The Best Time To Be Alive

When was, or is, the best time to be alive?
In this episode, we explore the nostalgia surrounding the generations that came before and after the Baby Boomer generation. I reflect on how music, technology, and historical events shaped our lives and perspectives. By comparing past and present experiences, we foster a deeper understanding of what makes today’s generation unique while honoring memories that connect us all. 

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Chapters

• 0:00 Generational Comparison Through History
• 12:10 Podcaster's Guide to Getting Older

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Bill Monty's Guide for Gettin' Older. I've been seeing lately a lot of memes talking about how the music and the times were better when we were growing up we meaning baby boomers, because that's my generation. So that's what I think about when I see these things and it talks about you know how everything was just slightly or much better than it was today, and I think that's something that every generation faces. Certainly my parents, I think, believed that their generation was better in some ways. They would have argued that Frank Sinatra or the Glenn Miller Orchestra or Elvis Presley was much better than my music of the Beatles and Jimmy Buffett, the Rolling Stones and people like that. And I think certainly today the music of Taylor Swift would be compared to the Beatles, and those who are Swifties wouldn't know what we're talking about when we say how much better we believe John, paul, george and Ringo were than Taylor Swift. I'm not saying anything against Taylor Swift. The music is actually very good. I actually like it very much but I think when we start comparing generations what was best, who had it best we start getting into thinking that in some way a different time was better than the time we live in I've talked about on this podcast before and on my other podcast, tales from South Florida, which you can find at talesfromsouthfloridacom, that the music certainly influenced me in my life, growing up.

Speaker 1: 1:46

I don't know if that's true of other generations, but I grew up, I was a young boy and went into being a teenager in the 60s and the 70s and I, the music certainly shaped who I was and, I feel, who the generation was. Yeah, I really don't think you can argue that the music of the Beatles or the trend of the Beatles. So when the Beatles came on, they were made fun of by the older generation because they had longer hair and it was kind of like a mop top look, you know, kind of a bowl cut, look, almost. The teenagers at the time started growing their hair longer. My father was having none of it, by the way. We had crew cuts until I was about 12 years old. But when the Beatles changed, when they started growing their hair longer, when they started going to a more psychedelic look in the 19, around 1966, certainly 67, 68, the entire world followed. 67, 68, the entire world followed. I don't know if you can say that's true. I don't know if there's any musician or artist since that time that has influenced the clothing style and the look of a generation across the globe.

Speaker 1: 3:00

But it got me thinking about the times that I grew up in. I remember thinking, when I was certainly much younger, that I was awed at how much my grandmothers had seen from the time they were born and at the time they hadn't passed. When I was thinking about this they both passed in the late 80s, early 90s. When my grandmother, my father's mother, was born around 1912, she used to tell me about growing up on the farm. She lived in rural Arkansas and she used to think it very funny when my brother and I would be looking at the Sears catalog for Christmas presents. When Christmas was coming we'd be looking at Sears catalog. I talked about that also in previous episodes and she would say you know, when I was growing up the Sears catalog had a much different use. We were excited for it for a much different use. Well, of course, there wasn't really toilet paper back in that time.

Speaker 1: 4:01

Thinking about how she grew up on a farm where there was an outhouse, there was not indoor plumbing and then she was there at the advent. She was a young girl when the plane first happened, when automobiles really became a sensation when electricity began to come into everyone's home, coming to everyone's home. International flights began, radio became huge Movies and then talking movies became a big thing. She was there for World War I. She was there for the Great Depression, she experienced World War II, the communist threat of the 1950s, television becoming part of the family life All of those things in a very short span of time. And for myself and those other baby boomers like myself, I think about what has changed and how much has changed since I first stepped onto the planet back in the late 50s. In my lifetime I've seen remarkable things. Things that were just science fiction or fantasy or a dream are now reality. So I think back to that meme that I saw on social media talking about our music and the times we grew up in.

Speaker 1: 5:20

But in my lifetime, when I was a young boy, what we did was we went outside, we played with our bicycles, we went on picnics, we drank water from the hose on the side of the house. We didn't go inside to get a drink. We certainly didn't carry water around with us all the time. If we did, we put it into a canteen, probably because we were playing army, maybe cowboys and Indians. We went to bed early and we woke up early Saturday morning. Cartoons were what we lived for on the weekends Sitting in front of the TV eating a bowl of cereal and watching the Flintstones and Bugs Bunny and Popeye. Then in the afternoon or the morning we'd go out and play. We had like a circle in front of our house in Houston when I was a boy where two streets converged together and there was like a huge circle in the middle. Our house was right in part of that circle so we would play kickball. It was a perfect kickball or softball field but we played kickball all the time.

Speaker 1: 6:24

The family across the street, the mother, worked for NASA and so was always bringing home to us information about the new space program. You'd go around Houston. You would see the astronauts. They were our heroes. You knew them like you knew baseball heroes on baseball cards. I still remember meeting Alan Shepard, as my father dropped off something at the post office one night after work and we walked in and Alan Shepard was in there checking his PO box. He got his autograph.

Speaker 1: 6:54

I don't know where that is, it's somewhere and that was both really cool and kind of commonplace and everyday when you lived in Houston at the time when I was growing up, there was no Disney World. There was Disneyland and we watched on Sunday night the wonderful world of Disney. I remember watching when the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and that started that entire craze. I remember the assassination of John Kennedy and then, a few years later, martin Luther King Jr, robert Kennedy, the assassination of Medgar Evers I didn't know who that was at the time, or Malcolm X, but now I know. Now I know the significance of it all and how horrible it all was, how the world was changing riots in the streets, demonstrations In the classrooms we were learning about the wonder of history and of America while not being taught some of the darker aspects of it.

Speaker 1: 7:52

While we talked about the Civil War, we did not really talk about the treatment of African Americans before the Civil War, nor after the Civil War. My mother was political, which I've mentioned before, and so she made sure we understood how important the Civil Rights Act was. She made sure we understood how important it was that young men were dying in Vietnam. We were the first generation that had a war coming to our living rooms on TV with the Vietnam War and as my brother came of age three years before me and got closer to the draft, my mother vowing we would move to Canada before she would ever allow either of her sons to fight an immoral war. The Beatles broke up, the Rolling Stones went on.

Speaker 1: 8:36

The 70s came Richard Nixon in the White House, then Watergate and the first president to ever resign. Came Richard Nixon in the White House, then Watergate and the first president to ever resign, richard Nixon. The 70s disco, the drug culture continuing. In the 1980s there was the talk of something miraculous. It was called a VCR. We were able to now go to a store and rent a movie and bring it home and watch it. You didn't have to wait for it to show up on TV and there were no commercials. Something called Blockbuster appeared Rent a movie, two movies, three movies, and bring them home and have parties. The microwave came along, revolutionizing how you cook. Suddenly, a meal that was going to take a very long time could be done in just a few moments. Color TV came to my family in the late 60s. Flat screen TVs came along in the 2000s. Man walked on the moon. July of 1969, just 11 days before my 12th birthday.

Speaker 1: 9:30

Computers I remember in high school taking something called computer math, where they taught us about computers because they said it was going to change our lives, and they certainly were right. On Star Trek they used to flip open a communicator and in my lifetime I saw landlines go away and mobile phones that you flipped open to talk to people the miracle of beepers. Someone could just type in a number on their phone and they could call you and then you'd get the message on this little device on your belt or in your purse or in your pocket and then you'd call them back. The beeper disappeared once cell phones really came into being. And then, of course, the Internet. What bigger than the Internet, something that has changed us so quickly? I remember when the first computer we got in the mid-'90s or late-'90s and just being able to type emails emails, that was modems. You'd have to plug it in, the phone would ring, it would cut off your connection. Computers cost a lot of money, but they opened up an entire world AOL, being able to see people and places in other worlds still not live, though not in real time. And all of that changed with Facebook, social media and now we have computers that we carry around in our hands.

Speaker 1: 10:41

So much has changed in my lifetime, so is my life, and the times of the baby boomers the best of times? Well, it is for me, because it's the time I live in and it's the time I lived in, culturally, socially, politically. Has anything ever been as big or important as the age of the baby boomers? I'd love your thoughts on that. Be sure you scroll down and leave me a message. It says leave me a message right in the show notes there. You click on that, I'll take it and speak pipe. You can leave me a 90 second message. I would love to hear your thoughts about growing up, about the memories that you have, the inventions that changed your life and that indeed changed the world. So much has changed and continues to every single day. Be sure that the one thing that doesn't change, though, is your commitment to making the world a better place, because as long as we do that, then the time that we live in right now will always be the best time to be alive.

Speaker 1: 11:42

My friends, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Bill Monty's Guide for Getting Older. If so, please hit that follow or subscribe button. That helps us to grow the show, and it also will notify you when a new episode drops. It's free. There's no charge for it. So I invite you to please go ahead and follow us or subscribe. Hit that like button, make a comment, please share with your family and friends and, above all, I ask you, please be safe and be kind.

Speaker 1: 12:10

Hey friends, thank you for staying till the end of the show. As I've mentioned before, that helps us so much with platforms like Spotify and Apple and Amazon. The longer you listen, the more ears they will put us in front of, so I do appreciate that so much. And a reminder please join us on our new social media platform, blue Sky. We're moving everything off of Facebook and we're moving over to Blue Sky. As a matter of fact, we're already there. So please join us on Blue Sky. Just look for Bill Monte Podcaster and become a part of our starter pack. Until next time, take care, so start feeling bolder. Welcome to Bill Monty's Guide for Getting Older.