It’s common to romanticize things from our youth but when we truly reflect it’s really wasn’t all that great after all. I’m guilty on occasion of doing this very thing as I miss Canada dearly although I enjoy a wonderful life in Texas.

Every older / aging generation since time immemorial has bemoaned that things aren't the way they "used to be" and that differentness is scary and threatening. The good old days were really the bad old days but they seem good because they are familiar and known rather than unfamiliar and uncharted.

When I was born in 1957 we hadn't orbited the first artificial satellite yet, there were hardly mainframe business computers let alone personal computers, the transistor had just been invented, the Salk vaccine had just saved the world and the first transatlantic comm cable had just been laid. But it wasn't the "good old days". It was the days of poorly built gas-guzzling cars from Detroit laying the groundwork for an invasion of foreign car makers, of women having almost no options outside of "homemaker". It was a world in which my wife's mother would shortly die of a form of cancer now routinely cured here in the 21st century. It was when phones were still luxury items and long distance calls across the US cost several dollars per minute.

And yet ... I had unconditional love and no worries as a child, a situation which was not to obtain anywhere in my adult life. So ... there's a temptation to look back on it as a better era. Even though it wasn't. Whatever was wrong with that era was something for my parents to worry about, not me.

I want to comment about rosy retrospection and survivorship bias and recommend Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World and Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things, but instead I let them know I'm glad they made it through. LOL