> Were those the good old days? I've heard this from several generations that the time when you were still under the protection of parents, but not their atten

> Were those the good old days? I've heard this from several generations that the time when you were still under the protection of parents, but not their attention are the "good old days" of your life - like if your biggest worry if you flipped a car was "My dad will kill me!" and not "phew, not a scratch on me & my friends are all alive". Must be the youth and opportunity of that phase of life rather than the actual era in the world (just look at a "2007 was the best year in video games" for an equivalent for a late millenial). The music was better, the cereal crunched better, all your friends lived nearby & were always free to hang out, the TV shows were made for your eyes and talking about your dreams was the thing you did without any irony. Also there was a lot that affected you that you just didn't know yet. You weren't even aware of your ignorance & all knowledge was just within reach. > I didn’t think about wage gaps, redlining, gerrymandering, or the intricacies of romantic encounters. > Things weren’t fluid and there was no spectrum. I assumed the police were telling the truth. I was unaware of how frequently powerful men answered the door wearing nothing but a towel. Oh, there was definitely a spectrum (Rain Man came out in the 80s). Rodney King was before the iPhone. LBJ was already showing people how everything in Texas was bigger (Doris Kearns Goodwin has a laugh about it, but we'll never know if she cringed). I'm too young to remember all this, because it was before my time, but I sort of went into the part 2 of "We didn't start the fire" here.