Let’s not throw the 21st century out with the baby water.
I tend to populate my social media with a bunch of different pages that I feel have the potential to help me grow, and educate me. Across our culture, there are several movements (spanning everything from dieting to one’s entire approach to life) that profess simpler times as the supreme cure to modern-day ails.
Personally, I agree with some of them. I do think our diet was infinitely healthier when it included fewer processed foods, less fast food, less frozen TV dinners, and more fresh, seasonal produce.
I do think people used to be happier when they moved more, and didn’t sit behind a screen all day, but that’s kind of a no-brainer. I just look at myself and the people close to me — when you spend a whole day stuck in your desk chair, you feel sluggish, irritable, antsy. If you spend at least a few hours moving your body, maybe dancing, you know, feeling alive, you’re much less likely to feel that.
So I do feel that, in some respects, a return to “simpler times” could be good for us.
Others, though, tend to make me go urgh. Like this thing I saw the other day, blasting indoor heating for disrupting the body’s natural rhythm, and throwing one’s hormones all out of whack.
First off, I come from an Eastern European country. Indoor heating during winter is, for many people here, a strong maybe. Several winters now, citizens of my town have struggled going days, and even weeks at a time, in the middle of winter, without heating, or often even hot water in their taps.
So suggesting that indoor heating is a modern, destructive fad really doesn’t sit well with me.
Now, this wasn’t a discussion of gas vs electric, or carbon monoxide levels. The idea was, basically, that you’re throwing your body off-course by “tricking it into thinking” it’s summer via indoor heating.
Surely, the many people who die each year from lack of indoor heating might beg to differ.
Another baffling conversation I had recently involved women’s involvement in the kitchen, a subject that to me remains interesting, since I perceive a lot of women who (still) feel stigmatized/ bad about being bad cooks.
To which someone came and told me very matter-of-fact that the problem is men and women no longer have clearly defined roles, which creates all these toxic relationship dynamics. I thought right.
And to think of all the generations that went before us, where gender roles were, for better or worse, more clearly and rigorously defined than they are now. So many of those people who should’ve, by this woman’s logic, been happy in their clearly defined lives, ended up traumatising their children and each other.
I’m a fairly live-and-let-live person. If you’re happy being a stay-at-home housewife, that’s peachy. But when you start thinking that’s the “cure” for other women’s troubles, well, that’s where we hit a few snags, you know?
Anyway, what both of these examples had in common was a shared longing for “simpler times”, and it got me thinking…where does that longing come from?
Is our increased nostalgia a symptom of a growingly unpredictable world?
It suddenly seems like everywhere you look, there’s people advocating for a return to basics, whether it’s what you eat, who you vote for, what you believe in, even how you define yourself. And while it can be argued this conservatism has been around since the beginning, it certainly seems to be spreading at an alarming rate.
I can’t help viewing this very vociferous conservative outburst as a sign of how unbalanced our society is, and how terrifying our changing world is for us. I’m sure a part of it is to due with “the other side” and their own virulence on some matters. A lot of people adhering to this particular brand of nostalgia do so more for being put off by extreme liberalism than they are genuinely attracted by extreme conservative ideas. It’s always a balance that we need to remember to keep.
Basically, we are the folk climbing up out of Plato’s cave who, at the first glimpse of sunlight, shout retreat. It’s perfectly logical, because for them, that first glimpse of light is first of all, extremely alien. Secondly, you can’t know if the glimmer you see on the horizon is the sun or a nuclear explosion.
What if it’s a cloud of fire spreading to swallow our world? It would make sense to hide then. Because in all fairness, these are deeply unstable, unprecedented times. There is no knowing if we’re headed for better or something incredibly worse.
Going back into the cave won’t solve anything, though.
It can’t bring comfort to the philosopher’s cavemen, and neither can it be of use to us. In the end, the nuclear blast will swallow the cavemen within the cave, or without. Might as well die standing in the sun, as I see it.
I don’t mean to get overly dramatic here, but I do understand that for a lot of these people, this return to simpler times bespeaks a fear of the unknown, and that is dramatic, and should be taken seriously.
You get a lot of people saying our 21st century world has become increasingly godless. In the face of consumerism, atrocity, social disconnection, it seems natural to call for community, a sense of unity that, in the past, was heavily influenced by religion.
Indeed, to an extent, the dissolution of the nuclear family, the suffragette movement, the equal rights campaign, the invention of the Pill, all these things have thrown inter-sex relationship up into a very confusing present. Because, while our world is changing, we can’t forget overnight the previous centuries, so they continue to shape stigma, as well as the values that we are, as individuals, brought up with. Inevitably, they end up influencing our romantic relationships, and how we define ourselves, and given that confusing state, you can understand the people who say it was easier before.
Because in some ways, it was. There was far less confusion. But to me, this 21st century confusion is kinda like those first couple of hours after you’ve landed in a foreign country. You don’t know what bus you need to take, or how transport really works here. You don’t know how their money works, or if what you paid for a meal is too much or too little. And everyone speaks a language you don’t get, making you feel isolated, anxious, but also, really, really thrilled.
To say that a full-slate return to previous “easier” times would be preferable is like, in the above analogy, turning round, and boarding the next flight home. And you probably didn’t come all this way just to turn back.
Likewise, I don’t think humanity has come all this way, ambling through all the social uproar, and movements, and difficulties of previous centuries and past millennia, just to pack up and leave.
Now that we’ve finally made it to this point of confusion, of uncertainty, of change (and yes, some changes are bound to be for the worse, as always), it’s time for humanity to reorganize. Regroup. Figure out how we move on from the past, not back into it.
Personally, I’m happy if your chosen way of life fits better in the past. If you wanna be a homemaker or a stay-at-home mother, and you’re happy with it, that’s fine. If you want to live in a religious community, that’s also your prerogative. I’d argue we came all this way so that people could be free to do these things, or not.
So I just wanna make clear, this isn’t an attack on people making these choices. I don’t think I have the right to tell someone else how to live their life, based on my personal convictions.
At the end of the day, I’m as confused as everyone else, but I have a strong suspicion that our way out of the cave begins when we stop falling into the “my way of life is supreme, and would solve the problems of the universe” thought pattern.
Really, hasn’t that mentality done enough damage, as it is?
And that goes for both “sides” of the argument. Religious, or not. Embracing traditional gender roles, or not. Heating your house, or not. :) I’ve always said, and will continue to do so, that there’s only ever one side. The human side.
Thank you for reading! I’m fairly scatterbrained, and this was one of the many random subjects that pique my interest.
I recently put out my first book (the first in a fantasy trilogy), and am working on the next two. So there’s a chance I’ll be talking about that, sometimes, as well as many other random topics.
So if you’re someone who enjoys that kinda writing, well, why not subscribe? It’s free. And I’m desperate. So there, honesty.
