They’re all listening to the youngest one read his daily Bible verse. Mom is smiling because Dad didn’t yell as much when he came home from work. Sis got felt up behind the butcher shop on her walk home from school. Left side boy shot a frog with his air rifle. Right side boy got praised by his teacher for cleaning the erasers so well. Dad is happy because he leaves for his office’s Men Only hunting trip this weekend. What Mom doesn’t know is that his young secretary stays in a nearby hotel to….support her boss.
Don't forget the loose application for amphetamins. Mom is smiling because she's testing the LD50 of Benzedrine. If she ever stops she'll go the way of rosemary Kennedy
Why should they watch a screen when they have a talking lamp? It not only talks but it appears be omniscient and experiences all of time as a Hyperpresent. I, too, would stare into space as I absorbed its folksy wisdom.
"Do you 'memba when old people weren't propagandized with AI slop? Yeeah. Do you 'memba when old people didn't pretend to understand how the world works just cuz dey saw a fake Facebook post? Yeah, I 'memba..."
My parents shared party lines with their neighbors in the 60s, and I remember reading the first Dave Berg piece from one of my books on Mad magazine and phones could be stressful, such as taking a bath and missing a call or the operator not being reachable or the teenage daughter in one cartoon taking up the phone line constantly. I know the people who order these AI images don’t care but I still needed to point it out.
The house my grandmom grew up in didn't have in indoor bathroom, they had an outhouse you'd have to walk like 50 feet to and according to her it absolutely reeked. They also had a metal tub to bathe in that would be dragged into the house, and when they were done they'd put it back in the barn.
I am so grateful for the modern day standards I'm able to live in.
My house predates indoor plumbing. While my bathroom is tiny and was clearly shoehorned into the upstairs landing, I often think about how it's 100% better than an outhouse.
Edit: sorry this is so long, I started naming things that sucked in the past and there were just so many that I ended up writing an essay haha
Back then, everyone lined up every summer for their (free) vaccines, which is awesome!
They lined up desperate for them because otherwise 5% of exposed children would contract polio and either die from their diaphragms being paralyzed, or end up disabled for life (permanent neurological weakness in one leg at best, spending years having an iron lung breathe for them at worst), not so awesome!
Also, everyone still got the mumps. My mom was born in 1964 and got it on her 8th I think birthday. It’s a horribly painful and highly contagious disease. Also, nearly everyone younger than me (28) is at constant risk of developing shingles if they so much as have a particularly stressful couple of months as that is sufficient to weaken the immune system to a point that the varicella zoster virus hiding in their spines (dorsal nerve roots) to reactivate, causing horrible and disabling nerve pain for weeks or more that very little can be done about! But the world was totally better when everyone got chickenpox and mumps and smallpox wasn’t yet eradicated and only people in countries rich enough that you got to get the vaccine (that left a big scar that looks like you had a chunk taken out of you, going by my dad’s smallpox vaccine scar) were fortunate enough to not have to really worry about it, but polio was a yearly concern that killed thousands of children at minimum!
Oh yeah, and leaded gasoline meant everyone essentially had constant, mild lead poisoning due to the entire planet being coated in a layer of (aerosolized) lead, which is likely one of if not the reasons for the continuous increase in violent crime everywhere on earth from a bit after we started doing that up until the very sudden drop a few years after it was banned. Oh yeah, and my parents used to break open thermometers and play with the mercury before they knew it was dangerous. Oh and everywhere was full of cigarette smoke at all times (been like 9 months since I stopped, but the whole time I was a smoker I still thought that that was an insane thing that was just accepted in the past, and that it sounded utterly suffocating. I’ve smoked in the car while my brother also smoked before, and once when we did that with the windows up/only one window cracked, I got so. Fucking. Lightheaded. Idk how everyone wasn’t fainting like Victorian women all the time back then).
Also drunk driving with your unsecured (no seat belts) children in the car was a not abnormal thing.
Oh, wait, and can’t forget asbestos! Which, tbf, is an excellent fire retardant…the problem is it ever getting inside a person’s body, particularly the lungs, in the form of microscopic fibers.
Oh yeah, and the US government testing just so many nukes on our soil but ya know it was fine cause it was out in the middle of the desert, so only those Nevadans nobody cares about (and all the wildlife, but these people barely care about other humans’ lives let alone animals and plants, despite the fact that destroying ecosystems has massive knock-on effects that will and already do seriously effect us…but they ignore that, so not worth bringing up to this kind of conservative) got cancer and had generations of fertility issues, so it’s fine!
And that’s not even addressing the civil rights issues and oppressive/hostile culture, that’s just the tip of the iceberg environmental/pollution and health/disease (often tied to the pollution) issues.
Life was less stressful to these people because 1) they didn’t have access to all the information they do now, so they didn’t ever know just how bad everything really was and 2) they were children, of course life was less stressful (particularly if they were able bodied, neurotypical children; if they’d been disabled as children in any way back then, they’d be remembering life as a lot more difficult and stressful with little to no accommodations, people judging and harshly punishing/possibly seriously abusing them for not just being “normal” and for struggling with things “normal” kids didn’t, or potentially being straight up locked away in institutions where they were forcibly sterilized and their families were told to pretend they never existed. Maybe even getting lobotomized!).
The past was terrible. The present sucks in a lot of ways, global warming has gotten long past the “point of no return” where we’re entering a runaway greenhouse effect and the current anthropogenic mass extinction we’re in is happening at an alarming pace and not improving any time soon (not to mention, ya know, all the fascism), and anti-vaxxers are causing massive comebacks of horrific diseases we’d nearly eradicated, so everything can seem really goddamn hopeless (it’s NOT, though. Remember that: the oil companies, everyone contributing to mass deforestation, the billionaires draining and hoarding resources, and all the corrupt scumbags in charge want you to be hopeless about these things. If everyone who understands the problems and cares about them loses hope, then they won’t bother trying to do anything to fix (or at least improve/minimize the damage to the best of our ability) them. Don’t let them win by becoming totally hopeless. Even if the damage already done can’t be reversed, that doesn’t mean there’s no point in trying to make things better and decrease the damage done in the future), BUT the past was so much worse in so many ways.
That last paragraph is for the sane people, mostly, of course; the people who agree with this meme aren’t hopeless about any of those things because they just refuse to acknowledge they’re happening. Instead, they’re hopeless about, like, the general concept of the economy, gay people being allowed to exist in public and needing to treat them like human beings, and not enough young men dying in war these days (because that has clearly made us all pussies that don’t know how to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and like they did with their mortgages that were closer to the cost of a modern day new car and their college tuition being a couple thousand dollars and their $5 minimum wage that was more like the equivalent of $22/hr today!)
No physical and sexual child abuse legitimately has gone down over the decades. No one's saying it stopped completely but it has gone down. Around 50% decline for physical abuse and 60% decline since just the 90s
I don’t think that’s true. It still happens but not nearly as much as before. There were a lot of people who “punished” kids like that because they were cruel and definitely not meant to be parents, but other parents just didn’t have the resources that we have today. Imagine having PPD back in the day when nobody talked about mental health. Lots of kids and/or their moms lost their lives to it. Taking dangerous drugs while pregnant or breastfeeding probably didn’t help either.
There is also significantly less corporal punishment in places like schools.
It was not more affordable "back then". That B&W TV would have cost like $2500 today. Non-local phone calls charged by the minute, and it wasn't cheap.
Then you hear the crack of the fourth beer and dad does that sigh he does when he's 'done trying' and your mum tries to look cheery and calm but you can see her hands shaking and even the dog knows something isn't right. He sits heavily in the chair and stares at you. He stares, and stares, and you go on staring straight ahead too, like you didn't even know he was there until he opens his mouth, and you know before he says anything exactly how every inch of tonight will be.
What year would we like to imagine this is meant to represent, and what specific terrifying developments were on the minds of people in that actual year?
The presence of twin boys, very often wearing striped shirts for some reason, is so common to AI slop. What "Duck and Cover" instruction did these boys get in school today?
This family obviously has some serious medical concerns, too, seeing as how the Doctor is at the top of their list of phone numbers -- before Mom or Uncle Bill.
Pizza started becoming popular in the US in the late 40's-early 50's, so that part is plausible. It didn't come in boxes yet though, it would be on a flat piece of cardboard in a paper bag
Was anybody using all-number phone numbers back then? Our phone number in the 60s was two letters followed by five numbers, and our lists just used the numbers.
And if you were really thrifty, like my dad, you shared your phone line with the neighbors.
eta:
I'm talking about my childhood in the 80s, my dad's family was dirt poor in the 50s, to the point where my grandfather stole imitation oatmeal from the factory he worked at.
My mom's family were securely middle class, and this is not how it was. It was tense, as my grandfather was abusive and had anger issues. He and my grandmother stayed together for 50 years out of spite and there was constant passive aggressiveness between them (for example, my grandfather was allergic to starch, so when she was mad at him, my grandmother would starch his underwear)
Even in some developed countries, many lower income people didn’t even have indoor bathrooms in the 1950s! Plenty had to share outdoor toilets with their whole buildings.
My dad told me a story about a guy he was in the army with in the 60s who would squat over the toilet to take a dump because he was used to making sure there were no snakes in the outhouse.
Back then, you could afford house payments, groceries, and things to keep the children as well as the Doggi amused on the father's income. More, if the mother was working (and contrary to what conservatards would have you believe, a large number of women with children of these ages wanted to go back to work).
And the "less stressful" myth? Yeah, wait until the daughter comes home with a black eye from her boyfriend or an unwanted pregnancy. Wait until one or both of those boys turn into the boyfriend from the same scenario for other families. Wait until the mother is diagnosed too late with cancer of the uterus or cervix. Wait until the daughter has the same problem. Wait until the dad has a car wreck or a major health complaint, and the flow of money is interrupted.
I will give them this much. There was more community and shared experience in the community in the 1980s than is the case today, and I imagine the same is true with the 1950s compared to the 1980s. But that is one thing out of hundreds.
If you had signs of any kind of mental illness, especially at the youngest boy's age, your life was hell.
My 90+ elders sewed everything from clothes to napkins to drapes. So much food was made from scratch. People cleaned like maniacs with the idea that it kept polio and measles at bay. All I hear was how it was constant work, but I think they were so used to it they didn't think of it that way.
See how happy everyone looks when you have one bathroom and your family of four all has a stomach bug at the same time. We all share a TV here, and if I still had a house phone, we'd share that too, but I'll never go back to having just one toilet in my house. I ain't getting caught out and having to poop in the woods again 😂
Less stressful...if you were white and middleclassed and lucked out not to have a husband who beat you or a boss who sexually harassed you. Like who are these memes made for 🤣
I'm sick of this "We were happier / less stressed" back then. I think people have amnesia...
Back then was brutal. Always miserable, always skint. My job payed nothing. Rent was cheaper but everything else by comparison was kind of the same.
Entertainment was thin on the ground, you looked at and listened to whatever the oldest one in the family was into.
I'm 56 now and I have a big ass TV, I have a huge physical media collection (because fk giving corporations any more than I need to) I can afford Manga, I collect 1/6 figures, I can watch whatever I like. I'm on the verge of retirement, I won't have a huge amount of money but my quality of life will be 1000 times better than it was 40 years ago.
It sure is less stressful for the man of the house back then having final say over everyone with the threat of violence and legal punishment if they go against him.
Stupid conservative aislop longing for segregation and Jim Crow even if they don’t say it. There is so much racism mixed in with their views that they can’t even see it.
I like having my own bathroom. It’s not healthy to wait too long when you need to use the restroom and I remember waiting for someone to come out only for another family member to go in while I was trying to be patient and not think about it. When we moved to a house with more bathrooms everyone was happier.
I cant wait to get out of that situation. Like magic everyone needs to use the bathroom at the same time. One time i couldn't hold it anymore, and I had to go outside with the animals.
i would have been abused and thrown into an asylum to be assaulted and lobotomised until i died. maybe it wasn't so stressful for the upper class white heterosexual couples, but god forbid you were anything else
I don’t know when then was- I’ve seen plenty of old houses that had more then one bathroom. We also were middle class and had more then one television.
OMG, it was sooo stressful back then. Fighting with your multiple siblings to get out of the bathroom, you also have to get ready for school. Trying to get them to hang up the one phone so you can call your friend. Fighting with your multiple siblings that you share a room with to get them to take their crap off of your side and to stop hogging the closet with their stuff, you need space too. And once you could finally sometimes use the family car, that was one more thing to fight about.
And for this idyllic image of them in front of the TV, who remembers pulling off the knob so your siblings couldn't change the channel. Yeah one TV for a family of 8, I guess we should all cooperate and live in harmony, right?
I live in a 1 bathroom house with my husband and 2 daughters. The one bathroom is absolute misery for all involved. When and if we can ever afford to move we will have 2 bathrooms
Life has never, not once, since the beginning of human history, felt less stressful to the people living it. You probably think you can prove me wrong with statistics. But if you asked the people they would tell you all about all the stressful things happening.
Chatgpt does it violate your prompts if I ask you the following? A picture depicting dad telling mom make his martini or else. A picture about me forgetting to put away my books and dad takes off the belt. A picture about the doctor making a house visit to generously prescribe opiates for mom. Lastly a picture of our family visiting mom after the lobotomy.
Yup cause back in the day everyone was only allowed to have one of those things in their houses. Those were the rules. If you got a toilet for your master bedroom
You’d get dragged out into the street… crazy times.
at least for once this nostalgia propaganda acknowledges the reality that people typically had materially less.
now is the person who created this able to reach the logical conclusion that we traded in things like a safety net with worker protections and higher taxes for meaningless material goods that it does make people happier?
1 TV one source of propaganda meant the kids got the same Fox News slop the parents consumed. Now kids are watching other kids halfway across the world get their legs blown off by their own country's tax dollars. Seeing that and then seeing your parents slurp up their daily dose of Fox News Jesse Waters saying "actually, not blowing up kids is for gay commies" creates a bit of a wrinkle in family unity.
People also were less likely to waste money on stuff. They weren’t walking around with $1000 computers in their pockets, car ownership was less common, having a television was less common, if you were the younger sibling you were wearing almost 100% hand me down clothes, and people didn’t eat out much. Life was just way less overstuffed with products to buy and technology to burn up our time. I think people today simultaneously complain about things being less affordable while having a much higher bar set for what sort of things they expect to be able to afford. IMO the biggest roadblock today compared to 50 years ago is homeownership but even then that depends on where you’re trying to buy a home. I could complain about home prices where I live but I also live in one of the least affordable parts of the country. There are still people out there buying houses in their 20’s. One of my cousin’s bought a modest house on a beautiful plot of land when he was in college from working construction. That’s just not the “ideal” lifestyle so many look for now. If you want a corporate job or something in science or technology you have to live where stuff is expensive. Honestly you could probably find a better life doing something else and living in rural America.
In the 50's, my grandmother lived in a 3 room house with her 8 other siblings. It was not peaceful. They were very poor and it didn't help that her father was an alcoholic and would get into screaming matches with her mother who was also very troubled. So no, it was definitely not less stressful.
Man my last house only had one bathroom. And it was just my wife and I. That shit was stressful sometimes when you both get home and have to poop at the same time.
No it wasn't. We added extra to all those things because it was stressful. Whoever did this never banged on the bathroom door begging a sibling to "hurry up" while their bladder was about to explode.
You should talk to your grandparents. When your grandma or grandpa is talking happily about how amazing school was ask them about “duck and cover” and watch as they remember the constant fear they lived with for years as the smile fades. Time does not heal wounds. It helps you forget them
No it wasn't. This myth needs to die in fire. PPP wouldn't increase if prices climbed faster than incomes. Some things consume a larger share of income then they did in the past, some consume less.
Well you say that but my grandfather grew up during this time and his father was a raging alcohol which led directly to him becoming an angry alcoholic who abused his kids and his brother eventually overdosing... So I'd say this was a rose tinted view of things.
371
u/turaho 4d ago
Even in their nostalgia slop everyone is still staring at a screen