“Life was so much simpler” is a myth, I promise
If you never said it yourself, you probably heard someone say it at some point: “I was born in the wrong decade.”
The feeling seems more popular than ever now that archival footage has found its way on TikTok and you can see videos like “what was life like in the ’70s” filled with comments saying they were born in the wrong generation.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with thinking that our present time sucks. Between a pandemic, a war and a scary political landscape, it seems not much good has come out of this decade so far.
Not to mention the easy argument of technology and social media. “Wouldn’t it be so much easier in a time when social media wasn’t around?”
But what’s so wrong about technology? It is responsible for great innovations in science and medicine which makes it so that most minor injuries, infections or diseases are treatable and curable.
You’re probably sick of what’s going on with the world right now and yearn for a time you’ve only heard about in stories from older family members or through film.
Does that mean we should go back in time? Like, to a time when women couldn’t vote? Or when racial segregation was instilled in every institution?
No. I’ll tell you now, what you saw on Bewitched, Happy Days and The Brady Bunch is not what living in the ’60s and ’70s was like for everyone.
I’m sick of the romanticization of some founding decades of the 20th century. It’s one thing to talk about the fashion or the history, but to say you wish to have been born at that time just comes from a place of privilege.
From what I understand, the sentiment comes from either of two thought processes: “I like the good parts and never thought through the bad parts” or “I thought about the bad parts and I realized I wouldn’t be affected.”
You might like the music, fashion, or aesthetics of a different time, but you were not born in the wrong decade.
