Everyone is always saying “remember the good old days”. It’s become this mantra. Things aren’t as good as they once were. Times have changed and not for the better. There’s this nostalgic feeling of recapturing the past because everything was so much better then – as least it seems that way in the mind of the person who is making this declaration.
I think this train of thought just filters down through every generation. Every set of people have their own interpretation of what constitutes as the “good old days” to them. Things that we would consider our personal “good old days” was a period during which someone else was griping about it. It’s all perspective.
My guess is that if you run through every decade of the last century, at least once (probably more, but I’m being conservative) – someone had referred to each one of those decades as the “good old days”. And at the same time you could find just as many people who were complaining about.
You never hear anyone really raving about the present tho. The future will get looked on with these hopeful thoughts of promise or ominous feelings of things to come. But the present is rarely ever thought of. It seems most of the time people are using the present to either think back or look ahead.
Kind of weird when you think about it.
I think people look back on the "good old days" as fond memories of their youth which has since passed them by. Speaking for myself, I equate this with experiencing my first love, kiss, car etc. it's an innocence about the world that can never be recaptured later in life. As you said, it does not matter what era we come from I think we all feel the same about our youth passing us by…When I say in "the good old days" what I really mean is, "in the days that I thought everything was possible and magical" as opposed to now where I'm "wiser and older" and know better…