Tomorrow's Nostalgia

One of the reasons that we urgently mourn the loss of old neighborhoods and industry to gentrification and technology is because the losses remind us of our own limited time on earth. There isn't an intelligent person around who would argue with the notion (the fact) that the "good old days" is largely a myth, a function of nostalgia, not of sociology. The brutal truth is that what we decry today as soulless, vacuous, and lacking flavor—the devolving of a better, more humane past into the characterless present—will be tomorrow's "good old days" for someone, somewhere. The problem is, I won't be around to share her grief.