Particularly - America.
I personally have found that, I live in the past to cope. Nostalgia is my drug. It sometimes doesn’t help because all it does is that it makes me yearn and beg for things to be back to where things were. Because it warps my mind into opening time capsules whenever I watch an old show or listen to an episode of some niche radio show that long stopped producing new material.
However, it helps because, it at least reminds me that there are some things that I can revisit. If I couldn’t revisit anything, play the games I played, read the books I read, watched the movies/shows I used to, then I’d be up shit’s creek because I’d have to face the fucked up things people consider what are the ‘best that’s offered’.
I take a different approach.
I more lean into now than on a faded memory skewed by time and misremembering. Don’t get me wrong, I like nostalgia too, but I’m careful to not get too wrapped up in it because those good times were also found while wading neck deep in bullshit then too. Not to mention, my world view was much more naive, less discerning, and simplistic.
This isn’t the world I grew up in, but just like then, there are good times to be found now. I just have to open myself up to them in spite of myself because of my natural tendencies toward a realist/pessimist view.