Good old times
Nostalgia is a weird concept. First, many people don’t know that the very notion of feeling nostalgic is not an ancient one, but a rather new invention. It was coined by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer in 1688 to describe the affliction that befell Swiss soldiers when fighting away from home. The affliction was originally also known as the ‘Swiss illness;’ and I hast to say that the Swiss are to this day a rather conservative and nostalgic group of people. But I am not going to take you through the entire history of nostalgia and homesickness here. If you interested, listen to this episode of Throughline.
Instead, I want to address our current times when nostalgia once again seems to ride high. If you look through history, the general mood of society seems to swing back and forth between a future-oriented mindset when people are optimistic about what the world will bring and how their lives will develop and a more backward-looking nostalgic age when people long for the good old days. Examples in the US of the former are the 1960s under John F. Kennedy or the progressive era in the early 20th century. Examples of the latter are the Great Depression of the 1930s and the 1950s under President Eisenhower.
Or today, when the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ explicitly calls for a return to some undefined past when America was great. But precisely when was America great?
The Washington Post asked YouGov to poll Americans of all ages to tell them in which decade things were best. Below is an overview of the results.
Which decade had the best…
Source: Washington Post
There is agreement that today we have the best food. The variety of food choices on every street corner is unsurpassed. If you want to know how it was in the past, just read up on the most popular recipes people cooked in the 1950s (Ham and Jelly-O anyone?), 1960s (Chicken Kiev), and 1970s (Frosted sandwich loaf). Clearly, we are better off today.
There is also reasonable agreement that the 1970s had the best music. Meanwhile movies peaked in the 1980s and 1990s with classics like the Indiana Jones franchise, to movies like Pulp Fiction and Shawshank Redemption. The same goes for TV with shows like Dallas, Golden Girls, and Friends. Ok, the best TV show of all time is the Sopranos and that started in the 1990s but was mostly aired in the 2000s, but that is the exception that proves the rule.
But apart from these obviously correct choices, there seems to be no clear answer to the question when society was the best.
Until you look at the data in a different way.
Here are the answers for each category but instead of sorted by decade, they are sorted by the age of the person when they thought society was best.
How old were you when society was best?
Source: Washington Post
Most people think that we had the most close-knit communities right around when we were 4 to 7 years old when we experienced first hand the love and care of our closest family members. The happiest families came in our early formative years between age 8 and 11 and the best music, films and TV came when we were teenagers. Because that is when people’s lives revolve almost exclusively around music, films, and TV.
Nowhere is nostalgia more clearly visible than in our taste for music. Here is a chart how people rated music based on their age when the song came out.
Our taste in music
Source: Washington Post
In short, we don’t like music that was released before we were born and everything that came after we turned 35. To me, this means the Beatles are overrated (yes, they are!), Led Zeppelin and AC/DC are gods as are Queen and Elton John, and music essentially turned into a permanent dumpster fire with Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, and Taylor Swift.
And don’t argue with me because you are wrong as proven by my data…
The world has continued to get better.
I on the other hand, since passing 35, have continued to get worse.
Billions of people have been pulled out of poverty, there are far fewer violent deaths worldwide, less hunger, more literacy, longer lifespans in the last 25 years.
However I now struggle with steep stairs and I have to be careful not to stand up too quickly from the sofa. Thus in my microworld things are worse and this clouds my outlook.
I am guessing this is related to the phenomenon about how people become more conservative (politically and culturally) as they get older — in the abstract, conservatism is the desire to preserve good things about the past (and progressivism the desire to change bad things about the past), as naturally everything was better when we were younger :-).
Interestingly, this also means that “conservatism” and “progressivism” don’t have fixed policy prescriptions, and explains why say AOC and Woodrow Wilson are both called “progressives” even though they have little in common policy-wise, and why modern conservatives care much less about things like gay marriage than previous conservatives, as the society the 45 - 65 year old crowd is trying to “conserve” is the society of the ‘80s and ‘90s, not the one of the ‘40s and ‘50s that say Reagan was trying to conserve.