The Good Old Days

Yes, we elders often talk about days long past, but that’s because we actually lived and experienced them. Some people refer to those earlier years as the good old days, but I’m not convinced they were all that good – but then, everyone has a different opinion.

Let’s take a look at the past century.

Sure, there were the roaring twenties, but there were also two devastating world wars and the great depression. Then we lived under the threat of the cold war. On the homefront, there were the hardships – many people had to make do with what they had. Nothing or very little got thrown away. Just about everything got reused. There were food shortages and so no food was ever wasted. We ate everything given to us. Stale bread got made into toast and any leftover food got made into soup. If and only if, there was anything left over, it was fed to pets or perhaps farm animals. Even a trifle is made from leftovers – hence the name, trifle.

Then there, were the ongoing diseases such as diphtheria, polio, tuberculosis, smallpox, Spanish flu, etc.

Dentistry centred around extractions rather than fillings and most people had dentures by the time they were in their thirties. Nitrous Oxide (Laughing Gas) was the anaesthesia of choice – if you were lucky, otherwise, it was painful. 

Nothing was thrown away. Within a family, a child’s clothes were often handed down from one child to the next. My pram (baby carriage) eventually became my sister’s pram.

Only the very wealthy had cars. The rest of us, if we were lucky, owned a bicycle. Longer trips were made on the bus, and even longer trips were made by train.

I was 11 by the time we lived in a house with an indoors flushing toilet. By the way, toilet paper was yesterday’s newspaper torn into squares.  

I could go on but the point I’m making is, compared to what we have today, one could hardly say those times were Good Old Days!

Having said that – those early days were the happiest days of my life.

Yes, I have had happy times, but overall, I am not particularly happy. I look around and I’m saddened to see so many unhappy people. 

In recent years there seems to have been a general shift in what we deem as happiness. Today, we are encouraged to buy things on the promise that they will make us happy. But when that ‘happy moment’ stops, we experience some sort of withdrawal while we search for something else that will make us even happier.

The corporate ‘drug dealers’ encourage us to trade in our perfectly good mobile phones for the latest models. Bigger and better this and that! Why? What’s more important – having the latest and greatest phone or the phone’s function and purpose?

The KPD factor

Many years ago, I decided to upgrade my stereo system. So off I went to an electronics store. The salesman asked me if I was looking for sound quality or KPD. I already had a stereo system but I wanted one that sounded better, so obviously I was looking for better quality. However, curiosity caused me to ask what was KPD. Knobs Per Dollar! He went on to explain by showing me the Mono-Stereo switch on a Receiver/Amplifier. Why is this here he asked. It will always be set to stereo, so this switch’s only purpose is to make the front panel look complex just for show. At that point he showed me another unit where the focus was about quality of sound. Guess which one I bought?

Happiness comes in many forms but don’t confuse happiness with what makes you happy.  

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Let me know what makes you happy in the comments below.

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