The good old days

Megan McArdle on the good old days of the 1950s/60s:

My great aunts worked all through the fifties and sixties, on the farm or teaching school. My grandfather had his own business, a gas station. He was certainly successful, but he spent most of his day pumping gas. My mother stayed home with us until economic insecurity and the sheer boredom of keeping house in a small apartment turned her out onto the job market, where she sold real estate, as she continues to do. My father stopped working for the City and took a job with a trade association. When I look back I don't see a halcyon era of secure, well paying and fulfilling work; I see people doing what they had to to pay the bills. Indeed, when I began freaking out about my drastically reduced income expectations, my mother pointed out that when my parents moved into the apartment I grew up in, she was 9 months pregnant, had just quit her job, and they had a (to them) giant mortgage, and less than $500 in the bank.

I think she's on to something. People moan about how our manufacturing sector is disappearing and the decline of union jobs but trust me, as someone who has worked a factory job, they suck. Perhaps people face additional challenges today but I think the work available is often more rewarding. The way we remember things and the way they actually were are often at odds.

McArdle concludes:

But the thing is, that even as I indulge in invidious comparisons between my apartment and the one I grew up in, and those my classmates are currently renting or buying, I have to remind myself that in so many ways I'm better off than my parents were at my age. I'll live longer (well, statistically, anyway), I have a fantastic job, and though I complain about lack of space, I have everything I need. The things I want more space for, and more money for, are incidentals that the human race lived happily without until, oh, last week.

I agree, especially with the last part, which I have been thinking about more as the Christmas season is upon us. Looking around, I seriously can't think of too much that I lack. Now, of course, there are things that I'd like to have -- and don't interpret this as some rant against material possessions -- but really don't feel like I have a pressing need for much of anything. Everything else, as McArdle says, are incidentals.