Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be

If there is one thing that bothers me about social networks, apart from bonkers conspiracy theories about how Covid-19 is a hoax, is the tired old meme about how things were so much better in the old days. You know the sort of thing. ‘When we were young, we climbed up trees, rolled about in mud, kicked a ball around in the local park. Share if you agree things were great back then and all kids do today is stare at their computer games all day, when they’re not on their mobile phones.’ It’s partly true, although I can assure that it is not just kids who are on their phone all day, but my God, isn’t it a bloody good job the Covid-19 nightmare has come along in an age of better technology?

As a child, our technology barely extended to a small black and white television and a massive ‘radiogram’. We didn’t have a house phone, a fridge, a washing machine or anything cutting edge. My friends and I did go to the park, at least when it wasn’t pissing down with rain, which being England, it usually was all summer, we did climb trees and we did roll around in mud. I don’t look back at those times as some kind of sepia-tinted memory. In fact, for much of the time life was dead boring.

These tired old memes come to mind now that we are in semi-lockdown. Children are not allowed to go to the local park etc etc and they have no alternative but to engage with their PS4s, their mobile phones and watch TV. Suddenly, nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Technology, so hated by some people, is now essential.

More than that, I wish we’d had that kind of technology when I was young. Video machines didn’t exist in my childhood, never mind the ability to stream from a seemingly infinite number of TV shows, movies and games. Entertainment was essentially the television, with all of two channels, playing vinyl records and discreetly looking through a fourth hand copy of Titbits, a weekly magazine featuring celebrity gossip and, as the title suggests, scantily clad girls, the Porn Hub of its day.

Some things were better ‘in the old days’ but my memory tells me not many things were better. A world without the internet, mobile phones, huge flatscreen televisions, PS4s, digital radios, a fridge, a dishwasher and all these things we now take for granted would be awful.

It’s nice to look back at the past, but it’s daft to look back at so called better days that never actually happened. It’s only those who weren’t actually there that think that. Technology has made life at last tolerable for many of us. Imagine how life would be today without it.