There was no Golden Age. No ‘bygone era’ when the world was a great place for everyone, a happy place, a safe place.
Pick a date. Pick a place. Were, say, the 1930s ‘golden’ in the UK? Before smartphones and ubiquitous media and the attention economy and instant gratification; when the world was a simpler place, when life was simpler to live? Was it great, happy, safe then?
Well, maybe – for some of those who were affluent. But 1930s Britain was riven by class division, and haunted by fear of the growth of fascism; it was blighted by poverty and malnutrition in dirty clogged cities; and characterised by the stymied aspirations of the many, who were expected to know their place, especially if they were women and people from minority ethnic backgrounds, and people of low social status.
Well, what about further back? How about Victorian times? Life was simpler then, no doubt. No television or computers – no screens of any kind to dominate our waking lives; no global climate crisis; it was a time of rapid industrial and economic growth; a time of ‘family values’; a time of peace for people here in the UK – mostly. ‘Britain ruled the world’, or much of it.
If anything, poverty was worse then than in the 1930s – read Dickens. It was a patriarchal, sexist, white-dominated, racist, class-divided time. If you were well-off, you were well placed; most people were not well off and for many, life was achingly hard, every day. And then you died, possibly fairly young, possibly with no teeth.
My point is, there was no ‘golden era’, no bygone days when things were much better for everyone than they are now. Life was simpler in some ways, for sure: the pace of life was slower; there was family time, and music and dancing and slow cooking, and talking face to face. There was also poverty and malnutrition and disease and lack of education and squalid conditions and discrimination and massive inequality.
Our individual circumstances largely dictate the quality of our lives, whatever the era. But it’s worth remembering that the materially average people living in the UK today probably have significantly more comfortable material lives than King Cnut, who ruled England from 1016 until 1035.
There is no ‘golden era’ to hark back to, through those rose-tinted glasses. There is now, and what we make of it. We should certainly not hark back to an idea of lost ‘greatness’ – however ‘greatness’ might be defined – and we shouldn’t wait for happiness to arrive when we get that promotion, or new job, or bigger house or faster car. Now is the time. We should appreciate what we do have, we should feel ‘happy’ if we have enough, and we should work for the best quality of life, for ourselves and everyone else; if we all did that together, maybe it would make this a ‘golden’ era.
