Nostalgia, is a national disease?

Ooh Woolworths pic and mix.!!

A lot of people at the BBC have been as well

everyone was on drugs [can I say that]

The nineties only really lasted until late 1994. Creatively it was a good era, but as deritive as everything that came before it. In many ways it was a purge, post recession. New found optimism. 

I mean I am reading about the BBC tonight, that fills me with dread. This is an organisation that hugely selfpublisises but is flawed at its core because it does listen to the license payers and shows little awareness of the time it lives in now. Because these are National instititions which are fundementaly corrupt and rife with nepotism. Presenters more worried about their pay than anything else. The public has paid way too much for entertainment for so long now.

I miss the shops too, and I miss good customer service. Also, I miss being able to buy good quality clothes at affordable prices.

TheCatWoman said:

I'm glad to live in a time when so many of the things that were common in my youth are no longer acceptable

Me too!

Stuart333 said:

I had my appendix out in the 70s

You and me too. I had mine removed in the late 70s when I was in my teens.

You had a more difficult experience than me. 

I agree that the standard of care, professionalism and cleanliness were better back then, even though the modern anaesthetic and laparoscopic surgical techniques mean a shorter recovery these days. 

I have attended hospital on several occasions this year. On two occasions, the nurses in the clinical area were chewing gum. On one occasion following minor surgery with a local anaesthetic, I was lying on the theatre operating table and the nurse leaned over me while chewing with an open mouth. I was so disgusted and felt sick. 

I have a lot of nostalgia for brick and mortar shops.  I have all ten seasons of the  1970s/80s BBC comedy,  Are you being served, on DVD.  Even then, they were nostalgic about the past.

I had a lot of favorite shops.

My mum liked the Co-op department store in central Leeds, I loved the Co-op store in Sheffield with its large circular wooden staircase in the centre and the bounce as i walked on it.

Debenhams was a favourite with many older people who visited it's cafe to relax,  I enjoyed their pork meal which was cut from a large roasted joint on demand and loaded with freshly cooked potatoes and vegetables. 

Safeway had some of the most pleasant stores that I've ever come across.

I remember Presto for its plastic carrier bags and the red pattern which wasn't colourfast and the red dye transferred to clothing as it rubbed against people.

And the list of memories goes on.

Good thread and discussion.  Thanks

To highlight a few bits if I may please?

"Cynicism masquerading as wisdom" - McFrost 

"life events can distort how people view the past" -ArchaeC 

"looking at the past through a rose coloured lens" , "the more we admire the "then" (that) never fully existed the more we devalue the "now".  -  Lonehare12 

"it may depend on how your life was at a particular time" - TheCatWoman 

Pop out to me as being particularly relevant.

It is in my experience tricky to deal with what may amount to an accumulation of "negativity bias" that accrues during a lifetime of experience.

Perhaps as autistic people in a neurotypical society we might be more likely to have negative experiences and possibly even more susceptible to them?

"we should learn its lessons, and build a better future"  - TheCatWoman is a good approach I think.

Attempts to recreate the past might be a bit of a shame as we could be missing out on the present and indeed neglecting the future.  

It is tempting to spend valuable time "In Search of Lost Time".  I have heard it said that time travel is possible - only in one direction.

I am reminded of a joke about person on a desert island who, finding a genie in a lamp on his desert island, used his first wish fpr an ever-filling bottle of beer.  When asked what was required with the second their response was "I think I'll have another one of those bottles please."  :-)

I hope that this hasn't left you feeling nostalgic for before you read this!

All the best :-)

I think that's very true McFrost, in my head I'm in my mid thirties, when I was at my fittest, slimest and strongest and had the most energy, but I tend to forget the intense loneliness I felt and how out of step with everyone else I felt. I was poorer then too, I remember having to decide if I was going to buy new nickers to replace the falling apart ones I had or buying washing powder to wash them again and hope they really didn't fall apart anymore. 

I think many people lack perspective about the past, especially thier own and can get quite defensive if someone elses experience didn't match thiers.

I agree ArchaeC and McFrost. I see this mentally shutting up shop to anything new particularly in men of my age group, things like there was no good music made after 1980 or mad stuff like that, they dress the same way they did in 1980 too. There was some really good bands and music, Bowie, Elton John etc, but there was an awful lot of garbage and one hit wonders too..

I'm glad to live in a time when so many of the things that were common in my youth are no longer acceptable and may have become criminal, all the casual racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia etc. I'm glad that comedy is no longer a constant stream of mother in law jokes.

I miss some of the shops Robert has mentioned, BHS and Woolies in particular, they still exist online, but what I miss is actual shops in an actual town centre, where you could walk in and buy something and take it home with you rather than be told they don't have your size/colour, whatever and to buy it online.

Having thought about this more, I think there are too types of nostalgic "good old days" thinking. One is the "everything was better in my day, the world is going to ***" type thinking and the other is the much more personal feelings about your own time of life. Maybe you feel you peaked in your early 30's, you were physically fit, you had some money, maybe you hadn't had kids yet, or maybe you had a really idyllic, carefree childhood. The trouble is that I think people mistake the latter for the former. They take their personal feelings of ageing, stress, difficult life etc and extrapolate it out to feeling like everything else around you has got worse.

Hehe - you got there before me on that one Robert124 

I feel a great deal of nostalgia for shops I used to regularly shop in.

A list of shops I enjoyed shopping in and have now disappeared. 

• Woolworths
• BHS
• Littlewoods
• Co op department stores
• Bodycare
• Original factory shop
• Fultons
• Safeway
• Sommerfield 
• Presto
• Kwiksave 
• Schofield 
• C&A
• Debenhams 

Couldn't agree more. I'm not sure if it's a national disease though. I would imagine this sort of lazy thinking exists everywhere in the world. It's a kind of shutting up shop at a certain age and refusing to engage with anything new. That doesn't mean you can't preserve what is good and call out what is bad of course, as you say.

The trouble is, as you have demonstrated there, people look back and see what was good, ignoring the bad, and look at now and see what's bad and ignore what's good.

To the rose tinted glasses wearer, the days when things were best were during their childhood, twenties and early thirties. The fact that this is pretty much always the same for people of every generation is a pretty obvious sign that this is just a human trait that has little bearing on the reality of the situation.

I am in my mid forties now and have observed "good old days" thinking for a long time, always guarding against falling into the trap myself. I now see people my age succumbing to it and I just see it as lazy thinking to be honest. Cynicism masquerading as wisdom.

I had my appendix out in the 70s. Anaesthetic then was different to now.  I was so ill by the time I got to hospital I would not have survived the operation, so they put a few drips up and may have given me some drugs, I don't remember. A priest or chaplain came to see me. I was given a 50 50 chance. They operated quickly and expected me to need a second one.

The standard of care, the fact they cared, cleanliness and professionalism were greater then. My months of physio in the 80s was good too.

Private healthcare now is the best solution, if you have money or insurance. Even for blood tests.

I'm not sure GPs are any better now than 50 years ago. They always make you feel like they are doing you a favour and would rather you just went away, even when I was dying, was severely hurt and had trauma and burnout. I will try to avoid ever using them again.

I don’t think life was better years ago than it is now, at least it wouldn’t have been if I had been born in the same body and of the same family in an earlier period. I suspect that some victims of famine and war around the world would have a different view to mine. 

Our NHS isn’t functioning well at present, but imagine being admitted to hospital in the 1950s because you needed your appendix removed. The anaesthetics used back then were not as safe as those used today. You would have had a bigger incision and you would likely have remained in hospital for a week or more, rather than just a day or two. Even if you weren’t a smoker, it is likely you would have been inhaling smoke from other patients. Imagine the same scenario in the 1930s, except your surgery site gets infected. You would have been more likely to die because antibiotics weren’t widely available. If you go further back in time, you might have had surgery without anaesthetic or you could have been left to die of a ruptured appendix. Vaccinations weren’t widely available and people suffered from ghastly diseases before succumbing to death. 

Welcome and unwelcome life events can distort how people view the past. At least until more recent times, historical works from original source material tended to tell one sided accounts which weren’t necessarily wrong, but they didn’t reflect the experiences and views of a majority who were affected by an event. 

The British TV news and social media have done a good job of distorting people’s perception of the present and the past. At times the TV news channels fail to report really important issues that affect people’s lives. The channels mostly have the same news stories, which makes me wonder why journalists are constrained and for what purpose. Yes, each show has its own interest and target audience, but what is it that keeps the BBC and ITV from reporting diverse events? Negative events such as murders and rapes take up much news time. I was struck how one one escaped prisoner was described as being of Algerian nationality, so this feeds into negative immigrant narratives, yet the news failed to mention that during the Cambridgeshire train stabbing, the hero train worker who saved multiple lives was Algerian. I don’t think it is always necessary to give the nationality and age of Britain’s heroes, I am just pointing out how narratives can manipulate perceptions. Thankfully for future generations, historians will not rely only on news stories to inform people of UK 2025, but for now the public are blasted with these manipulated realities. Furthermore, we are all capable of creating our own manipulated realities even when faced with full facts, that is the nature of the human condition. 

Things are very rarely all good or all bad; the reality is often somewhere in between. It isn’t possible to offer an authentic account of the past that reflects how things were for everyone because the stories of the past are of individuals. We the watchers, listeners and readers of these stories bring our own experiences to how we perceive them. 

Did you watch the first episode of David Olusoga’s new series “Empire” on BBC2 last night? I liked his fresh approach to this difficult period in history.  

Today I visited the area where I lived 50 years ago as a child and surprisingly it has hardly changed.  I walked through the streets,  past my old house, and the atmosphere is still the same.  The people must have changed and the houses have been upgraded slightly. But no substantial new builds, the houses haven't aged!  And my feelings were still the same.  The local doctor's surgery had different names,  but it's still a doctor's surgery with three doctors.  The gardens and trees looked the same, the whole place was still peaceful.

It was as if time had stood still.

A lot of it may depend on how your life was at a particular time, but many people are nostaligic for times before they were born or at least when they were children and probably sheltered from bad things by thier parents.

I've wondered many times about why we either don't invest or do it once and expect it to last forever, you hear people going on about how we had the greatest railway system in the world, but they seem to forget how long ago that was and that many other countries if they did industrialise early have kept on investing or they've industrialised fairly recently and have the latest technology.

But this short is centuries old, it was being complained about in Tudor times when Henry VIII built the navy and after when sucessive governments allowed to it to decay.

I wonder how much of our unwillingness to invest in the future is because of the huge profit margins and shareholder payments that seem to plague us unchecked? For example one of the big betting companies has said that despite it's billion plus turnover it can only manage a profit of 5K and if the government puts a gambling tax on them similar to that on alcohol and tobacco they would imediately close all thier high street shops which are running at a loss anyway. Do they think our heads do up at the back? Do they think we believe that they're running these shops as some kind of charity to keep people employed? I think this is an example of governments being in hock to big business, which then leads to there not being enough money to invest in things, like the health service, just think of what the tax raising profits could do if they were channeled into mental health services?

I also think nostalgia is one of the appeals of the populist right, they tell everyone if we reset ourselves to a supposed golden age when children behaved themselves, there were bobbies on the beat and everyone knew their place and had a job everything will be fine. What they don't tell us is the past they yearn for is one where there were vast inequalities and those with money could do what they liked to whom they liked with little or no comeback. 

I think the nostalgia industry is a sop to keep us compliant and not look at whats really going on around us, the housing crisis, the lack of health care in many areas, the poverty that so many people live in, the total mess that these short sighted politicians have brought us. I think people are willing to do things for the common good if they see the result for the common good, not the back pockets of the already wealthy and superwealthy.

I agree the 90's had opportunities and I trebled my salary in 5 years. From '95 onwards it got better. I travelled in business class then.

I also had my first burnout, got traumatized, broke up etc. so it was not all good.

People were more social and interacted more, which is what I think people miss. 

Every period has good bits. I think it is also true that we have a lot of change for the sake of change. I see some things are worse, but also many things are better.

I don't think it is wrong to say some things are worse.