Dear Europeans. When old folks in your country are whining about “good old days” what do they particularly recall and miss?

34 comments

1. In my country? Usually a dictature where catholicism and fascism ruled the country. But people were very brainwashed. My grandmas survived the civil war, lived a terrible post war period and lived in a country where you could be arrested for the most stupid things. But they still adore the ex dictator

2. Generally these good old days is the times before 2002, before current government.

   They generally talk about how secular we were and how TV shows included sex joke related stuff that we can’t even imagine happening today or the old festivals, concerts…etc that we don’t have anymore. There is an Instagram account called “[Old Laik (secular) days](https://www.instagram.com/oldlaikdays/)” which constantly post stuff that I mention.

   Other than that it is usual stuff. Complain to youth, complain to economy, complain to loss of old traditions…etc

3. In Poland we ofter hear about “good times” in the communist era. That they hadn’t have much “but it was enough”. “Every man knew how to fix stuff and every women knew how to cook and sew”. “And there was no these LGBT people (or more likely Fags, Lesbos and so on…)”

   The admiration of “everybody having a job” (redundant street cleaners!) and everybody was entitled to a flat (you just had to wait 30 years to get one, sometimes in other city…).

   “There was almost no inflation” (state regulated prices, falling behind 30 years compared to a global market, which resulted in the hyperinflation in the 90s). It was also almost impossible to exchange foreign currencies.

   And don’t get me started on some adoration of compulsory conscription – “in (2 years of XD) military everybody was made a man. Not like today’s “girly” boys”.

4. I think the most older folks do acknowledge we have it better today compared to ‘the old days. However, some might complain about how everything is privatized like health insurance and public transport. While these privatizations where depicted as a way to make everything cheaper and getting a better service, people don’t perceive it like that.

5. It depends on the age of the person, if he or she is between 50 and 60, he or she is likely to talk about the 1980s, years of great economic development and widespread prosperity; if he or she is in his or her 80s, he or she may be talking about the 1960s, the years of the Italian economic miracle; if he or she is older or simply has quite edgy views, he or she may be talking about a more distant and ‘blacker’ Ventennium.

6. Sometimes old people will romanticize the Soviet Union, which is crazy to me I guess when you reach that age you cling on to what’s familiar to you. Unfortunately we haven’t had a “good old days” since long before anyone currently alive was born. Maybe the late 00s and early 10s (before annexation of Crimea). Hopefully our fighting right now will give our future children a “good old days” to look back on

7. Many people consider golden age as 1920-1935. Practically nobody can remember these times, so it’s usual “when I was young”.

8. I usually just see old people on Facebook saying cities like Oslo has lost its soul with all the new buildings popping up

9. Less crime, feeling safer, living well on a normal wage, living slower without everything being so hectic all the time, a lot of them mainly miss being younger with more energy to do things, values shifting from what they were taught and lived with for decades make them feel a bit lost.

10. Military service, because apparently it was soooo good at educating young people that they never, ever did dumb and/or illegal things and would all become perfect citizens.

    These same people will usually be very happy to tell you about the dumb and/or illegal things they did *while doing their military service*, but apparently that’s not the same.

11. The old days, for old people today, would be socialist Yugoslavia. I don’t know many old people that miss those days, but those that seem to be nostalgic, say things like how there was more solidarity, equality, free time, vacations, people built their own houses for cheap, etc.

    This is what my grandma says sometimes, but then continues how everything was corrupt, how party members constantly tried to take advantage of the fact that they were party members and felt they are above the rest. How most of the money produced here was funneled to Belgrade and that actually not everyone was equal but there were three classes, the elite party higher ups, the regular folks, and the dissidents who were either murdered in the early days or put into work prisons or exile later.

    Then she continues with telling her life story, how you have to work and fight for everything and what she had for lunch. She liked how her boss and his wife were bestfriends with her and grandpa.. says that this could never happen today. None of them were in the party.

12. The “good old days” in Sweden usually refers the long reign of the Social Democrats under the prime ministers Per Albin Hansson (1938 – 1946), Tage Erlander (1946 – 1969) and Olof Palme (1969 – 1976, 1982 – 1986), ending with the assassination of Palme in 1986.

    This era of Swedish history is known as Folkhemmet – “The People’s Home”. It was a time when the Social Democrats were a lot more Left-wing than they are now, and when the Swedish way of democratic socialism was seen as the ideal compromise between American hyper capitalism and Soviet communism.

    Sweden during the Folkhem era had a generally high living standard, with less crime and violence, greater job security, less poverty, and much less economic and social divides compared to today. It was also a time when Sweden had a large international influence for its size due to its officially neutral and alliance free position in global politics.

    There was also just an optimistic feeling about the future in general, and a sense that things were steadily getting better. A simpler and less cynical time in many ways. So I think it’s quite understandable that some older people who experienced that time are longing to go back to that.

13. some of them the time of the right wing dictatorship.
    But mostly are remembering with rose tinted glasses a time when they had a lot less access to information so you didn’t know about bad stuff that happened.
    50 years ago if someone got killed in the next town over you wouldn’t hear about it, now 3 or 4 24/7 tv channels will tell you all about it for the next week….so people think things are worse.

14. Ireland pre Celtic Tiger was poor as shit and the Church had an iron grip on society. A lot of my family left, one relative had her newborn son stolen off her for the crime of being pregnant out of wedlock.

    Obviously Celtic Tiger era we had a bit too much money and too little sense, but anyone who talks about the “good old days” is insane.

15. Well… people in my country don’t really say that. We had a civil war around 90 years ago, and that war led to a dictatorship, and the dictatorship led to a period of extreme political instability and terrorism! And all of this ended around a decade ago, with the main terrorist group dissolving in 2018.

    I’ve heard people say they miss the “economic boom” of the 80s, that ended because of terrorism. My town had a very successful paper-making company, and the county was an industrial powerhouse. There’s nothing left now. But that’s it. Not many people want to go back to a time when people were killed every day and your life could end one day because a dictator said so, or because you were in a war zone, or because someone decided they really hated you, or because someone planted a bomb close to you.

16. Things were easier. You have scarce food but could do whatever job and build your own house. You are now constrain from every aspect of life, with a divide between haves and have-nots bigger than ever before. Same as everywhere else around. The problem is they equate “good times” with Franco. Which is not the case. It was the booming Europe after the war. The socio-economical situation was roughly the same for everyone no matter the regime they were in. I hear a lot about “communist architecture”; there is no such thing. It’s the modern movement, and it was build the same way everywhere.

17. You could make a case that Luxembourg actually had “good old days” back at the hay day of the steel industry when the wealth of the country rose immensely and European integration started. It would completely ignore the reality of work back then though. There’s younger people, from all ages between 40 and 18, including me, dreaming about how nice it must have been to have any realistic way to homeownership and a future where wages actually rose despite inflation, that’s not talked about as a return to the good old days though. Often that sentence will actually boil down to downplayed racism as folks old enough to say it generally don’t suffer under the current economic hardships and actually just want to see less foreign looking people on the streets, they haven’t walked in years as they only drive everywhere they go.

18. Tbf regardless of location I think all old people just miss the time when they were young, pain free, with future hopes and could manage the world better because it wasn’t so confusing for them. Not any objective “this was better” but just “I felt better”

19. In Belgium it’s mostly the way of living. You can’t do shit these days. Packs of sigarets cost to much money. Everyone could aford to drive and cars didn’t cost as much you could also drive to any city with them, they keep restricting the speed limits even more these days. They also hate modern day music and how everyone is on thier phone all the time.

20. They miss being young.

    It is perfectly normal. More or less everywhere there is a spiral in which, no matter when you were born, things stop making any sense when you reach aprox 40, and then it goes down quickly.

21. Fahrenheit, pints and pounds, “the P*kis knowing their place”, “before Brussels”, “Empire”. They’re forgetting the ration cards lasting right into the 50s and the UK being so poor people had to go to Germany to work in construction. But they “still showed Luftwaffe who’s boss!”

    They resurfaced this attitude during the peak of the Brexit polemic, “we were alright before and we’ll be now”. Ah no, you weren’t alright, it was the remnants of the Commonwealth still propping you up. And now, you don’t even have that, you bunch of myopic racists.

22. pfff in Spain there are some old folks who are like “Spain was better during the dictatorship” (this is relatively common in Madrid depending on who you talk to) mainly because in the capital you had privileges…

    Personally I think its a fcking stupid take, I mean Franco did build some much needed infrastructure which did help Madrid later on, but thats about it. There is nothing good about spain during the civil war or dictatorship…

23. Whenever they were young, I guess.

    There were more jobs, everything was much simpler, too much stupid rules nowadays, whenever there were worries, Kekkonen hit his fist on the table and everything was calm again etc. And Finland started to get more immigration in the middle of the 90s, which may annoy some people.

24. In Italy they always complain about how good it was back then when we had the Lira as our currency: inflation was rampant, people retired at 40 years of age (the record is 29 years old, though), everyone evaded their taxes, and bribes were common.Bonus: everytime someone older than 30 hears of any sum of money, they automatically say “ohh, that’s like X billions of the old liras”.

    Also, the mandatory military service. Which yeah, maybe it would be good to form your character, but all the old guys always tell us youngsters of how they avoided doing their duty…

    EDIT: I missed the big one. How “back then we could vote for the prime minister”, before the Democratic Party came to power and we only had “unelected” governments.(Italy is a representative republic, we vote the parties that make up the Parliament, and the Parliament then elects a prime minister – we never voted a single prime minister since the abolition of the monarchy)

    EDIT 2: actually we never voted a single prime minister during the monarchy as well. The vote was still just for the Parliament.

25. I don’t think there’s a particular period all old people get nostalgic for – they just get nostalgic for whatever decade they spent their formative years in. The idea that everyone’s nostalgic for the empire is massively exaggerated – sometimes you’d get people talking about how happy they were and how much community spirit there was during WW2 and rationing despite all the hardship they endured, but I think that’s starting to die out as people who actually lived through rationing also start to die off.

    Generally, old person talking points are the same as anywhere else. Kids today are soft, addicted to their phones, don’t play outside anymore and have no respect for their elders. Exams nowadays are too easy and you can go to university nowadays just by being able to spell your name. Kids used to be thick or badly behaved, but now they have dyslexia or ADHD. You don’t know your neighbours anymore. You can’t say anything anymore or make a joke, because political correctness has gone mad. Kids can’t blow bubbles anymore, because health and safety’s gone mad. Youths who commit crimes just get let off with a slap on the wrist. Music today is all terrible. Films and TV are full of violence, smut and foul language. People don’t know how to speak English anymore. Things used to be so much cheaper. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to used pounds, shillings, pence, ha’pennys, half-crowns and the like again instead of decimalised currency. Why can’t I buy my groceries in ounces and gallons anymore instead of some metric unit imposed by Brussels. The country’s going to the dogs. Etc etc

26. Good old days in communist Romania where everyone had a job and money but the stores were empty and you had to know a guy that knows a guy that works at the butcher and they would save you a piece of meat once every few weeks. Or you would get fruits and eat them a week later coz they were so green you had to wait.

    The big one they always say is “Well Ceausescu paid of Romania’s foreign debt”. Yeah, coz he squeezed every last coin from the people, the last few years before the revolution were horrible for so many that had kids die of hunger. But hey no foreign debt and a huge palace for Ceausescu in the middle of Bucharest. Biggest building in the world while the population starved.

    So yeah, nothing good about the good old days in my opinion.

27. I was born in former GDR.

    My dad and his generation (he ws born in 1959) miss the simplicity. He never finished school but still got good paying jobs. He never needed to think to get to where he is now – the party and country’s leaders told him what he could do and he had connections (also because he was working for the STASI) and was great using his hands and working a lot. Almost never called in sick, trusted people. His brother also was working for the Stasi but he was more ruthless. So in the 90s my dad ended up getting screwed by capitalism while his brother ended up selling insurance. Us living in poverty (I’ve come home many times from school and there was no food in the fridge and the electricity was shut off), his brother living the high life. My dad felt betrayed. We had a good life in the 80s. He never wanted a change. My mom wanted a change, she could see that the system was failing but never said anything. They’ve lost many friends in the early 90s (also because they’ve found out that someone spied on them, they thought it was my mom since her parents were devoted socialists and one of the first ones after the war to join the party). My dad often said that he would never have stood a chance if he wasn’t born in the east. After some hard years, in the end of the 90s life turned around a bit and the past 15 years he’s had a good life.

28. Disclaimer, I was raised in the radically liberal circles of south Dublin, but I have never heard anyone talk about the good old days in Ireland; even people in their 90s talk to me about how shit things were in the past.

29. In Ireland I don’t think there is a large amount of pining for the good old days because pre 1990’s we were piss poor and essentially run by the church. The only people that do hold those views tend to just be racists, old school Catholics or just plain idiots with rose tinted glasses of the past.

    There’s a part of me that thinks the nostalgia that does exist is for the innocence they had growing up before learning of all the fucked up things the state and church were up to. I doubt there would be many that would want to see the country go back to that time though.

30. You can discuss here about national/cultural manifestations of this thought all day, but even the fact that this is a global phenomenon should make you attentive towards the idea that there has to be a more fundamental psychological factor. People generally associate their peak time to be their youth, and can’t mentally move on from that. When then asked, they generally express that through events or conditions which happened/existed when they were young, a time where everyone had their most friends, more energy, more opportunities and generally more going on in their lives.

    I personally think this mindset sucks but most people get mentally stuck/settled around their 30s. It doesn’t have to be like that though if you choose not to be. I refuse to, at least.

    TLDR: It’s a collective longing for more youthful days.

31. It’s not the old people who do this, but the middle aged people. 80’s were a true golden age for Finland economically.

    Older people? My great grandparents grew turnips for a living and died in a war. And their children lived as orphans. Nothing nostalgic about that.

32. Either the dictatorship because news was heavily censored and being racist/homophobic/religious zealot was pretty cool at the time, or the years immediately after the revolution because you could go to work in pretty much any other European country as a construction worker for a few years and come back as the richest guy in your village.

33. The general sense of security of socialism. You finished school, there was a job waiting for you, and you were certain that you will be able to provide for a family. There were also obvious downsides to the whole thing but I can see how people miss that.

34. People usually talk about the stagnation era when they mean the good old days:

    – guaranteed employment
    – guaranteed housing
    – lower prices
    – cheap travel around the USSR and you could speak Russian anywhere without getting a stink eye

    All of these are of the “yes, but” variety. You can easily get them to talk about how shit the cheap food was, and how they couldn’t find anything to buy on that salary from the guaranteed employment.