good connections to buy local meat.  My old high school has now moved on to crystal meth and crack, and not just on Friday night.

On the other hand, there are now far fewer traffic and hunting accidents resulting from alcohol; all the villages have public libraries which are very well-used; internet and cheaper telephone rates have made it much easier to stay in touch with friends and family; and there are stricter anti-pollution laws and less garbage strewn across the roadsides.  My daughter represents the first generation in our family where she can virtually choose to practice any profession she pleases.


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## invictaspirit

I want to talk about TV.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, England only had 3 TV channels.  I think I get over 300 channels now on my sat system, there are so many I can't be bothered to count them...and only a small number of them are foreign.

Yet TV was about eight billion times better in the 1970s.

I would prefer to have 3 channels of good TV than 300 of total crap.  

Anyone else suffer from this type of nostalgia?

(By the way...my wife and I chose where we live now VERY carefully.  Despite living only 55 km from central London we can leave our doors unlocked and often do.  This is, however, very rare.)


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## Kelly B

I think that the good old days are an illusion. Laundry by hand, childbirth without medical help, the need to have a bunch of children if you hoped to have any of them survive to adulthood... no thanks.

I also don't think people have changed much. We lock our doors and drive our children everywhere because we _hear _about more problems, so we're afraid. If you compare places with the same density of population, I don't think that most of us are really in any more danger of being robbed or kidnapped than we were many years ago. 

On the other hand, the tools we have available to mess ourselves up are indeed worse, like the drugs Chaska Nawi mentioned, and really horrific weapons and so forth, so it is true that the dangers we do face are more impressive than they used to be.


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## Hakro

I think that the main point is: how "old" days do you mean?

For me the good old days were in the forties and the fifties. Most of the members are so young that their good old days were in the eighties and the nineties.

Some people seem to have a perspective of a hundred years, at least.

And they all are right.

If you mean just locking the door, I do it only if I stay away overnight or longer. Until recent years I had my car in front of the house with the ignition key in place. Nowadays I lock my car because the kids of my neighbour found that I have coins for parking in my car...

Finland still is a safe country but I have to admit that it's becoming worse and worse every year. This has nothing to do with the good old days, it's just the crime statistics. There are reasons for it but it's another story.


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## Sorcha

I think it entirely depend on perspective, like anything i suppose. For me I think back on tings that happened five, ten years ago with rose tinted glasses not to mention people who have memories a little longer than mine! What i do think should be standar here though is that some things were better then adn some things are better now, does it always have to be a choice bewteen old and new? Why do so many countries refuse to forget? And others simply can't remember? I find that far too many people think that it has to be one or the other, not so, balance is essential in everything!

By the way


> Incredible perspective for a young guy, Miguelillo


 
WHAT?? Are you extracting the proverbial here? no really, are you?


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## luis masci

Amazing!!! I was surprised seeing the number of replies that this post has got in a few hours. The post presented two possible ways to me. One was the increasing of criminality and the other was the path of the nostalgia. This last one seems was chosen by most of you, so I’m going to follow it too. 


Hakro said:


> I think that the main point is: how "old" days do you mean?
> For me the good old days were in the forties and the fifties. Most of the members are so young that their good old days were in the eighties and the nineties.
> Some people seem to have a perspective of a hundred years, at least.
> And they all are right.


I think indeed that is the point, because people tend to involve their own feeling with their remembrance. I also think that the old good times are an illusion but certainly we enjoyed so much watching 3 channels than doing a crazy zapping through 300. LOL as you say.


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## cuchuflete

In the good old days, the house was filled with the aroma of someone cooking jelly and jam with fruit from the garden.  This morning I picked a bag full of Japanese quinces and filled the house with the aroma of homemade jelly and jam.

In the good old days, when there was a storm, and electric power stopped, people cooked dinner on the stovetop, and burned firewood for warmth...just as I did two days ago.

In the good old days, before I got my first manual typewriter, letters were written by hand.  Now I send e-mail.  Oh well, I guess some things are really different.  It's hard to collect all those lovely foreign stamps...nobody has figured out how to put those on email messages yet.


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## Etcetera

There's a Russian saying (it appeared in the beginning of the 1990s, I suppose): The old days are considered '"good" only by those who survived them. This saying means Soviet times, of course. 
In my opinion, there's always something good about virtually every period of your life. Maybe the reason why most people like talking about "the good old days" is that when people are young, they're more optimistic, they have all time of the world ahead, and they generally take their disappointments more easily.


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## Hockey13

cuchuflete said:


> In the 'good old days' we were scared of polio and as elementary school children learned about the "necessity" of fallout shelters where we could hide in case of an atomic bomb attack. In the 'good old days' automobiles were designed to fall apart in about two or three years, and soft and mushy white bread was advertised as healthy.
> 
> In the 'good old days' racism was commonplace, and people didn't talk about why it was wrong.
> 
> In the 'good old days' people were encouraged or forced by social pressures to support their governments, no matter what stupidities those governments did.


       

This is especially true for the US where things have changed a LOT in the last 50 years.


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## whattheflock

Sorcha said:


> By the way
> 
> 
> WHAT?? Are you extracting the proverbial here? no really, are you?


 
Sorry. Me no understanding the question. Would you mind elaborating?


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## Thomas F. O'Gara

It depends on the time...and place.  The happiest I've ever been was when I was catapulted out to live in the US Southwest when I was in the military in the 1970's, after growing up in New York.  I hated it at first, but gradually I realized that I was finally living somewhere where I wasn't bombarded with what to think, 24 hours a day.  I miss it.

On another tack, and ironically a comment on Etcetera's reminiscences, I was in Russia in 1991.  We had an Orthodox priest over to the house to conduct a memorial service for my mother-in-law.  It was a Sunday afternoon, and the neighbors were harvesting potatoes.  The priest took them to task for working on Sunday.  They ignored him.

He turned to me and said "it's not like the old days.  People had more respect then."  I wondered what old days he was talking about.


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## luis masci

cuchuflete said:


> In the 'good old days' we were scared of polio (today we are scared of HIV)and as elementary school children learned about the "necessity" of fallout shelters where we could hide in case of an atomic bomb attack (today children have to learn how to do front terrorist attackers). In the 'good old days' automobiles were designed to fall apart in about two or three years, and soft and mushy white bread was advertised as healthy.(also smoking was fashion, but who knows... maybe the things that today are advertising as healthy will be all the opposite in the future)
> 
> In the 'good old days' racism was commonplace, and people didn't talk about why it was wrong(do you think is it over today?)
> 
> In the 'good old days' people were encouraged or forced by social pressures to support their governments, no matter what stupidities those governments did(do you think is it over today?)


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## whattheflock

Koenig said:


> Sounds like you didn't have a very good childhood....


 
That's funny. If Cuchuflete had to learn to hide under his desk from the bombs (preparations A through H) at least they were teaching him to hope for survival. When I was growing up we were all scared green of the impending nuclear Armaggedon (teachers in school liked to boast we were already at DEFCON THREE, and the end-of-times clock was fractions of a second away from midnight) because by then we were taught that you can't hide, you can't run, the bomb's gonna kick your ass anyway.
So, in a sense, Cuchuflete's were actually the good-ol' days.


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## Hockey13

luis masci said:


> In the 'good old days' we were scared of polio (today we are scared of HIV)and as elementary school children learned about the "necessity" of fallout shelters where we could hide in case of an atomic bomb attack (today children have to learn how to do front terrorist attackers). In the 'good old days' automobiles were designed to fall apart in about two or three years, and soft and mushy white bread was advertised as healthy.(also smoking was fashion, but who knows... maybe the things that today are advertising as healthy will be all the opposite in the future)
> 
> In the 'good old days' racism was commonplace, and people didn't talk about why it was wrong(do you think is it over today?)
> 
> In the 'good old days' people were encouraged or forced by social pressures to support their governments, no matter what stupidities those governments did(do you think is it over today?)


 
Luis, your last two responses are not exactly following what Cuchu said. He's not saying they either of those things no longer exist, he's saying both of them have vastly improved and _awareness_ is practically unviersal. If you lived and grew up in the US, you'd probably understand a little more.


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## maxiogee

Hockey13 said:


> Luis, your last two responses are not exactly following what Cuchu said. He's not saying they either of those things no longer exist, he's saying both of them have vastly improved and _awareness_ is practically unviersal. If you lived and grew up in the US, you'd probably understand a little more.



Is he saying that?
I thought he was saying* "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose ..."* - things haven't changed, just what we term them.

If he was saying that racism no longer exists, but awareness is huge - how would that explain people's attitude to Islam?
If he was saying that the "support your government" attitude is gone, whatever happened to The Dixie Chicks?
How long does your automobile last nowadays before it falls apart? In my childhood cars weren't designed to fall apart. They ran and ran and ran.
Soft and mushy white bread healthy? Have you looked at what the ad-industry tells us is good for us these days?


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## Hockey13

maxiogee said:


> Is he saying that?
> I thought he was saying* "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose ..."* - things haven't changed, just what we term them.
> 
> If he was saying that racism no longer exists, but awareness is huge - how would that explain people's attitude to Islam? When did I suggest that he said racism no longer exists? I think most Americans can agree that racism is no longer openly accepted in most parts of our society. I consider that an improvement, and I believe that is what Cuchu meant. As I implied in my post: not perfect, but certainly better.
> If he was saying that the "support your government" attitude is gone, whatever happened to The Dixie Chicks? Again, when did I say that he meant that the attitude was gone? I believe the Vietnam War, and now the Iraq War, has changed a lot of minds on nationalism in this country. On the other hand, 9/11 made the country more nationalist for a time.
> How long does your automobile last nowadays before it falls apart? In my childhood cars weren't designed to fall apart. They ran and ran and ran. Are you really suggesting that older cars were more efficient and more "durable?" They were also veritable death traps and very polluting.
> Soft and mushy white bread healthy? Have you looked at what the ad-industry tells us is good for us these days? If you listen to the ad-industry for your health advice, you are the first person I've ever met who does that.


 
Again, I'm not saying *perfect*, but certainly better. In the old days, Europeans would ravage entire civilizations in the name of mercantilism. These days, even though corruption and the global economy sometimes hurt weaker civilizations, the situation isn't _nearly_ as bad as it was. You don't contend that, do you?


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## Etcetera

Thomas F. O'Gara said:


> On another tack, and ironically a comment on Etcetera's reminiscences, I was in Russia in 1991. We had an Orthodox priest over to the house to conduct a memorial service for my mother-in-law. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the neighbors were harvesting potatoes. The priest took them to task for working on Sunday. They ignored him.
> 
> He turned to me and said "it's not like the old days. People had more respect then." I wondered what old days he was talking about.


A curious remark indeed. I don't thing the priest might have spoken about the days of his youth, because we all remember what was the attitude towards religion in the Soviet Union. Most probably, he was speaking about the Old Russia, the Russian Empire when, indeed, people had much more respect to the Church.


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## cuchuflete

Exegisis on "What cuchu might have meant"...

There is less overt racism today than in my youth.  There is probably less racism in absolute terms.  There is still lots of racism, most of it coming from self-styled "conservatives" who don't know what conservatism is, and who proclaim themselves to be religious, while acting contrary to the teachings of their religions.  The target has shifted from one group of darker skinned people to another, those who often speak little English.  It's still racism, but it's often kept in the closet until the practitioners meet a kindred spirit.  Some change, more needed.

The old racism was based on decades or centuries of teaching that some portions of humanity are inherently inferior.  The new racism is based on irrational fear that the "good old days" will be threatened by large waves of people with different habits.  Racists are still easily identified by their lack of education and failure to think.

Polio:  Medicine is better today than in the good old days.

War: Mutually Assured Destruction somehow prevented nuclear war.  Check back in a few decadades to see how humans deal with terrorism, which puts no value on life.  Are things better or worse?  

Automobiles:  I can no longer repair my own car engine with a screwdriver and a set of wrenches, but the car seems to need far fewer (and much more costly) repairs.  Verdict: vehicles are much, much better.  Those who disagree should find a 1960 Chrysler Windsor, with push-button shift, and try to drive that front wheel drive behemoth in snow.  

Governments and the public:  Things have improved.  Governments still do some very stupid things, but people are willing to protest, and sometimes the protests yield changes.


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