Every generation has its own “golden age” myth. A time when things worked better, society was more cohesive, work was more secure, relationships were more authentic. It’s a powerful, reassuring narrative. Seen from the rearview mirror of memory, the past loses its sharp edges, its concrete asperities and its dull pains, retaining only soft lines and sepia tones. Perhaps, in some respects, this nostalgia is not entirely unfounded. It is true that in some phases of the second half of the twentieth century economic growth was robust, that work followed more linear paths. It is true that life was less exposed to the constant pressure of social media, less accelerated by permanent connection, less fragmented by global hypercompetition.

In these respects, a part of the collective memory captures something real and important. But if it is true that nostalgia intercepts fragments of reality, it is equally true that, if we shift our gaze to structural macro-data – health, education, living conditions, security – the story changes radically. And the idea of ​​an overall better past doesn’t hold up to the numbers.

A poor country

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Italy was a poor country, with living standards that we struggle to even imagine today. Life expectancy was just over half of what it is today. Death was a constant presence, many people did not reach adulthood, and old age was a rare milestone. There was no universal healthcare system, nor widespread life-saving drugs. Infant mortality was very high: at the beginning of the century an enormous proportion of children died in the first year of life. Losing a child was a tragically frequent event. The leap is also impressive on the education front. At the beginning of the twentieth century almost half of the population was illiterate and access to higher education was limited to a minority. Today illiteracy is residual, around 1%, and the vast majority of young people complete at least secondary school.

Education has changed skills

Education has become a right and a social norm. This has changed skills, opportunities, participation in public life. The housing and hygienic conditions were equally harsh. In many houses there was no running water or indoor toilets; overcrowding was frequent and diseases spread easily in unhealthy environments. Today almost all homes have toilets, electricity, drinking water, heating systems and comforts that a century ago would have seemed an unattainable luxury. Yet, today we have fears that we didn’t have yesterday. We live in a state of constant uncertainty and look to the future more as a threat than an opportunity. Why? Part of the answer lies in the period of great Italian growth in the 1960s, which went down in history as the “economic miracle”. In Italy in 1950 there were just 400 thousand cars in circulation; ten years later there were 2.5 million. Television, which initially cost as much as twelve months’ worth of an average income, quickly became the home of millions of families.

Social mobility

But the real driving force of that period was not simply the possession of goods, but the widespread feeling of advancement: social mobility. The social elevator was working at full speed. The children of the workers became employees, the children of the employees became managers. There was a perception that commitment and education guaranteed an almost automatic improvement in position compared to the previous generation. Today that elevator appears to have stalled, if not actually reversed. The web of the “work society” has replaced the rigid but clear structure of the “work society”. Trajectories have become fragmented, horizontal, precarious. Already since the mid-1990s the chances for a young man from a humble background to reach the top were many times lower than those of a son of professionals. Today, for the first time since the post-war period, those born between 1985 and 2000 represent a generation of “descendants”: young people who, despite being more educated than their parents, occupy less qualified and less paid professional positions. Human capital has grown, but its yield on the market has weakened, generating a sense of betrayal of the “social pact” which fuels nostalgia for a poorer but more promising past. A key to interpreting the discrepancy between objective well-being and perceived malaise is Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The American psychologist theorized that human needs are structured like a pyramid: at the base there are physiological needs (hunger, thirst) and safety needs; going up we find belonging, esteem and, at the top, self-realization. Italy in 1900 was at the base of the pyramid: people were fighting not to die of hunger or infection.

By 1960, most Italians had moved on to material security and belonging to a rising social class. Today most people have their primary needs amply satisfied. But, paradoxically, this very success has projected us towards the highest and most unstable steps of the pyramid: the search for self-realization, the balance between life and work, social recognition in a hypercompetitive world. The basic needs are “satiable”: once I have eaten and have a home, the need subsides. Top level needs, however, do not have a defined threshold. There is no point at which one can say: “that’s enough”. And it is in this absence of limits that performance anxiety arises. If yesterday the malaise was alienation from repetitive gestures in the factory – boredom and physical fatigue – today it is cognitive frenzy and the fear of irrelevance. In a society that has already achieved high standards of well-being, we are not satisfied with material security. We seek self-realization, balance, professional success, social recognition. Pressure no longer comes only from a hierarchical superior, but from horizontal comparison, amplified by social media, where the success of others often becomes the measure of our inadequacy. This happens because we do not evaluate well-being in absolute terms (“how much do I have?”), but in relative terms (“how much do I have compared to my neighbor?”).

We measure ourselves against a global elite

It is a mechanism that in sociology is called relative deprivation. If in 1950 the term of comparison was the neighbor on the landing, today, thanks to the smartphone, our “neighbor” is the influencer in Dubai or the successful colleague on LinkedIn. This uprooting of comparison from physical boundaries dramatically expands the sense of personal failure: we no longer measure ourselves against our real community, but with a filtered and idealized global elite. Then there is a further factor: the perception of risk. We live immersed in a continuous flow of information on economic crises, conflicts and environmental emergencies. Awareness of global risks is greater than in the past and this fuels a widespread sense of vulnerability, even in a context in which many structural indicators have improved. We have gained decades of life, but we have not yet learned how to fill them without being crushed by the weight of expectations. Perhaps the challenge of our time is not to demonstrate that we are better or worse today, but to learn to recognize real progress without denying new forms of anxiety. To prevent nostalgia from becoming an ideological refuge and to clearly address the uncertainties of a society that has gained decades of life, but has yet to learn to live its modernity peacefully.