Age of relative nostalgia dawns with greater appreciation

I have now reached an age where I can get quite nostalgic about the past, that point when you start measuring memories in decades rather than years.

When I was young I often heard adults my parents' and grandparents' generations talk about how "easy" they thought life was for young people, and that young people seemed to have no idea how fortunate they were compared to the hardships faced by the previous generations.

I, like many young people, would take such remarks with a pinch of salt, but I have recently started to better understand what they meant.

A little example from everyday life brought it home to me recently, something as mundane as buying groceries.

When I was a child, I often remember my mother coming home from buying the week's groceries at the supermarket. She would often complain how heavy the bags were and would show me the marks on her hands made by the straps of the plastic bags, due to sheer weight of what she was carrying. In addition, the nearest supermarket was a couple of kilometers away from our home and our family could not afford a car for long periods of my childhood.

Now, it is almost taken for granted that, with the mere effort of browsing on a smartphone or a computer, it is possible to order those goods and they arrive swiftly (generally within one hour) at our front doors, as e-commerce is now at a very advanced stage and the logistics system to support it is also highly developed.

Think of the time and effort that is saved as a result of this.

Then I imagine what life was like in my grandparents' generation (they were born in the early 1920s).There was even no such "luxury" as supermarkets in their day. The produce had to be obtained from a range of different shops, and there was no such "luxury" as picking whatever you wanted from the shelves. It would have been a case of waiting for the shopkeeper to get it for you.

In addition, they experienced two successive eras of hardship: the economic depression of the 1930s when many people could barely afford daily necessities, and the trying times of World War II when supplies were very short and most basic foodstuffs were rationed.

The fact that we can use our "telephones" today to order groceries and get them delivered would seem an unimaginable luxury to them, or even something from the realms of science fiction, as basic landline telephones to just make calls were beyond the reach of most ordinary people in those days.

It makes me wonder what things the next generations will take for granted which we will either consider to be an incredible luxury, or maybe even find difficult to imagine.

But how we view these things is based on our own experiences, what one generation thinks is a "luxury" is something that another generation will consider to be perfectly normal.

So when I look back at the times when my older relatives were comparing the situation with their younger days, I realize now that everything literally is "relative".

Contact the writer at ian@chinadaily.com.cn