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A more intangible quantity has thus to be reckoned in a period's sense of its own wellbeing. People speak about a declining "quality of life." Those who are discontented with the present are apt to have selective memories of a better past and forget, what went with it— the petty tyrannies that were possible in office, factory or domestic household, where one could lose his job at an employer's whim and could count on few if any benefits if given the sack. But those who in their own lives have since gained by shorter hours, better quarters, safer conditions and coffee breaks have also lost something when they in turn become customers and consumers: a decline in store manners and helpfulness, clothes and articles more carelessly made, service and workmanship less dependable. One man's easier life is bought with another's frustrations.
More than the daily round of frustrations, what distresses many people about the present is a nagging feeling of things out of control, a world approaching with too many people in it and too few resources to go around, an absence of faith that solutions are possible or leaders will be found to provide them. Rarely has this feeling been described with such elegant despair as that expressed by President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing of France: "The present world crisis . . . is not just a passing perturbation but in reality represents a permanent change. If we examine the major graphic curves that are drawn for the future by the phenomena of our times, you see that all of these curves lead to catastrophe."
In American terms, however, some of the curves are not worsening. The chances of nuclear war with Russia decline. Domestic politics is less edgy and disputes in U.S. society less disruptive than they were in the late '60s.
Some of the country's most conspicuous problems, in fact, stem not from worsening conditions but from an increased awareness of them. Injustices that earlier generations once silently accepted now have articulate spokesmen decrying them. Yet oddly enough these same people who work so hard for change take so little just satisfaction in the gains that have been made that they can hardly be called happy warriors. They even exaggerate their own pessimism out of a fear that public willingness to overcome obstacles would otherwise slacken. The result is that few times will pass into history like ours, having done so little to insist on its own merits.
Any past period that people somehow survived seems in retrospect more manageable than today's open-ended uncertainties. Daniel J. Boorstin, the social historian, believes that "the contemporary time is always the best time to live. It is a mistake to say the best age is one without problems."
If today is not the worst of times, it is not often seen as the best either, even by those who wear "Smile" buttons and say "Have a happy day." Perhaps an opinion poll would show that for most Americans, the vintage years may now seem—in the benign middle distance of memory—to have been at the turn of the '60s; Then hope in the direction of events seemed more buoyant and less under challenge than now. If one thinks only of civic well-being and its later decline, that period does indeed seem the best of times.