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The World We Live In - Past Or Present?

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agchristie | 09:02 Tue 30th Aug 2016 | Society & Culture
44 Answers
A phrase I keep hearing recently goes along the lines of 'it's a crazy world and things aren't what they used to be'.

These are big questions I know but:-

1) Where would we benefit from returning to the 'good old days'?

2) What has not changed for the better?

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Woofy....(09:37)....... I remember my Mum doing all the washing on a Monday, because it took the rest of the week to get it dry ! She had a simple manual washing machine. We had an ancient Ascot gas boiler, that would be condemned now I expect. Mums worked so hard in those days, with little in the way of labour-saving devices, and yet they seemed to manage. Mum...
09:48 Wed 31st Aug 2016
1) No benefit. Can you imagine a life with no central heating, outside loos, no internet and 24 hour news.

2) People moaning about kids. They criticize our young for not going out and then criticize them for playing out. I think the attitude to children in the UK is quite appalling compared to other countries.
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Interesting Ummmm.

So,in your view,there is little evidence for the 'good old days'!

I don't think there are/is "the good old days". People will always be nostalgic about the days of their youth, and when their kids were small and didn't need worrying about too much, as long as they could see them.
Apart from that, like ummmm, I can't see any benefit in going back.
There's stuff like ISIS etc., but we had similar things back in the day anyway.
still got the same old toxic air in places. London got rid of its famous smogs, but Oxford St is still more polluted than Beijing. That's just one town, though; I don't know how bad it is elsewhere.

More broadly, things like allergies and asthma seem much more widespread than even when I was young.

Plus side: plenty, as ummmm says. Most technological advances are useful. But it can be hard to untangle the good and bad points. Is it good if kids stay indoors with their computers rather than going out and interacting with real people?
Listening to my mum and dad talking about the 'good old days' makes me grateful I was born in the 70's.

The one thing that makes life harder for kids and parents is traffic. We played out most the time from quite a young age. We could hear a car as soon as it turned into the street. Someone would grab the football and we'd all stand on the path until the car passed. Our kids don't have that luxury. I find it quite sad.

Now the kids are out and about Pokemon hunting and being slated for it. Adults need to give them a break!



Has Pokemon-hunting died its natural death yet?

A few months ago my 20-something year old son went out looking for one when he came home for a weekend, but last week he was here again and there was no mention of them.
(Yes, I am slightly embarrassed that my intelligent 20-something year old son went Pokemon- hunting)
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Ummmm, I was also born in the 70's and spent most of my time playing outside and know what you mean.

Looking back,I can clearly recall the fun times playing tennis in the street with a net stretched and tied between two handily placed lamp-posts! When a car turned in it was chaos! There were plenty of 'let' points believe you me!

Ah,the good old days!!
Jo...my son has just been out and got 3 gyms or something!!

ag - I think the fact that our children can't play out has made people intolerant of children.
Too large a job to really tackle but clearly change brings many losses and gains.

Generally speaking science and technology brough many benefits. Social interaction has plusses with greater tolerance and understanding but losses re local relationships and comradery. Standards of goods are poor with everything being slung/replaced as soon as the manufacturers dare. Commercial noseyness and manipulation is at an all time high, and one has to endure political correctness still.

Thing is folk recall the good bits lost easier that any improvements made on this twisted meandering often reversing back progress made as time.
my "good old days” were the sixties and seventies and I honestly can’t think of a single thing that was better. Not all children “played out” in the halcyon way that was described. We lived on a busy road and it wouldn’t have been at all safe.
I am not sure that there are more allergy type problems around, but I do think they were less often diagnosed and treatments were less effective.
I think that some parents are less thoughtful about the noise made by their kids but they probably would always have been thoughtless. My garden is backed on to by 8 other gardens and all of them have resident children or visiting children. The level and type of noise and behaviour allowed by the adults varies considerably. Mostly its reasonable but in one garden both children and adults scream in play...and i don’t mean shout, I mean scream; and in one garden, the children have been allowed, by their mother, to deliberately bark at my dogs from the top of their tall play house from which they can see into my garden. When father is at home, he stops it. I wonder if children are taught better manners in other countries?

but also
In 1695, Robert Russel wrote in A Little Book for Children and Youth (subtitled Being Good Counsel and Instructions for Your Children, Earnestly Exhorting Them to Resist the Temptation of the Devil...):

... I find by sad Experience how the Towns and Streets are filled with lewd wicked Children, and many Children as they have played about the Streets have been heard to curse and swear and call one another Nick-names, and it would grieve ones Heart to hear what bawdy and filthy Communications proceeds from the Mouths of such...
In the past people did not talk about things like domestic abuse, child sex abuse, mental health problems, bad single girls getting pregnant on their own etc etc

I think that these days we talk to each other more about such subjects and there is information available that can help people in whatever situation they are in.

I find that there is sometimes too much information and news available to us. But that could just be me.

It is so easy to look back to 'the good old days' but every period experiences problems - they just change.

That’s true Wolf. Local people “knew” about such things but they were thought to be shameful and hidden.
communities had their ways of dealing with some of them....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charivari
woof - that was an interesting read, good job it says 'England' and not up here in Scotland ;-)

I hope that we are a much less judgemental society.

The internet has made it so much easier for victims to come forward.

I have no doubt that if my mother was born in my era herself and her siblings would have been taken into care.

In the 'good old days' my nan had nowhere to go so had to resign herself to a life of domestic abuse.
my late grandmother was abused (not sexually) by her youngest daughter who is now dead...not my mum, my mum was her eldest daughter. Eldest daughter got away with it even though the family knew because nobody believed that anything could be done and that it was a shameful secret.
Even the ancient romans moaned that things weren't what they once had been, and harked back to a golden age
My era, if you like, was the 1960's, and I remember it with great fondness. But it was very different from today.

There wasn't anything like as many cars around for instance, which means that life was less frenetic and certainly quieter....kids could play fairly safely in the streets. And cars were slower....none of that screeching up to a roundabout, before applying the brakes.

People were definitely more polite and considerate. There is a family living opposite me that have three teenage children and I always know when they are home because very loud pop music is blaring out....what it must be like for the next door neighbours I can't imagine. I don't recall that happening in the 60's.

But it wasn't all sweetness and light back then. We never had central heating and the house was very cold in the winter, except for the main living room.

Everybody seemed to smoke !....younger people now don't know what its like to walk into a Pub or Cafe and not have to fight your way through that awful fug of cigarette smoke. All those overflowing ash trays ....Yuck !

Food was unrecognisable back then, from what we eat today....the diet was very bland and boring....no curries, chillies, pasta, etc, etc ! I eat lots of yogurt these days but I don't recall ever seeing any in the 60's.

We had 2 TV channels and personally, it wouldn't bother me if we went back to that again now.....I could quiet happily manage with the BBC and the Other Side. But I would definitely miss the Internet....no AB !

The music was better, in my humble opinion. That pop music that blares out from the kids opposite is that awful "dance" music.....just endless noise that sounds like machinery starting up.....its just sound effects ! Thank God we had The Beatles and the Beach Boys.

I also think the pace of life was slower back then, although its difficult to quantify I suppose.
The benefit for me of living in the 'good old days' is I would not be getting very close to becoming a grumpy old fart.
Are you sure about that Talbot !

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