I was once married to a man who didn’t believe “the good ole days” ever existed. When I would comment that things really were better when I was growing up, he’d insist they weren’t. He believed people’s minds fooled them.
According to some scientists — who agree with my ex — “‘Things aren’t what they used to be’ because we are suffering from psychological biases.” Or so claims Nick Chater, a professor of behavioral science at Warwick Business School, who says that “our belief [that] things were better in the past is because of loss aversion and our ‘rose-tinted’ memory.”
But perhaps how one views the past depends upon what exactly one is considering for his valuation of it.
Professor Chater speaks of big events, such as the two world wars, as if they are things that no one will ever possibly experience again. He sounds as if he believes the future is going to be all “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” — the title of a song by ‘60s singer Lesley Gore.
I would contend, however, that such things could very well repeat themselves in the future of mankind, and shouldn’t be how one gauges the quality of life. As individuals, we are hard pressed to exert any control over such significant occurrences. Therefore, we should examine things from the past that were quite impactful at a personal level.
Very meaningful facts from bygone days do exist to support my own contention that many things in the past were decidedly superior to what they are now. Consider our food supply.
As we need to eat every day of our lives to remain healthy and strong, we need to enjoy the food that we put into our mouths. If you don’t like the taste of food, it’s darned difficult to want to consume it.
Look at the photo that accompanies this commentary. It shows a watermelon bought in July 2025 at a local grocery store. When I was a child, or even a young adult, decades ago, I never saw a watermelon like the one pictured here. And, sad to say, this watermelon is not the only one I’ve ever bought in more recent years that consists of a fair bit of inedible white rind. Worse yet, it’s not the only kind of food that has deteriorated in quality.
Strawberries went downhill long ago in the same manner as the watermelon. These fruits might look as red as you’d expect, but nowadays that red color is usually only skin deep. The moment you bite into or slice your strawberry, what are you likely to find? Just as with the watermelon, much inedible white flesh rather than a fully red fruit as it ought to be. So much for superbly luscious flavor.
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It can even be difficult to get a fully ripe strawberry from a farm. Years ago, I appeared on PBS’ “Virginia Homegrown.” A separate segment was about a farmer. He was wonderfully thoughtful and brought strawberries for everyone. Even those fruits were not fully red inside.
Have you bought a green pepper or a cucumber lately? Many of these particular veggies are absolutely tasteless most of the time when bought from a store. What drives the act of consuming food? Taste. If food doesn’t taste good, what is going to compel you to continue eating it? Only starvation.
For decades, I grew my own fruits and veggies and consequently ate well and healthfully. But with the passing years, my rheumatoid arthritis has taken evermore of a toll so that now I need to purchase almost all the food that goes into my mouth.
When I first started buying fresh fruits and vegetables, the store-bought produce was fine to eat. Sadly, for at least the past decade or so, that has no longer been the case.
Luckily, you can find some kinds of fresh fruits and vegetables (particularly leafy ones, such as spinach) in the produce section that are in good condition and taste OK, and produce that freezes well can be found in the frozen food section. But, it can be darned hard to find decent fresh produce these days from a store.
The problem, of course, is that feeding the many humans on the planet today requires bringing in food from long distances. Sometimes these foods are picked before they ripen and thus never can ripen adequately. Others are selected to be grown for how well they can travel and less so for their flavor.
It’s not only foods that are problematic, but also flowering plants. Roses are small and do not exhibit the heavenly fragrance they once did, and many grocery stores sell flowers that are so perfectly formed that they look artificial. Why bother growing them if they don’t even look alive?
Returning to Professor Chater, he says that, “The idea that everything is getting worse — declinism — is an old one. Even ancient Athens saw itself as having declined from a former, mythical golden age. So perhaps our minds are tricking us into thinking things are getting worse.”
He goes on to say that, “In particular our memory tends to forget about the bad events in our past and we have a tendency to rehearse and dwell on the good things that happened in the past, we retell them a lot more often, so we reinforce the good memories. We tend to remember the great songs or cars or football players from the ‘old days’ and forget all the bad ones.”
Balderdash! Surely everyone realizes that when bad things happen to us, they are usually far more impactful upon us than good things. Yes, we may want to forget the bad things, but bad circumstances have consequences, which is what makes them so bad — and thus we do remember them. We may prefer to push them out of our minds as much as possible, but they will always reappear now and again.
So, no, I don’t believe it’s just our imagination that some things were better long ago. They really were better.
Marlene A. Condon is a Daily Progress columnist and the author and photographer of “The Nature-friendly Garden” and “The Nature Revelation: God Exists.” Her degree in physics and her documentation of the natural world in writing and photographs has informed her published body of work for over 30 years. She writes a blog, “In Defense of Nature,” at indefenseofnature.blogspot.com.
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