If the past is a foreign country, most of us are looking to emigrate. Far from believing that our best days lie ahead, a study suggests most people are wistful for the good old days.
Exactly when you think the good old days were depends, perhaps unsurprisingly, on your age. The over-70s are most likely to think the Sixties were truly swinging, just as they were becoming adults, according to the YouGov poll for Times Radio, while the under-30s think the turn of the millennium was the best of times.
A third of people overall think the 1960s and 1970s were better than today, but then the nostalgia drops away quite sharply. Only 16 per cent think it was better in the 1950s, which gave birth to the Boomer generation, falling to 4 per cent for the wartime 1940s.
Looking further back, one in 30 think the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries were better than today. Dan Snow, the television historian, is not among them. “Obviously I hold a candle for the 18th century,” he told Times Radio. “But I don’t want to live in the 18th century. I like the fashion, I find it’s an extraordinary period of revolution, of transformation. It’s a period many people are drawn to in fiction and film [but] it was a terrible time to live. It’s a terrible time to be a woman or a person of colour or to have a dentistry problem.”
Born in 1978, Snow best remembers the late 1990s, just before the rise of the internet and the terrorism seen on September 11, 2001. “There was this great sense of this global awakening and fraternity. The Cold War was over. I was listening to Slide Away by Oasis.
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“In the communications revolution, this was exactly the right spot. We didn’t have social media, but we did have mobile phones to text each other. So you could meet up. You could text. The world was so exciting and I thought the future had everything.”
Today, however, the future is far from bright. Half of people think they will never again live their best life, and 56 per cent think the year 2050 will be worse than today. Only 17 per cent think it will be better. Young people are more upbeat: a quarter of 18 to 29-year-olds think things will be better in the next 25 years, compared with only 12 per cent of over-70s.
Nostalgia has played a significant role in politics in recent years. From Donald Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again, to the Leave campaign’s vow to Take Back Control in the EU referendum, the appeal to a fabled past plays well to certain voters. Half of those who backed Brexit think life was better in the 1960s and 1970s than today, compared with a quarter of Remainers.
People who voted Conservative at the last election fondly remember the 1980s heyday of Margaret Thatcher, while Labour voters prefer the years of Tony Blair’s reign.
Matthew Smith, a pollster at YouGov, said: “We can see very clearly a dominant preference for the time period when you were young. Distressingly, for my 35-year-old self, it is a tendency to think your best days are behind you by the time you enter your forties.”
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Listen to The Good Old Days with Matt Chorley from 10am on Times Radio.
