The Good Old Days Were Never That Good.
This is the best time to be alive.
Duck and Cover. Here Come The Old Folks With the Garden of Eden Syndrome.
You know the Garden of Eden syndrome. You can tell the afflicted. They begin a sentence with a mix of longing and pride. “Back in my day …”
Then comes the paean to the ’60s or the ’90s or the ’50s or whenever they had their misbegotten childhood.
Back when the music was better. The cars were better. Life was simpler. Kids had manners. Crime wasn’t rampant. You could get penny candy at the store on the corner.
Spare me. I remember the old days. I was there. For some very old days.
You’d have to tie me up six ways to Sunday and stuff me into a time machine to make me go back.
Sure, I loved the poodle skirts in the ’50s with the gazillion petticoats. But you know what was going on in the ’50s and ’60s when I was a teenager dancing to American Bandstand? Women were addicted to Miltown because they were bored out of their lives. If they had a job, it was likely low paying with bosses who demoralized them by treating them like servants.
Tom Hanks has the luxury of waxing eloquent about typewriters. He never had to use one to earn his living.
I remember having to type on old Remingtons and Underwoods and Royals. I struggled with whiteout and got migraines trying to get through a day’s work without making a mistake, without two keys jamming in the slot where one belonged. I remember typing my first book in the ’70s when at least I had an electric typewriter. But when I had to make an addition to a chapter, I couldn’t cut and paste like I do on a computer. I had to type the whole damn chapter over.
And let’s talk about the cars. I shudder when I think about the car seat my little girl used when she was a few months old. Oh, right. No car seat.
I wrapped her in a blanket and put her next to me while I drove. And that day I got distracted and T-boned a car in the intersection in the rain? Where was the regulated car seat with seatbelts to keep her from flying into the dashboard? Oh, yeah. Forty years into the future. Nobody had even considered the crushed sternums from mothers slamming their arms across their kids’ chests to keep them in place while they shuttled them back and forth to school. That’s if the mothers’ hadn’t gone flying through the windshield when they were rear-ended in the days before seatbelts. But yeah, the Beach Boys were cool on the radio. They distracted us from the news about the nukes Khrushchev had pointed at us.
Oh, you thought we had world peace back in the day?
Maybe you were thinking of the fifties when we had the Korean War, or Vietnam in the ’60s and ’70s. Or, was your family too busy dealing with alcoholism, cancer, child abuse, poverty, and the other plagues that people forget were also rampant back in the old days.
But that’s okay, we had good food in the old days. Lots of stuff in Jell-O and creamed chicken on white rice. And that was for parties.
Or maybe you’re thinking about how good the medical care was in the old days. The gallbladder surgeries or hysterectomies that cut you up one side and down the other because easy laparotomies hadn’t been invented. Or heart transplants and open heart surgeries and liver transplants that save hundreds of thousands every year now that hadn’t even been imagined when we were yucking it up over Lucy and Desi.
Tell me one nostalgic pipe dream that makes you pine for the past, and I will burst your bubble with a dozen examples of advances that not only makes life easy but safe by comparison.
Cell phones, computers, dishwashers, garbage disposals, telephones in the home, televisions. None of these things existed when I was in grade school. And I didn’t have a deprived childhood.
Yet when people get older, they slip into a daydream. They seem to live in a past that resembles the Garden of Eden.
When they remember everything as perfect. Before the serpent showed up. Some people seem to have a form of grief for a past that never existed, as though people in their childhoods and youth never got depressed or divorced, or stayed stuck in bad marriages and jobs. Or had kids who got into trouble or parents who got old and dependent. Some kind of veil drops over their eyes and the life they once lived seems so much better than the life we live now.
Of course, our world is in trouble. Was it ever thus? Our world swings on the end of a pendulum, cycles of misery and relative calm.
But never are we far from one extreme or the other. Don’t even talk to me about climate change. The sixth extinction. But never is there a static state that is as perfect as the imaginary life that beckons as if from the grave as we get older. It’s a siren call, leading us to grief, impatience, and disillusionment with the life we live now. Like Odysseus, if we hear that call, we must tie ourselves to the mast. Have our memories but resist giving up our enjoyment of the new for some false longing for the past.
And you, enjoying your youth. Watch out for this Garden of Eden syndrome. It’s contagious.
You’ll find yourself in twenty or forty years, waxing nostalgic for cell phones and electric cars, complaining about the newfangled whatever that has taken over your life. But trust me, what you’ll have will be so much better than the glitziest, shiniest object you can imagine on the horizon now.
Perhaps it’s the shock of the new. Maybe that’s why we can’t let go of the past. But I know older people who make themselves miserable pining for what never was, and they can never have. They have trouble with science and facts.
I know my memory gets worse as I get older. But I can tell you this. I remember the good old days. I treasure my times with the people I love. But the days were never as good as the ones I have now. The one lesson I learned from back in the day was the mantra that came from the hippies, the Beatles, the experimenters with expanding their minds. They had one bit of wisdom we all should remember when regarding the past.
