Some people say the good old days were better - before smartphones, social media, and the internet took over everyday life. Kids rode bikes until dark, families actually sat together and watched TV.
There was touch football in the street, kick the can, booties up, stickball and Frisbies to occupy our time. We all thought Lassie was a real dog who saved Timmy every week (Did Timmy fall down the well again, Lassie?).
We thought we were cool if we had a Davie Crocket hat. We played 'Army'. If you had a quarter in your pocket you could get a cherry coke at the corner store and go home with 15 cents change. You could yell out your bedroom window to talk to a neighbor, and if you had to call someone, it was on a rotary phone instead of sending a text or an Instawhatever.
Do you think life was better back then - or is today’s technology a good thing?
Thanks to Florida Hillbilly for the inspiration
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Life was defiantly better back then! Don
ReplyDeleteLife was better before the digital revolution because face time counted for a lot more than it counts today. Today's under-50s, even many under-60s manifestly lack the social skills that made past socialization so much richer and pleasurable. Computerization has also eliminated millions of jobs that employed, that gave a sense of purpose and belonging, and that gave the millions of Americans who worked those jobs genuine faith in The American Dream - faith in their ability to provide for themselves and to improve their and their children's lot in life; while today's young can't begin to afford a home.
ReplyDeleteIt's a mixed bag. The internet has done more to separate and divide us than bring us together, but honestly I don't know how much of that is the internet and how much is the anti-American, racists that have hijacked the education system.
ReplyDeleteIf it weren't for the internet, #MeToo (read "pound me too") would not have taken off. Again, mixed bag. Sexual harassment is not acceptable, but dating has become unsafe for men.
Teenage girls are more anxious and depressed as a direct result of social media. Social media also let's distant relationships stay in touch.
It is much harder for those in authority to successfully lie to us, but at the same time, Fauci hasn't been tried, put against the wall, and shot. Legacy media is hanging on, but their lies are easily exposed. Nothing is done about it. There is no punishment for journalists that deliberately lie. But whatever tools are put in place to ensure the truth will be leveraged against those speaking the truth by those in power.
People are more anxious. Kids are more fragile. Hard to call it progress.
I didn't grow up in the US so some of your entertainments were not mine to enjoy but life was more relaxed in the 50's, 60's and 70's when I grew up. We could leave our houses unlocked and the keys in the car which you'd be foolish to do today except in one upmarket tourist town and some rural areas away from towns. The difference is down to two things - you can't move to the tourist town and go on welfare and some areas are notable for ferals generally being notably absent. Rural folk still watch out for each other as well.
ReplyDeletei'm not sure if life was better but it was a lot more simple.
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ReplyDeleteThe good life begins when I've pulled the blankets up over my head and formed that little tunnel to breathe through; when I've snuggled that extra pillow up against my chest and put my mind on autopilot.
Instantly I'm transported back to a time when I could run effortlessly, for hours, in leather-soled shoes with hard rubber heels. I could do at least 100 situps and 40 or so pullups and enough pushups to burn off three cheeseburgers dripping with animal fat and smothered with salt and cheese and barely break a sweat.
I remember the girls . . . the Debbies and Sallies and Judies and Charlottes and Kays - and how slender they were, how seductive they could make themselves without Oscar de la Renta or Lancome or Estee Lauder, how mysterious their smiles and their innocent but all-important secrets, how they could slink and strut and completely destroy teenage boys without even knowing about Liz Claiborne or Maggie Sweet or J. Crew.
The aroma of not-particularly-good perfume and spearmint gum together with inexpensive but effective shampoo was a lethal combination, elevating my blood pressure to dangerous peaks, causing various organs in my chest to attempt escapes, and putting those jungle-rhythm tom-toms to work in my head.
I live again the outrageous boasts, the preposterous plans, the insane antics I pulled with the Bills and Steves and Alans and Roys and Everetts, draining the hoses at gas stations after they had closed so we could cruise a few more times past the girls' houses, saving our precious coins for sodas and burgers and fries at the Sugar Bowl or the Town & Country drive-in restaurant on the edge of town where we circled like young Apache renegades, trying to make those ancient engines pop the tires and seriously impress everyone in earshot.
I grew up in a little place exactly like all the ones thousands of other kids grew up in during the 50s, the genesis of the American Graffiti subculture. Those little towns were interchangeable, indistinguishable, and absolutely unique to Middle America. Unimaginable freedom linked inextricably to unfathomable angst. Memories I never want to lose and where I live now that my eyes and knees have given out.
Quelle dommage y lo siento for those all those who got into the game too late and have no Memory Island to go back to except one where the beaches are touch screens, the babes are AI, and the hometown haven is a megalopolis with nose candy, STDs, and suicide in a capsule.
Hi Joe....,
ReplyDeleteThat was then.. this is now.. Yes I was around back then..... and yes we did things back then that would get us and our parents locked up today!!!! I grew up in S/E Louisiana in the late 40's thru the 50's and 60's!!!! Great times!!
Now, for a short story, I'm sitting in Mr. Alack's barber shop waiting for a haircut... in the magazine rack is Field and Stream, Sports Afield and other related mags.. But!! in Field and Stream as a column by an author named Robert Rouark and he told viginett's of times growing up in North Carolina with his Grandfathe's!! Later to be in a book called "Tales of the old Man and the Boy!!!!!!" READ IT!!! and the Sequel!!! especially ch. 8 where Robert tells of gong on a camping/ hunting/ fishing trip in his early daze with some friends and cousins... As he said,"We had enough guns and ammo to start a small war"... But that was not what we were about!!!" It was a different time than now... and if you lived it you understand... The guys i went on that camping trip then are still Friends... now!!! Old Friends!! Grand parents ++ and I can go on!!!
I'll leave you with these memories of times gone on....
I'm sure you have many of your own!!!
Audentes, Fortuna, Iuvat,
III%,
skybill
Read previous comment as anymouse!!! Me the old fart from S.E La. skybill
ReplyDeleteTechnology added to our lives till around the early 1990s where it started to be used to monitor and control us. There have been no innovation since then and all we have done is make the technology smaller and faster.
ReplyDeleteHow we use anything hasn't really changed since we began as a species. We make things for good purposes and then someone makes it do bad things. Then our lords and masters come in and use that against us.
There are many advantages of this technology and there are many advantages of what life was like 40 years ago. I'd rather still be here now if we can get control away from the globalists in charge.
We will never get a balance because as humans we are generally stupid sheep and easily led by professional liars who convince our simple minds that black is white and everything would be perfect in the world if they had total control.
One more thing: we were much more tolerant and forgiving, much kinder to one another when . . . most of us smoked. I honestly believe that the replacement of the simple comfort of cigarette smoking, which back then was a very social and sociable indulgence, with all sorts of psychiatric drugs has worsened things for people and for our society. (I flew airlines when more than three-quarters of the seats were SMOKING SECTION, and I never heard a complaint from anyone aboard.) And the ANTI-SMOKING was just the camel's nose in the tent, followed by all sorts of "You CAN'T do this or that or this other thing" finger-wagging scolds and nags who have made life evermore tedious at best, and hellish at worst.
ReplyDeleteSmokers brought that on themselves. In books I learned that the polite thing was to ask "Do you mind if I smoke?" before lighting up. I never ever once heard anyone ask that. Often people were hostile and defiant about smoking right under signs indicating what was supposed to have been the nonsmokers' section. It seems to have been chemicals used in processing more than actual tobacco, to which I didn't seem to be allergic, but cigarette smoke made a lot of people queasy and, as a matter of self-defense from the smoking bullies, we became prune-faced goody-goody bullies.
DeleteIn high school I wrote a funny story, true and unexaggerated, about how my family got separated and spent two hours all running around looking for one another. That wouldn't have happened in the years of cellphones. Then there was the vacation trip that was so not fun it ought at least to become a teaching story, so I wrote it as one, about how so many people wanted to take the same bus (down the East Coast to Florida) that I left DC in #6 of 7 buses and arrived in what had become #7 of 15 buses. All of those buses were supposed to have arrived at the same time but they arrived an hour or two apart, and the relatives I was visiting were sitting there waiting to see whether I was going to be on any of the 15 buses, blood pressure rising. That wouldn't have happened if cellphones had been invented, either. I liked the original, simple cellphones that didn't try to be too "smart."
ReplyDeleteNow, of course, cellphones are too big and self-important to ride around in cars or pockets and wait to be used like phones. They try to be computers, TV sets, books, magazines, games, alarm clocks, calendars and forty or fifty other things, and all they EVER succeed in being replacements for is flashlights, and they don't work as flashlights for very long either. A person would have to be sort of "mental" to try to use those things so it's not surprising that they're being blamed for serious mental illness. I won't have a flat "phone" in the house.
The Bible tells us not to say "What is the cause that the former days were better than these?", "for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this." (Ecclesiastes 7:10.) Those bygone years may not have been so much better as different. In hindsight we were safe; at the time we were pretty worried about thermonuclear war. If we were having more fun then, that's probably because we were kids.
But if there are new fads and gadgets we really don't like...we do have the option of not using them.