Was the past better than today?

Quite often middle-aged and old people reminisce of the past and say how much better things were then than they are now. They have nostalgia for more innocent times, for simpler times, for safer times.

Quite often there's a heavy amount of nostalgia filtering in this, as people tend to remember the good things about their childhood and ignore (or even be unaware of) the bad things. It's one form of "somewhere else is better than here" (ie. "the grass is greener on the other side of the fence") thinking, but instead of location it's time.

Of course there are many things today that are better than they were eg. in the 1970's and 1980's, even though many people who grew up back then reminisce of those times and are very nostalgic about it.

But are there some things that were genuinely better back then than they are now?

Well, let me present one thing that I think was genuinely better. This is a screenshot of an older phonebook:

Notice something particular about it?

That's right: It's essentially a "doxxing book". It not only has people's full names and phone numbers, but also their full home addresses.

This was (and in some places still is) completely open information, available to anybody. Heck, especially back then every home had one of these books for all the local people, and you could easily buy any phonebook for any city and town in the country (or any other country for that matter).

In this day and age this seems absolutely insane. People just putting their names and home addresses to the public, for anybody to see and find out.

But the thing is, back in the 1970's and 1980's this didn't matter. It was completely normal and deemed safe. There weren't really any negative consequences for doing this, and the benefits were deemed to greatly outweigh any possible drawbacks. This wasn't deemed problematic, because it really wasn't all that problematic.

That's because, at least in this regard, most of the world (and especially the west) was genuinely safer and more peaceful. There was no internet, and there weren't people trying to get random people killed or harassed. Having your full contact information, home address and all, open to the public was not really any sort of problem.

So yes, some things were genuinely better in the past.