Full disclosure: I have never read the Hagakure, I saw the quote in the movie Ghost Dog starring Forest Whitaker. It's a pretty good movie and you should watch it.

According to my grandma, the 50's was full of rampant adultery, interfamilial theft, tragic avoidable deaths, domestic abuse, alcohol abuse, and use of prostitutes.

There’s an old saying “life is better remembered than lived” and that statement holds true throughout history

"Never compare your life with someone else's highlight reel." That advice can be used in a chronological sense as well: "Never compare today's reality with yesterday's highlight reel."

If it were possible to go back in time, people who did so would then be nostalgic for the future they left behind.

The ancient Greeks idolized the past and believed they were only a few years away from seeing a total societal collapse.
The opening line in The Epic Of Gilgamesh (oldest recorded story) is reminiscing about "the ancient times" before the invention of bread.

My mum had a friend who in the 1970ies said: "we are living in the good old days" Everybody thought she was weird.

Theres actually a really good movie that has this message called Midnight in Paris. The main character is obsessed with 1920s era Paris and thinks it is the golden age. When he gets the opportunity to go back to the 20s, he realizes that a lot of the people idolize the 1800s and "wish they could back." This makes him realize that there is no perfect point in history, so he stops idolizing the past and learns to make the most of the time he lives in.

i don't get why we constantly need to yearn for the past with all of its flaws when we should instead yearn for a better present

History's final lesson: Reject nostalgia, embrace wisdom, build a better future.

What people really miss is being a child, not worrying about money or bills. Being young again and having your parents take care of you.

Seeing those old outtakes was intriguing.  When the acting slips off it shows how they really were back then and how they actually talked versus the over dramatized fast talk as seen in old movies.  It really makes them seem more human in that light.

remember when this was called "the myth of the 1950s"

My grandma remembers the 50s. She was repeatedly denied by her father to go to college despite her academic achievements. Her dad sent her brother instead only because he was a man. My grandma now describes her brother (who lives in a trailer off of social security) a failure.

Omg, the behind the scenes of the actors just makes them so much more human. They speak like normal people we would see today. The weird tone thing just vanishes. Really puts into perspective how that type of spoken mannerism was just  stylistic choice and not how actually people spoke back then

That “I don’t feel alive” line actually gave me chills

The reason why every generation always misses the “good ol’ days” is because those good ol’ days were during a time when the youthful minds didn’t understand how the world worked and simply was filled with wonder and joy of simple things. This is something that will continue to happen until we are gone as a whole

My wife and I married in 1975, and bought a house in 1978. One of the houses we looked had no inside toilet. It was built with one (here in Australia every house had inside toilets) but the English couple who later bought it and were now selling said to us, "There shouldn't be a toilet inside the house. So we had it removed." They'd got a plumber to install a toilet outside the back porch. Even in 1978 this couple thought that life in England in the 930s with the toilet in the back garden was the authority on household plumbing.

I remember in one of Ricky gervais’ comedy specials a couple years ago when he said something like “…. Well of course things were better then, you were a kid!” It seems that people are nostalgic for the past when they were kids because of how they felt and the lack of responsibilities they had.

I think it's reasonable to point out some things were better in the past without having to defend the position that everything was better in the past.