There is no good ol' days, there never was. This is actually a positive realization, you'll see, bear with me for moment.

From Albert Camus' BETWEEN HELL AND REASON:

"We make love by telephone, we no longer work with material but with machines, and we kill and are killed by proxy."

With those words, contemplated as far back as 1946, one comes face to face with the realization that the great malaise of our time is in fact not of our time at all, but extends much further back. What this means is that current trends of looking back at a decade like, say, the 80's with great fondness because of its pre-internet tactility of fiddling with cassette tapes and chatting strangers up in neighborhood bistros you could walk to and unfolding real paper maps on your dashboard mid road-trips are at best myopic. Chances are many other aspects of 1980's life would've looked outright dystopic to someone from, say, the 1880's: Families staring at television instead of chatting with one another at the dinner table, live performers at pubs and restaurants replaced by jukeboxes, and the explosion of a certain power plant that rendered 150,000 square kilometers completely contaminated. Reading Camus helps us see that the dehumanizing aspects of our lives extend further back than any of us are actually talking about. Society-altering products pushed upon us by certain socially inept billionaires along with the thousands of much smaller fish (a certain class of wannabes who like to refer to themselves as "Founders") who will do anything to get offered a multi-million-dollar acquisition are not in fact the lynchpin of where the world is headed, but are all--completely unbeknownst to them--part of a trajectory already set forth a long time ago. 

The more historical material one reads, the more we realize there doesn't exist a time where a certain distaste towards the dehumanizing effects of "Future-shock" does not apply. Kirkpatrick Sale's REBELS AGAINST THE FUTURE will have you believe that the singularity may have occurred with the development of James Watt's steam engine in the late 18th century (not the first steam engine in history, but the one that made it practical enough for widespread use). Indeed, the industrial "revolution" that was ushered into being thanks in no small part to Watt's engine may have inflicted some of the fastest devastating effects on human life, from the erosion of craft and the craftmakers' command of their own working hours, to the pollution of the environment, and the confiscation of public land for private exploitation. Although, a case could easily be made that the latter occurred as early as the 12th century, when England's "Enclosure Movement" kicked off, whereby forest-dwelling people increasingly had less forest to dwell in--without which the myth of Robin Hood would never have been born. But that isn't further back enough still; go back even further and you have Ancient Egypt carving up mountains in the south to use the stone for pyramid construction up north. The wood from Lebanon's near extinct cedar forests was also harvested for ship-building as far back as Ancient Egypt.

Ultimately, there is no time in human history that can be looked upon as a complete ideal. If one was to take on the task of envisioning a utopian world based on the past, our best bet would be to piece it together from what we might refer to as "the best parts". Looking backward through rose-tinted glasses won't cut it, we'll need checkered-tinted glasses for this job. Can forest-dwelling co-exist in a world with bike lanes that lead to pubs that draw an international crowd and serve craft beer together with Korean barbecue? Can the sound of the Velvet Underground still somehow exist, and can we have webstores through which to offer our crafts and wares the world over? Can guns, tanks, and missiles not exist in this universe?

Another perhaps more practical exercise would be to envision a realistic outcome for the future based on past trajectories and where we are today; If the world we live in today is more dehumanized than the world of the 80s and that one more dehumanized than the world of decades prior, then we can probably conclude that the future will likely be far more dehumanized than the world we live in today. Which means, dear reader, there will likely come a time when people in the future look back at 2024 with longing nostalgia and unironically refer to it as the "good ol' days." 

With that ever so slight shift in perspective, perhaps the best we can do is embrace this terrible era as a grand ol' time to be alive.

Ganzeer
Houston, TX
23.08.24