“Thank you industrial society for saving us from this” sarcastically declares one
internet post, featuring a picturesque view of the Swiss alps.
“Can you believe people used to afford a suburban house, car, three kids, a holiday,
and college all on the income of one guy?
What happened to society?” asks the nostalgics.
“Reject modernity, embrace tradition” says the 16 year old teenager in Missouri,
posting a picture of two people standing in front of a power line(?)
“Medieval peasants had more free time and holidays than people today” proclaims another,
to over 117,000 likes.
Hey pal, there are billions of people today who still live the lives of medieval peasants
and they clearly don’t work fewer hours than us.
This kind of talking point is part of today’s digital zeitgeist, from across a spectrum
of viewpoints and age groups.
And I know it’s not all people, most people know we’ve never had it so good.
This video is for the folks who genuinely believe that life was better in ‘the good
old days’.
Happier.
More virtuous.
We didn’t have as many nice things but...everything made sense.
The outfits, the buildings, the social cues.
People being more friendly than they used to.
People being more religious.
More public esteem.
“Ultimately,” they might say “we must return to tradition, and a domestic, conservative
way of living.”
And I can easily dismiss all of this as nonsense by saying: You can already do that.
You can go live a pastoral farmsteading life and pretend you’re a medieval peasant, it’s
not illegal.
There are many people who live as if it were the 1950s or the 1880s, you don’t need to
advertise it to the world.
What separates you from the Amish is that they’re actually devoted.
They actually live the life that you purport to want.
And when they get asked to explain what made this bygone era so great, it’s always about
what people didn’t have.
“We didn’t have smart phones, we had to talk to each other.
We didn’t have central heating.
And we were happier for it.”
No you weren’t!
Back in the 50s, less than half of British households had a bathroom, and people hated
it, with one newspaper saying it was ‘disconcerting’ that so many people in a ‘civilised country’
were stuck with the ‘bleak alternative’ of a portable bath.
Most houses didn’t even have an indoor toilet, it was in the shed at the bottom of the garden.
Many look back on this time as a golden age of social conformity and family values.
Before the sexual/secular/artistic revolution ruined everything that was important to them.
Others look back on it as the high-point of real proper jobs, in industry!
High wages.
Secure wages.
And they were unionised!
When wealth disparity was at its smallest ever in history.
And sometimes it isn’t even political – there are countless Facebook groups full of older
generations commemorating many of the banal complexity of the mid-century, everything
from rotary phones to bin men.
Ah, god damn it, they made the binmen woke.
However, thanks to the wonders of historical archives, we can paint an accurate picture
of normal life in the 1950s, untainted by nostalgia and distortion by popular culture.
Houses – nobody wants to live in a pod, but houses in the 50s were less than half
as big a houses today.
Look at this ad for a luxury home – it’s pretty average or even quite cramped by today’s
standards.
And while it was certainly cheaper, don’t ever think of renovating it.
Some houses were built with special caverns in the bathroom walls where you would simply
dump all your used razors and then forget about them, leaving the next person to deal
with all those rusty blades.
If you wanna knock down that wall I hope you have your tetanus vaccine.
That's even if you could afford the luxury of your own house.
The white poverty rate was double back then, and the black poverty rate- well you can already
guess.
Cars – Cars at the time were death traps; car physics were not well understood at the
time, they thought if you keep adding bulk to it, the car will just absorb the crash.
Instead it just transferred all the impact force into the frail meat puppets inside.
Cities – Littering in the street wasn’t seen as socially taboo until the 1970s environmentalist
movement.
There were no regulations on air pollution, so factories spewed out so much coal and smoke
dust that it often blocked out the sun in highly industrial towns like Pittsburgh.
Or in London, where over just 4 days in December 1952, smog killed roughly 12,000 people and
made 100,000 people seriously ill.
I will give the nostalgists one victory though: theft and burglary rates were incredibly low
in the 1950s compared to today, although that’s because nobody had anything worth stealing.
Work – The average American man worked about 300 more hours per year than today.
And he didn’t even get paid more for all this toil – adjusting for inflation, the
median salary in 1957 was slightly lower than it is today.
He isn't getting home until 7:30 and he's going straight to bed after beating his wife.
Wife – The idea of a gorgeous stay-at-home submissive wife is a load of nonsense too.
1 in 3 married women still had jobs, which is half the rate it is today, but it’s certainly
a large chunk of women.
Women who were relegated to being housewives often found it boring and unfulfilling.
"I ask myself why I'm so dissatisfied.
I've got my health, fine children, a lovely new home, enough money.
My husband has a real future as an electronics engineer.
He doesn't have any of these feelings.
I wake up and there's nothing to look forward to."
“I've tried everything women are supposed to do – hobbies, gardening, being very social
with my neighbours.
I begin to feel I have no personality.
I'm a server of food and putter-on of pants and a bedmaker, somebody who can be called
on when you want something.
But who am I?”
“I seem to sleep so much.
I don't know why I should be so tired.
It's not the work.
I just don't feel alive.”
Nor was everyone pious and morally pure.
As early as 1939, a minority of Britons believed in life after death, indicating that maybe
people back then weren’t as religious as we think.
1950s cinema gives the impression that everyone acted as upstanding, sexless, clean-mouthed
citizens all the time.
But that was just voluntary regulation by the big studios.
For every grand cinema showing the latest Hollywood romance, there were many more seedy
dive cinemas showing low-budget exploitation movies.
Soho in London was internationally famous for its adult theatres.
Alfred Kinsey, a controversial researcher, found in 1953 that around half of women and
68% of men in America had engaged in premarital intercourse.
Swearing; also pretty common, here’s some out-takes from old Hollywood films where the
actors mess up their lines.
“My play opens, I have my fingerprints taken, my hand asked in marriage, the things has
happened...to...son of a bench”
“I am not lost-...oh Christ, son of a bench”
“Fork fork fork fork, I don’t know the line.
“She knows the words though” “You know what I’m gonna do for you?”
“I have a hunch now…” [film crew laughing]
“...and I want that child.”
“We’ll you’re not going to have it- son of a bench”
And that’s just the high-profile actresses who were in the workplace.
You can imagine the kind of foul-mouthed language used by everyday people in casual settings.
Having heard all of this, a nostalgic may look back further; if the 1950s weren’t
as conservative as I thought well, then the true ‘good old days’ must have been the
1920s, the 1800s, the middle ages.
But it’s all a race to the bottom, because conservatives have always been talking about
the ‘good old days’.
In the 1930s, one English newspaper reported “there is no period in history in which
young people have given such emphatic utterance to a tendency to reject that which is old
and to wish for that which is new” with another blaming “Parents themselves [having]
frequently failed in their obvious duty to teach self-control and discipline to their
own children.”
In 1939, a Gallup poll revealed that 62% of Americans thought that life was better in
the era of the horse and buggy.
America in the 1890s had a standard of living comparable to modern day Malawi, the poorest
country in the world.
Life expectancy at the turn of the 20th century was around 52 in the US and UK, and a bit
lower on the continent.
There are only two countries in the world with a life expectancy that low – Nigeria
and Chad.
But apparently even this was too cushy for people in the 19th century.
In 1832, Andrew Jackson proclaimed that under his leadership, the United States was “reviving
that devoted patriotism and spirit of compromise which distinguished the sages of the Revolution
and the fathers of our Union”.
Evidently things were better fifty years ago.
In the 1770s.
The 18th century.
But even in the 18th century, people complained that “young noblemen, who, in direct opposition
to [good] character, hurry through life in one invariable round of debauchery.”
Ultimately saying that, “despite having attained maturity” young men are naught
but “emaciated”.
I mean look at this guy: he’s wearing stockings.
A wig.
Makeup!
He rides horses.
Gaaaaay!
Inevitably, Uncle Richard will ruin Christmas dinner in the 2040s by saying “life was
so much better back in the 2010s.
We must return to tradition when marriage was between two humans, not these ‘Robosexuals’
indoctrinating our kids.”
We all know by now that, despite it’s flaws, modern life is superior to anything that came
before to in nearly every single way.
In that case, why do we have literally thousands of old people celebrating old butter knives
and even more young people complaining about mechanised agriculture?
I think I know why.
The two Germanies reunited 34 years ago, but those who lived in East Germany haven’t
given up nostalgia for the old communist system.
A majority of East Germans agree with the statement “East Germany had more good sides
than bad sides.
There were some problems, but life was good there”.
Yet at the same time, 83 percent of East Germans approve of the transition to a market economy,
and the number of East Germans saying they are satisfied with their life increased by
44 percentage points from 1990 to 2019.
What gives?
Well, when asked what specifically they missed about East Germany, very few respondents actually
said the economic system, the communist government, or the Statsi turning everyone into paranoid
freaks spying on their neighbours.
What they miss the most was the school system, the unique food, the public art, and the idea
they they were all working towards a common goal, even if that goal wasn’t actually
getting any closer.
They miss how simpler everything was back then.
East Germans enjoy the aesthetics of the past, but most of them recognise their lives are
better today.
I think that’s at the core of this mindset, from the hyper-conservatives demanding a return
to arranged marriages, to your grandma sharing Facebook posts about phone boxes.
Modern life can seem a little...vegetarian.
Somewhat bland.
Everything from buildings to post boxes have been simplified, removing some of the richness
from the tapestry of everyday life.
When everything can be bought online and everyone can be contacted at arm’s reach, what reason
do you have to socialise at the local pub, gossip with the greengrocer, or go outside
at all?
When consuming media online can replace all other hobbies, what reason do you have to
develop into an interesting person?
Naturally, this makes people very lonely and very bitter.
It’s easy to look back and think that people were happier and more sociable in days gone
by.
How we can undo this is beyond the scope of this video, so I’ll leave you with an extract
from the Japanese book Hagakure.
The narrative follows a young warrior born into an era of peace, born decades after the
last great wars between the Samurai.
Plagued by boredom, he yearns for a return to conflict, solely to provide purpose into
his life;
“It is said that what is called ‘the spirit of an age’ is something to which one cannot
return.
That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world’s coming to an end.
For this reason, although one would like to change today’s world back to the spirit
of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done.
Therefore it is important to make the best out of every generation.”