When I was young, life was better

03/11/2023 Nilson Lattari

Have you ever read this expression? “When I was young, life was better”. Older people compare the present days with their past. Ok, I used to say it too, and I learnt that we don’t have to do this. Because I wondered once: How could I define this “better” past?
Our era is the present day and nobody is the owner of an era, because moments, spaces, and finally, life experiences belong to a person, and turn it into a personal history.
Others say “in my time” as if a determined space in the timeline belonged to special people: they are the owners of a historical moment that isn’t apart from human life.
Of course, when we get older, our life is no longer the same. Everything is changing and when we arrive in the future, the future, simply, doesn’t suit the future that we imagined when we were young. A lot of people fancy a future that they will live in their desired professional life. It’s only a dream that we figure out when we are younger. Then, in the future, our dreams won’t come true. A lot of people imagine they will be working on a successful career but, in the end, they will be working on a different job. Because life runs according to the difficulties that we live, and it is not aligned with our wishes.
Nobody is the owner of his supposed time and he is not the owner of a space in the future because nobody can determine his fate.
There will be stones through time, and it will be impossible to overcome them.
Furthermore, there is a sense of nostalgia inside of each of us when we remember the past. Young people imagine they are eternal and, in my opinion, when this eternity is closing to them, nostalgia becomes a desire to return in time to live the past again.
Think. If we miss our era is because we were people who lived and experienced a happy childhood and youth. This happiness is due to an aspect of security by family and luck. And now, we have to imagine someone who passed his childhood and youth fighting against poverty and insecurity. Someone who was raised by a problematic family, and lived in tumult, in degradation. I’m not sure if this person liked to remember his past, especially if he got to establish a future better than his past.
I sometimes imagine that old people use this expression because they need to criticize the new inhabitants of this planet. I think that these old people are jealous.
During the pandemic, when our freedom was limited, I thought that people felt nostalgia, and their thoughts went back to the past to try to look for a comfort zone. When we lose our freedom. our past comes to help us. The one who experiences his present days in sadness, I think that he can imagine that his past was better.
In fact, the era of utopia, when we figured out a better world and would build it, it was a time of dreaming. It’s like looking for cosiness, and some people go back to the past because it was a time of dreaming.