I’ve been thinking about what older generations leave for the next generation.

When I was a kid with Depression-era parents, I was always so thankful that my life was better than what they had lived through.  I always thought this was an inevitable progression, i.e. that inevitably every new generation would have it better than the ones before it.  To me this was the inevitable march of human history.

I may have been wrong.  I’m not sure that the Boomers and Gen Xers have left the Millennials and Gen Zers a better world.  In fact, at an individual level, it feels a lot worse.

What got me thinking about this was a video that popped up in my YouTube Music feed.  It is a video of Lynyrd Skynyrd playing “Freebird” in the Oakland Coliseum on July 2, 1977 (I’ll post the video link in my post one below, as the algorithm hates YouTube links).  I was a little too young for this concert, but this is still basically my late-70s high school age cohort.

Putting aside for a moment the epic performance of the band, look at all the crowd shots:

-Everyone is healthy and bright-eyed, and no one is obese.

-No one is on SSRIs.

-The chicks are chicks, the dudes are dudes, nobody is having a confusing crisis in gender identity, and they all obviously enjoy life being young, sexually attractive and full of normal, gender appropriate hormones and desires regarding the opposite sex.

-There are no cell phones.  Everyone is living in the moment, full appreciating what they are experiencing.  They are PRESENT in the moment.

-It’s FUN.  Everyone is really having a good time, and nobody appears worried about drone attacks or climate change or crazy jihadists driving a truck through the crowd. 

-No one has mutilated bodies.  No nose rings.  No Goth/emo visible depression. No green hair.  No full tattoo sleeves.

-They are teenagers—high school kids, many of them—out on their own, in Oakland, having fun, with NO PARENTS HOLDING THEIR HANDS.

-Yeah, they are probably all wasted from drinking plastic gallon containers of Hawaiian Punch mixed with Everclear grain alcohol (ask me how I know), and from smoking late-70s dirt weed, but I’m not seeing any fights and they are so happily INTO IT.

I think life was better then.  I know the ‘70s had all sorts of social and political issues, but it sure feels like teenagers had a way happier, healthier and less stressful life in 1977 than they do today.

(And if you are a youngster, yeah those sorts of concerts really were that awesome.  And that hot babe in the halter top?  She’s your grandmother now.)