The Golden Age
Have you ever heard the idiom “The golden age never was the present age”? If you’re not familiar with it, it basically means that we all love to look back at some point in the past and believe that everything was better then. It’s very rare for someone to think that they are personally living during one of these elusive golden ages.
I think that’s very true when you’re looking at the behavior of other people. It’s very easy to look at how kids behave now, then look back at when you were the same age and imagine that it was some kind of golden age when all the kids were well-behaved and respectful. Of course, that is beyond absurd—we were absolutely turds back then, too—but it makes us feel better to imagine that we were all perfectly well-behaved angels.