To be annoyed by the 'in my day' comments

[Citycat1]

I'm 40, and it seems I am encountering more and more comments from people above 60 saying life was so different 'in their day'

Examples:
L.A issue a heat warning on FB. Relative starts a rather negative reply about how in their day, in the summer of '76 they used common sense. Yes, I get it, and I LOVE the heat, but there are many vulnerable people that may suffer or end up in a&e and the NHS is put under strain. I'm thinking frail elderly as one example group. So I cab see why warnings are in place.

My DD currently has chicken pox. I ask a lady (staff in boots) for some zinc oxide cream. She says there's no calamine lotion. I explain politely that actually that's not recommended anymore as it dries the skin and makes itching worse. I get 'in my day it was fine' and a roll of the eyes.

My mum regularly tells me how things in the 70's were so much better. I'm sure some things were....but some were not. And to berate my whole generation because you don't understand the next one is belittling.

I'm sure it happens in each generation but it just irks me. Or AIBU and things really were better 'in their day ?

It's all about context isn't it, I remember my dear grandmother recounting how in "her day" they didn't have Lycra and how she would knit herself a swimming costume in the summer, how the gusset would droop in the water and her nipples would try to escape. A funny memory shared, not at all "kids these days don't know they're born" type comment at all.

I'm sure for the current mature generation, they had the same from their elders, probably beginning with "..... well during the war...." it's a universal human trait I think.

Many things were better, many things were worse - plus ça change and all that.

I completely disagree that this is an age or a generational thing though, and you're skating very close casual ageism here. People from all generations exhibit all manner of views that are questionable - if you're finding that you're only ever hearing this from the 60-plus people you know then that's down to the people you know, not a whole generation.

Yup.
People have been making these sorts of comments since the days or the Pharaohs or the Roman Empire. The same proportion of the 'youth of today' will doubtless grow into the 'daft gammons' of a few decades hence.

Ahhh yes, the paradox of "things were so much better in my day" and "youngsters have no idea how good they've got it these days"

I am 60. The vast majority of music in the 70s was a pile of wank.
All these wankers of my age and older seem to be forgetting the sunburn and the standpipes from 1976 - also this is much hotter than 1976.
"in my day" is a load of load crap.

There were less rules and regs or cctv. Social media was a landline phone or letters.
It was just different times
If we did go back these days people would moan. It's only because we didn't know any different it's seen as better. It really wasn't in so many cases!

People see things through rose tinted glasses. No doubt during the next heatwave people will say we just ‘carried on with it in 2022’ forgetting all the concern, prep and amendments that took place the days building up to it.

And to berate my whole generation because you don't understand the next one is belittling.
This seems a bit like the pot calling the kettle black.

It can be annoying but I'm almost 40 and I say it all the time 🤣

Mostly when it's a nice day out and a freshly tarmaced path or car park and I say "where are all the kids, in my day we would have been straight out there with our skateboards and rollerblades"

Or when they kids say there's nothing to watch on tv I have been known to say "when I was a kid we had 4 channels and kids shows were on for an hour or two a day and you watched what was on"

The related bollox that winds me up is The Merlin engined Spitfire was the Best in the World.
Yes it was after the engine was redesigned by Ford in America to suit manufacture to closer tolerances.

Isn't feeling nostalgic a normal human emotion?

In many ways our society will inevitably evolve & improve

But sometimes we do come back to the old ways & realise we had it good

It depends on the way it's said - either to seem superior or just an observation

Eg:

"BIMD" men wore an earring in their left/right ear to denote their sexual preference

Is just a comment about how things were different back them

Would this be the people from the days of the public information broadcasts telling people not to go back to lit fireworks, not to pick up hot sparklers, not to let their children play with plastic bags or in old fridges!

People can be stupid in any generation. Certainly people still do the first two as any local rag report of Bonfire Night will tell you.

The same people that insisted that driving drunk was perfectly safe and seatbelts would cause more deaths than they'd prevent!

They were not the same ones. (I was there.) Those ideas came from people who resented any curtailment of their freedom. Just as people do today over different things. We now moderate free speech to avoid hate crime, there are plenty who object to that and call it PC gone mad and they're not by any means all from the older generation.

And there are plenty of younger people ready to tell the older ones why they're wrong about just about everything.

There are those from all generations who criticise others. Others who try to understand and take the best from all of them. It will always be so.

PS I Do Not do the 'in my day'.

I'd argue it's a whole load worse now for teenagers.
I'm so glad mine have navigated through the teenage years just about unscathed.
I blame social media.

One thing that has definitely changed is the sheer number of tin foil hat nutters around these days. Or maybe the number of weirdos sitting in basements wearing underpants and eating fried egg sandwiches is the same as it ever was but thanks to the Internet we now know of them.

And to berate my whole generation because you don't understand the next one is belittling.

And isn't that pretty much what you just did by saying this is something over 60's do? I find that offensive. I am quite capable of understanding people of all generations - or not understanding people of all generations. Being over 60 does not make me an idiot. On the other hand, being under 60 doesn't make you intelligent either. Case in question.

@Harridance
Not this one. Seriously some eras are just better for some things. No way can anyone tell me that the last two decades have been better than the 50’s and 60’s for music.

I had a friend rolling her eyes at the hot weather warnings because "we had summers like that all the time when i was a kid" (she's early 30s and has always lived in the uk) so not just older people!
Sometimes I think people want to be helpful or recommend something that worked for them that perhaps is not mainstream advice anymore....without always realising why the advice has been updated.

I hate people banging on about millennials and saying that a mobile or Internet access is a luxury and that in <insert year before 2000> we survived perfectly well without phones and Internet access. Well of course you did because it didn't exist in the 1980s! But so many services insist on using apps/doing things online or make it incredibly difficult or longwinded if you can't do it online.
Or complaining about schools closing for "a bit of snow" and in their day you had 1 teacher in charge of 648 children and everyone was fine.🙄

I had an “in my day” comment from one of DH’s relatives from DD was tiny and had just horrendous reflux.

I said well Aunty [name] thank goodness it’s my day and parents are listened to when they know there’s something wrong with their child. It just have been awful for you back then. Took her aback a bit and then she agreed.

I’m not usually so quick witted.

What makes me laugh is the 60yr+ eye rolling about any heatwave thesedays and talk about '76 where 'people got on with it'.

.......except they didn't get on with it did they? I've heard about the 1976 heatwave every single summer - from as old as I can remember. So for nearly 50yrs that generation has been dining out on that 'hot' summer story, which is the exact opposite of 'getting on with it'!

'social media' has been great for my boys. It meant that in particular during lockdown they could chat to their mates and play games together.

They would have been very lonely without it.

A lot of it is silly (comparing today's temp to 1976 for example), but sometimes it's useful to remind myself when I'm stressing about some aspect of baby care and getting it right, that some crazy, unsafe stuff was done by previous generations and babies still survived, so I can cut myself some slack.

DH claims the music was better in the 90's.

After forcing him to sit through several classic episodes of Top of the Pops he agrees he was wrong. The indie bands he remains fond of were a tiny part of the music scene.

OP, bookmark this post and come back when you are 60+.
Maybe you will feel differently.
I have different world views at 43 than I did at 23. I imagine I'll be thinking (if not saying "in my day").
🤷

I didn’t say it’s what all over 60’s do. Not at all, and I don’t think that at all. But the comments do come from the over 60’s that I receive. Not my age. I work in a hospital, I love to sit and chat to all generations. Many don’t have the blinkers on about ‘in my day’ but those that do just come across as belittling and I think it’s annoying and sad too.

I'm an over 60 and I can assure you that no one ever thought that sexual abuse was OK.
During covid a bit more stiff upper lip and just get on with it rather than the hysteria I saw on MN might actually have helped people more.
Of course there were medical advances. The life my mum had as a young mother was totally different to what her mother had had. The services available to me as a child were infinitely better than those she'd had before the nhs was formed. Would I rather have medical treatment available now to that of the 60s. 100% yes. But would I rather have had what was available in the 60s to wait was in the 30s? Too right I would. The only reason we have so many medical advances now is because of the medical advances in the past to build on. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that.
Strikes? True, we did have rail strikes - I mean, that could never happen today.
War? That's right zippo wars today. (Psst, don't mention Ukraine)

I grew up in the 60s and 70s. It wasn't some sort of dark ages. Cue roll of eyes. 🙄

Calamine was okay when it first went on but I don't recall it doing much for my itching when I was a kid and had chicken pox. Antihistamine is probably more use, along with lots of cool showers. Zinc oxide is for nappy rash so probably would be quite good too.

Some things were better in the past - we had less of a consumer, wasteful culture, chocolate was better, you didn't need 2 salaries just to pay a mortgage but many things were worse. There was still poverty and people did things we now know not to do - like sunbathing while sitting on tinfoil in the park, or dunking the baby's dummy in advocaat to make it sleep. Although that last one might have just been my nan!