The "Good Ol' Days" Are Less Good, More Ol'

Whatever your social media site of choice, you have no doubt encountered some infographic that intended to inform you how much better shit was back in the day. It probably rattled off a list of arbitrary things that were popular during that time and ended smugly with some assertion of how, because of this random shit, therefore, all shit was much mo' betta. It may have looked something like this:

But were things really better than just because that's when you happened to be a kid? There doesn't seem to be any good reason to think so. What is funny about most of the people who post things like this, is that they weren't even born until the mid-to-late 90's. I was born in 1987, do I call myself "an 80's kid" - fuck no, for two reasons: First, it's stupid and unnecessary and stupefyingly pretentious to claim to be better in anyway because you were born at a time, something need I remind you that you had zero control over. Second, because even if I were to buy into the bullshit, my life had nothing to do with the 80's. I GREW UP in the 90's. So, yes, I do remember all the stupid bullshit that these kids pretend to get nostalgic about. Were there cool things in the 90's? Sure, but it's really easy to talk about the few shows you miss without remembering how much everything else sucked. This is a matter of something known as confirmation bias. It amounts to remembering the hits and forgetting the misses. So if we want to paint a pretty picture of the 90's, we write about all the shit that we miss (which, we actually still have access to, thanks to the fucking future technology developed post-90's, you unthankful little shitbags), and we forget about all the shit we don't miss, such as this:

So when you post stupid shit like this,

probably FROM an iphone you spoiled little brat, then go trade it in and complain that your parents didn't get you a little piece-of-shit, black-and-white keychain "virtual" pet that required zero input to  get any actual output.

Where the fuck does this elitism come from? I'd almost be wiling to say, "You're not a real 90's kid if you don't fucking shut up about how much it rules to be a stupid fucking 90's kid", but alas it's not just those born sometime in the past 13 to 22 years. Because I've also seen shit like this:

This sounds more like 80's white-trash to me. What I love is the caveat of "still turned out okay", as opposed to what? Every person raised by domestic violence and actually thinking they're not okay? No, everyone thinks they are their imaginary God's gift to fucking humanity and owe it all to the crappy fucking childhoods they had, which they can now in their ripe old age turn back to and say, "Yeah! I had the best shitty childhood and it was awesome!" No, you are bad and you should feel bad about yourself. Everyone thinks their youth was awesome and the rest of us just don't get it.

We've all heard old people (like, real old people, as in grandparents and scary homeless people) talk about how great the "good ol' days" were. Same fucking thing happening here. Do you want to know the answer? It's confirmation bias combined with the fact that our memories are mostly fiction, and being a kid is awesome because you don't know how to filter out what is and isn't useful. So you have a memory of your childhood/youth/whathaveyou being sweet, when it was rarely that at all. Every generation will say the same fucking thing, but their childhoods sucked just as much, but because they were fucking stupid, worthless kids, they couldn't fucking remember it, and now that they're old enough to reflect, they'd rather bask in elitism of whatever happened to be their youth, than just admit that shit today is better than it ever was in any of the ways that really matter.