What nostalgic notions make you roll your eyes?

That life in the past was less violent than it is now.

That young people are mostly apathetic about their world and how it’s governed.

I’ll keep thinking.

American Southerners missing the 50’s and 60’s as the good ol’ days. They didn’t allow blacks to eat at the same restaurants, go to the same schools, drink from the same fountains, or sit in the same seats on buses and on trains. Give me a break. Good ol’ days for who?

^ What has already been said.

What I find fascinating, however, is that the same model of inventing a past and perpetually longing for it is common in all of us. Nearly everyone I know has some point in time that represents a time when things were better for them, when they were happier. Yet, I knew them back then, and they were miserable shits. I think this is a function of the mind, and we’re all susceptible. I’m likely not immune to this. I’m sure my memories of the fun times are fiction.

How great television was. Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, Beverly Hillbillies, all part of the same mindless crap that kept people numb during the Vietnam War. Three networks and maybe the educational channel.

How safe it was being a kid. Through the windshield from no seat belt, poisoned by the stuff under the sink, major head injuries because of no helmet, eyes out because of dangerous toys.

And, how clean the air was: living in the SF Bay Area, we couldn’t see the Oakland because of the smog.

Children these days, they are so lazy. They refuse to work and study. Back at my time I had to work for a living while studying at the same time, yet I still got good grades. Those children can come up with a thousand excuses for not working. And look at their school results!

Back at my time life was so simle and sentimental. People would talk face-to-face. We would know each other very well and our relationship was so strong. And now the Internet ruins everything! People just look at the screen all day and they refuse to meet face-to-face. They claim to know each othervyet only through the Internet. Life is getting cold.

That the middle class is rapidly disappearing.
Give me a break. I’m living in a house built by the local AT&T executive in the 60’s/70’s and I bought it by working in a freaking food factory. The houses that the factory workers lived in in the 60’s/70’s are interspersed with crack houses today.

In the early 70’s the doctors and lawyers in town started their own subdivision with glorious, huge homes just a mile down the country road we lived on. We’d drive through and just drool at the opulence. Shift to today? My dentist was looking at remodeling (moving walls) in one of the former Dr.‘s houses to live in while he built. Good news! A $750,000 house came open, and they just moved the walls in it. When I was a kid, my dentist didn’t even live in a recently constructed house.

Green Acres is one of my all time favorite TV shows, @zenvelo!

I’m a nostalgia addict who’s usually too busy brushing tears out of my eyes to roll them.

@ibstubro interesting way to look at it. I actually long for the simpler days regarding housing, and I live in fairly big houses, mostly because of my husband.

Mortgages in America make it possible for people to own bigger and more expensive homes than they probably should buy. This leads to prices going up, more debt, bubbles in the market, not being able to live in a good school district unless you pay a fortune, and couples dependent on double incomes to live in safe, productive neighborhoods. I don’t like it. It’s too extreme in the last 20 years in most of America.

I remember when I was in college getting my teaching license. There was this book we were required to read for a class called “A Tribe Apart” about the secret lives of middle school students. All of the kids (I say kids because they were mostly all under 20 and I was 29 or 30 at the time) were shocked by the book and wrote essays about how middle school was SO different “way back” when they were in middle school.. (eye roll)

They never bothered to check the date the book was published. It was 1998. We were in school 2002. So it was only ONE or TWO years after these kids were in middle school. Basically, the book was about their experiences in middle school.

Several times I mentioned this in class. The kids in the book were only 2 years younger than most of the students, so this weird nostalgic “back in my day.. ” response to the book sounded ridiculous. Still, the essays kept coming.

I still think most of the things mentioned jn the book were fringe topics that most middle school kids don’t experience AND are sheltered from so they don’t even know it’s happening around them. I think all of the stuff in the book has always been happening and now its out in the open.

When people say that old women must have been beautiful back in their younger days.
What, so none of them were ugly then as well? :D

Life was better back then when it was simpler. Pfft, remember manual typewriters, carbon paper, and adding machines? Or driving a tractor with no cab or rollover protection structure in freezing weather with those lousy brown cotton gloves, because thinsulate didn’t exist. Or having to do a ring job on your car at 75000 miles when it started burning oil. Although cars were a lot easier to work on. :)

I get nostalgic over the kind of TV we had in the 60’s and 70’s. Carol Burnett, Laugh In, M*A*S*H, SNL.
“Jane, you ignorant slut!”

Thanks, great stories! I was making sense, then.

The idea that the school years are the best time of life is another trigger for me. I’ve been told that multiple times. Most often when I was stressed by a mountain of homework or panicking about an upcoming presentation.

I always wondered what kind of message that was supposed to be – kill yourself now, it will only get worse?

<rolls eyes> :D

That the 1950’s were the idyll of modern American society. They were the cork in the bottle that produced the 60’s/70’s.