To think that people have an idealised view of the recent past?

[ExercicenformedeZ]

I'm just jumping off another thread, where people were describing the 1990s as a golden era. I disagreed with that, because while some things were good about that time, a lot wasn't, and a lot of why we think that things are awful now is because we have 24 hour and instant news on our phones.
I'm reminded of the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris, in which an American writer from 2010 (when the film was made) finds a sort of time portal into 1920s Paris, which is his ideal era. While there, he meets a beautiful woman whose ideal era is La Belle Epoque, so only 30 years before the '20s. She ends up leaving the '20s to go back to the 1890s, and while he is trying to talk her out of doing so, he has a revelatory realisation that people always idealise the past and look down on the present. It is a form of escapism and a little bit of it is fine, but too much of it stops you living your life to its fullest.
I have seen the film a couple of times, I rewatched it a couple of weeks ago and I found it really resonant and relevant to today's climate. I see a lot of nostalgia about, and while I understand it, I also think that we are in danger of idealising the past as a way of avoiding our day to day issues and doing what we can to improve them. There are a lot of excellent things about today's world that we would miss if we were dropped back thirty or forty years ago.

YANBU. People need to see the past for what it was and stop idealisng it.
YABU. We really are past our best and life is only getting worse.

The early 1990s were shit. The late 90s after Labour came to power were much better there was a real sense optimism.

I was at uni in late 90s when Labour won the election. It really was a time of optimism, excaberated by the rise of Brit Pop etc.
Last era before wholesale mobile phones and only the start of the Internet therefore teen years were without phones/social media etc.
Lots of issues but to be a teen then was to have a lot more freedom than they do now.

I was listening to an old radio programme the other day recorded in I think 1995. References were being made to how shit things are and how low people are about the state of the world. I did think to myself that they had no idea what was coming but it does seem that you might well be right in your assumption.

Yes....it was a good time for families.....child tax credit anyone.
(Which the Tories took straight off us when they came in).
My dad used to say there was nothing good about the 'good old days ' which I think is what op's is saying.

If somebody was alive during a particular period, it depends upon whether they personally did 'well' in that time.

For everybody else who wasn't, their positive feelings are based upon the depictions of the time as presented by those who did 'well' in it - and in turn, on second, third or 40th hand accounts of those who did 'well' in it. Which means having money/power/influence.

They're just harking after the thought that they would have more money/power/influence themselves in previous times, forgetting that for many, they would have been the dead in childbirth, the person who buried many children, the murdered, the victims of plague or dysentery, the infant death so common that they were the third baby in the family to have the same name or didn't even have a name because they were dead along with their mother.

I graduated in 1990. There was a recession on a BB d it was hard to find jobs.