I saw an ancient meme on Reddit the other day, something along the lines of “in 10 years you’ll want to go back to now because the good old days are happening and we don’t even know it.”

A lot of the people in the comments argued that we are absolutely not in the good old days with all the shit that’s going on in the world, or some people because of all the stress they’re dealing with in their personal lives.

That might be true for them, but even some of the bad times are padded with a lot of good times for me. Like when my partner and I were dirt poor living in a tiny apartment in a bad neighborhood. We were miserable a lot. Sewage backed up into the toilet and shower a lot. We had black mold. We’d wake up in the morning to random tweakers sleeping on our porch, using our outdoor power outlet to charge their phones. One time the SWAT team kicked in our neighbor’s door on the other side of the duplex. Turned out she had literal pounds of meth right on the other side of our bedroom wall and she’d been selling it as long as she’d lived there.

We still made good memories though. Our first concert together, our first BIG concert together, our first car purchase from a dealership, and plenty of personal family memories.

That was during the first big waves of COVID and the riots after George Floyd was brutally murdered by the police. The war in Ukraine started a couple years later, now the war in Palestine is raging and shit has just been getting worse and worse. That’s not our entire lives though. We’ve made so many good memories together, even with all the insanity and polarization going on in the world.

We hit our five year anniversary at the beginning of this year. I’ll look back on that fondly. We got our very first house together and now we live in a great neighborhood with a big beautiful yard, adjacent to a huge open field where we get to watch deer and groundhogs run around. We caught our cat Zoey hanging out with a deer a few weeks after we moved in. Literally. Hanging out with a deer. We can actually order a package and it’ll still be on the porch when we go out to look for it. We have a goddamn hot tub now, for fuck’s sake. We’ve both grown so much as individuals that we’re completely indistinguishable from who we were 10 years ago, and we’ll probably be even more different in another 10 years.

The world has always been fucked up. My grandparents lived through The Great Depression and World War 2 but they still had plenty of fond memories of their lives back then. My parents and their siblings lived through the war in Vietnam and most of them fought in it and came back in pretty bad shape. They still have good stories and other memories from back in their day. Don’t let the noise of a cruel world get in the way of living for today.