Feeling that the past was better is not a good sign for society.

Memory is an interesting area of research. How do molecules and/or electrical connections provide us with our memories? I was working out the other day and listening to a Beatles song. I immediately recalled driving in the 1980s on one of our long-haul family vacations. We had a pre-Walkman bulky Panasonic tape player connected to the car lighter via a relatively new type of connector. The tape player sat between the driver and navigator, as we had only physical maps in those days. The rule was that the driver chose the music, and here was the same song I had played in Wyoming over 40 years earlier. Nobody imagined touch screens or on-demand video. We had music beyond the AM radio, and we were happy.

While nobody would like to go back to outhouses, candles in place of electric lights, or a world with no air travel or internet, there still seem to be some qualitative life aspects that felt better back then. Before we had a cellphone constantly clamoring for our attention. Before we lived in a world of instant information and global news. I grew up in the generation that went after school to the park or rode bikes and was told to be home at 6 PM for dinner. There was no “Find My iPhone” tracking feature or cellphones to call or answer. We played with physical things, many of them just crude toys that were reimagined into weapons or tanks. Our computers weighed a lot, had green letters, and did very little. Printers were dot-matrix, and one had to remove the feeder holes from the sides of the pages. We had snowball fights and sat around for hours trying to figure out what to do Saturday night. When movies and bowling were ruled out, there was little to do beyond sit around and shoot the breeze or watch the Bulls lose.

My wife also recalls the Sabbath afternoons of her youth. People came out with oranges and ever-popular in Israel sunflower seeds and sat in the........

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