Things just are not what they used to be!
Do you ever find yourself feeling that the world was better, simpler, purer and somehow less messed up in the past than it is now?
That could be your childhood or your grandparents time or even further in the past. Does it ever occur to you that every generation throughout history has felt this way?
Any earnest reading of history will see that pretty much any era of the near or distant past was as chaotic, messy, imperfect, unjust and wicked – just often in slightly different ways.
Since every generation feels the future is both exciting [utopia] or daunting [dystopia], that the present is messy and wicked and that the past was somehow balanced, integrated and had a harmony or wisdom that made it better – perhaps it is because memory and emotion form a doppler effect?
This doppler effect causes the future, the present and the past to each take a different impression, a hue, a note. Just as a racing car will sound shrill upon approach and more resonant as it passes, so our emotions about the future and present and past will bend experience and memory as time passes.
The truth is there is ALWAYS a chaotic present, an uncertain but exciting future and the past becomes a story. The ONLY real time is the present! Make it great