732. Were The "Good Old Days" Ever Really A Thing?

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Way the World Works. Today I want to talk about something you hear older people say all the time, and I'm counting myself as one of those older people. A lot of times you'll hear parents or aunts or uncles or teachers or grandparents talk about like the good old days or I remember back in the day, all things were so great. I remember in the 80s or I remember in the 60s or whatever it is.

People have this romanticized version of how things used to be and that they were better than today. And you hear that a lot and I will tell you as I've gotten older, I've done that a lot or I'm thinking kids these days don't know how great it was before we had the internet and smartphones and blah, blah, blah, blah, but when was I forget that having the internet and smartphones has made my life so much easier today.

So I'm torn. I like both things. But you hear a lot of people talk about these good old days and that's something actually very deeply psychological, it's something that we do as people. I talked a long time ago on the show about nostalgia and nostalgia is this longing for the past and how nostalgia is something that's a really powerful tool for us psychologically

and it's something that marketers use to market products to us and it works. It's really powerful because we all have this longing for what used to be and politicians use it too. We'll get into that, but let's go slowly. So let's talk about nostalgia in the marketplace just a review of that. So you'll notice there were shows, probably too scary for kids, but shows called Stranger

Things that took place in the 80s and for people that grew up in the 80s, it was so nostalgic. There's that word again, it had this power over us because we were excited to see the things we used to love, the songs, the clothing, the big hair. We were excited to see that on TV because it made us miss our childhood. It made us miss those good old days, it made us miss those things. That's the power of nostalgia.

You'll notice, well, maybe you won't, but your parents will, that a lot of the movies that come out these days are actually remakes of older movies. And a lot of them were movies that were made when your parents were kids and they have great memories of them. And so they bring it back. Ninja Turtles.

Ninja Turtles, the first movies came out when I was a kid and they've remade them like three different times since then because we have great memories of them and so they're trying to rebrand them for a younger generation. If you're like me though, you hate all the new ones because you're like, this is not what I came to know and love. They made the Ninja Turtles look different, their eyes look different.

I don't like it, but there's the power of nostalgia. In fact, I don't know why Ninja Turtles became the thing I was excited about, but I did love Ninja Turtles when I was a kid. They are even starting to re-release old movies in the theater and they're doing great at the box office. People are going to see them because of that nostalgia, renting a movie or streaming it on

TV is not what it used to be because there was something magical about seeing it for the first time, you know, on the big screen. And so the nostalgia market is targeting us and re-releasing these movies. And I bring up Ninja Turtles because they're doing that with the second one, which is coming out in March of 2026, which I'm really excited about. I'm going to go back and see it in the movie or movie theater.

I also really liked the Rocky movies when I was a kid. Those are the boxing movies with Sylvester Stallone. And this year, they re-released for the 40th year anniversary, makes me feel old, but they re-release that in theaters. And I went to buy it because this power that nostalgia has over, not just me, but of everybody psychologically, it's really powerful and it gets us to want to buy things because we

think, oh, I miss those good old days. I want to feel that way again. I want to try to reproduce it. But here's the funny thing about it. Are the good old days really so great or did we just only take the good memories? Have we only taken the good things and kind of forgotten the bad things, which isn't really

a bad thing, right? Like who wants to remember all the bad things? But maybe we're not remembering it correctly. There was an interesting study that was done. I listened to it on a podcast, it was, I don't think it was Freakonomics, but it was something like that.

One of those podcasts that I actually don't really listen to often, but it was really good. And they did a social experiment and they went to different generations and they said, what do you think the good old days were? And they said, oh, you know, 1950s were the good old days. So then they went back to the generation earlier to them, the generation that would have been adults during the 1950s and they said, when were the good old days?

And they said, oh, it was the 30s. People of generations, they kept recalling days that were prior. And so what this made people think is there's no one set of good old days. So there's no real such thing as this golden era, these good old days, because it's different for every single person and a lot of it was based on how old they were at a certain time because they started yearning for this, their childhood or their youth or their adolescence.

And they started wanting that again. Now here's where we tie this into politics. You actually noticed this. I mentioned it was a very powerful tool for marketers. And you see this in political marketing as well. And one thing, and I'm not saying whether, remember, this is good or bad.

I don't think marketing Ninja Turtles, you know, reboots are a bad thing. It's just, it is, it is a state of what works for a psychologically. So I'm just going to pick political candidates. I'm not taking a side. I'm just using these as examples. So when Trump ran for his first election in 2016, make America great again became the

slogan and that was huge, right? What does that mean? Well, it actually goes back to when Reagan ran for president in 1980, there was this make America great slogan. And so eight people actually remember the Reagan era. There's a lot of bad that like any president, there's a lot of bad things that happened.

Drug war got bigger. There were some, there were some bad things that happened, but economically speaking, president Ronald Reagan ushered in a, a version of free market economics that the country really needed and it helped get, get us back into a good place. We all know that no one in the government should be intervening in the market. But from a broad perspective, Reaganomics, as they called it, was, was a good thing for

the country. Cold war ended, you had this new era of hope where a lot of Democrats and Republicans actually liked Reagan. And so people consider this a good old days, right? They consider it a time when things were thriving, things were doing really well. And they look back to those times with fondness.

And so here you have in 2016, and I guess 2024 and 2020 as well, you have president Trump calling, calling or, you know, relying back on this, let's make America great again. Let's go back to those good old days. That's really what that means. Let's go back to these good old days. And people heard that.

And let's be honest, especially, you know, with the, the state of where the world has been, people long for those good days. They don't remember when they hear that and they think about the thriving economy back in the 80s, they're not remembering specifically the drug war, incarcerating people. And a lot of that is because the policies implemented in a certain time period don't actually come to fruition, don't start causing problems for a couple of years down the road.

So even though a lot of the drug war issues were made worse under Reagan, they didn't become something that was leading to mass incarceration and single family household. That didn't happen until years down the road. And so they don't associate it with that time, even though the policies were a product at that time. And so they're looking back to these days.

And as we know, that was a really powerful marketing tool because of the three elections that Trump ran and he won two of them. So clearly that make America great again, the slogan that let's go back to the good old days. That was really, really powerful. So we talked about how nostalgia works, whether it's good or bad again, it kind of just is. It's kind of a neutral.

It doesn't really have good or bad. It's just something that is so human that we all relate to it. In fact, just as I know, I like to collect old toys from the 80s and 90s because that's what I grew up with. And I think they're fun. It's fun to have a piece of these days where I didn't have to work days, you know, I didn't

have a job. I didn't have a responsibility. And so even I fall guilty or I fall prey to it. But so whether or not it's good or bad, like I said, is kind of neutral. It's neither. It just is.

But how does this distort our thinking when it comes to things like policies, when it comes to things like politics? Well, like I mentioned with the Reagan thing, sometimes our minds, we have rose colored glasses as they say. And that's a saying that means we look at it through a very particular and biased lens. We've talked about beware bias many times.

We look at it through a lens where we have filtered out all the bad and we only look at the good and we're thinking like, no, that was such a good time. I had no complaints and we're forgetting all the bad things that happened. And so we're not looking at something fully rational. And we're also looking back. We're not looking forward and that makes me sound like a politician.

That sounds like something a politician would say. But the reason I bring this up is if we're focused so much on returning back to a time where we believe was better or a simpler time where, again, the good old day is the golden era. What we're missing the opportunity to do is to work on the present era, to make the present era great, you know, yes, maybe Reagan wanted to make America great, maybe Trump wanted

to make America great again. That's great. But what are we going to do for making America good today or making our communities better? That's a better example. Making our communities good today. You know, honing in on what worked in the past might not work.

And so I think it's really important for us to remember to live in the present mind state and to present state of mind and to say, okay, yeah, I do remember things being pretty great back then. But oh, wait, I forgot about this. Like I was thinking back to the 2000s the other day and thought, oh, that was a fun time to come of age and become an adult.

And then I was like, wait a second. That's also when 9 11 happened. That's also when the Patriot Act. That's when TSA, that's when all these horrible things were starting to come about in the surveillance state became okay. And maybe I don't miss that so much.

And maybe that wasn't so great. And so it's important to also use the past, use these good old days that nobody can find and think about how that impacts us today. What can we do better? What can we do that isn't just relying on the past? How can we make today?

How can we make our communities better by making something even better than back then? Yeah, maybe it was good we have all these memories, but what does that have to do with today? How can we make today even better? Maybe that sounds a little hokey, but I think it's important because I think a lot of people dwell on the past and they want to return to an era that just doesn't exist anymore. And so they have to, you know, we have to find a way to be really excited about now.

And I bring that up. I think this is so important because there's so much doom and gloom today. I hear so many people all the time just talking about who we live in crazy times and they're so sad and they're sort of pressed because well, the state of the world. And I just think that's so silly because first of all, ask them in 20 years and they're going to look back to this time and they will have forgotten about most of the bad things.

And they'll say, I remember when Chad GPT came out and blah, blah, blah, and they'll think of all these great things, you know, to a lot of you listeners who are young now, these are your good old days. These are the days you're going to be excited about when you're older. People forget about the bad things. And so I think it's really important to remember that for two things, one, not to always dwell

on the past or remember to make the present really, really great, but also to remember that things aren't as bad as people want to make them out to be. The reason people cling to good old days is because they think there's something wrong with today. And don't get me wrong to make, you know, politicians accountable, to hold them accountable, to make today great, to make our communities better.

We do need to look at how the world can be better, but I also don't want us to get lost in despair and thinking that the world is so bad and so scary because the world has always been scary and it's always felt a little bad and there's always going to be things that keep us, you know, in a state of unease and that's because human beings, we're unpredictable. You know, we do things. We hurt each other.

There's so many crazy things that happen globally. It's the way the world works, but just remember that you are in someone's good old days right now. Remember that they aren't so bad that there are good things and it's not always looking towards the past. It's not always looking towards the future.

Let's look at right now and think about how good things are and maybe how we can clean up our own lives first, you know. So I will leave it there. As always, don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast. And until next time, guys, I will talk to you later.