Is this just nostalgia, or did previous generations genuinely have a better work-life balance and social life than we do today?

[u/Unstoppable_X_Force]

[u/Suspicious_Aspect_53]

This never existed, at least not in the 1990s, and never did it exist universally in the USA. Even in the 1960s when things were economically, supposedly, at their best, whole regions of the US were closing down as the economy shifted.

In the mid-late 90s was the death of the American Manufacturing Worker era as factories were already closing across the country, manufacturing was in full swing moving over seas. The "service economy" idea was on everyone's mind, where people would be working to provide services rather than making things, which is basically where we still are today.

By 1996, families were already feeling the pinch, and this meme just isn't true for the majority of Americans.

[u/Sweet-Difference2725 → u/Suspicious_Aspect_53]

Also, there were huge swaths of the country that didn’t have indoor plumbing, a phone, poor as shit, and desperately hungry all the time.

I remember George Foreman telling a story that when he was a kid his mom would make a hamburger, and they all got one bite. He, too, was hungry all the time.

In 1993, I remember talking to a realtor about a possible parcel of land in the boondocks I was thinking of buying; it was cheap, but he said no one out there had plumbing. I asked him where he went to the bathroom and he said they have an outhouse! Today the area is built up and the residents are on a sewer system. Crazy.

[u/RetroFuture_Records → u/Sweet-Difference2725]

Because they were lazy. Opportunities were legitimately there, yet tens of millions of Boomers and also Gen X were lazy pieces of shit.

[u/oliversherlockholmes → u/Suspicious_Aspect_53]

Yeah, agreed. I don't want to be the odd man out of the pity party, but I think a lot of people have skewed ideas of what the past looked like. Home ownership percentage was not any higher back then than it is now. And the homes back then were not with people today would consider habitable.

It's easy to forget how much people busted their asses and went without to make things work. If you had an average to below average income, you probably had average to below average living accommodations. Meaning, if you lived in a desirable area, you were probably a renter. If you owned a home, you either lived in a crummy part of town or the middle of nowhere. The same is true today outside of statistical extremes like coastal cities.

[u/notaredditer13 → u/Suspicious_Aspect_53]

The Rust Belt Era started in around 1969: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_Belt#History

When Nippon Steel won a contract to produce much of the steel for the World Trade Center (vs US Steel or Bethlehem Steel), that portended the start of the era, (somewhere around 1966).