How much is it an age thing though. I do notice people of my age (mid-Gen-X) starting to take on some quite “it was better in the old days” mindsets. They didn’t have the post war employment boom to remember, but culturally some are becoming very « c’était mieux avant »
It absolutely is an age thing, but I think the pace of change plays a major role in it. Since about 1800 the quantity of change an average person has had to absorb in their life has kept accelerating (aided by improved life expectancy) but we're still running the same mental hardware!
I was thinking about that the other day and I don’t think there are many 70-year spans in England that wouldn’t give you a sense of radical change at one level (civil wars etc) but yes urbanism was a big moment of acceleration.
I think this is part of why most of the best-regarded monarchs are those with the longest reigns. Partly they become familiar to so many more people, but they become an easily-remembered anchor in the context of lots of other things changing.
Yeah I’ve talked to Belgian friends who saw King Boudewijn’s death in 1990 after 40 years as a real milestone.
While it’s possible for things to get worse. People getting nostalgic as they age is the most unthinking thing. We should be aware that we cannot compare because we are at a different age in different eras.
I also agree that the modern world is very confusing if you have low capacity to deal with stuff (for whatever reason), it’s something I think about in our work on democracy a lot.
Democracy has always had to simplify and condense people's choices (why we have representatives and political parties at all!) but I think the 5-6 broad categories of political thought we can mentally process now fail to capture all the complexity that a government has to negotiate.
And for whatever reason is important. Some things are difficult because people have failed to understand something, others are difficult because they haven't had the time to.