The definition of "middle age" is pretty easy to work out. If you take your current age and double it and nobody is surprised that you have dies, then you are middle aged. I think that middle age officially beings at age 29, which helps to explain why the official age of ladies is 29... until it isn't. Likewise, "old age" follows a similar metric, where if you double someone's age and everyone would be really surprised that someone is still alive, then you are old. Probably old age begins at 51.
The days of my youth have long since been and gone. Some people my age have had children that are now old enough to have had children of their own. Scrolling through the Facebook (yes, being old gives you licence to add the definite article unnecessarily) is at times, less like a way to catch up with friends and family and more reminder that Tim Reaper with his Massey Ferguson Combine Harvester (he gave up with a scythe a long time ago) is coming very very slowly. In fact, the Reaper moves at 1 mile an hour (1.61km/h) and provided that you can walk faster than him, he will likely not catch you. Walk slower than that and he will keep his appointment. Heaven has a bus stop outside of the pearly gates and Hades has busted gates which are open all the time.
This leads me on to the nebulous term of "The Olden Days". I have now heard the question asked of parents younger than I (I do not have children), of what life was like in The Olden Days. To ask the question is an indicator that the person has enough imagination to realise that the world did not begin when they did. However, as for me who is older than I need to be, hearing the question is like paradigm shifting without the clutch; sparks are flying everywhere (and even now I realise that that turn of phrase indicates that I am old).
There is in fact a definitive test of when The Olden Days are. It is contained in the children's song; which goes:
"In the olden days, in the olden days,
For your grandma was a baby,
In the olden days."
Already, just like "middle age" and "old age", "The Olden Days" comes with a sliding scale depending on the user in question.
Let's assume that we are talking about the child, of the child, of someone that I went to school with. This would make the person that I went to school with, a grandma or grandpa. The scary thing is that for such a child, then The Olden Days would be when I was a baby; which would be the late 1970s. It is daft to think of The Olden Days as being an age of colour TV but there we are.
I have no idea what the youngest age of a grandma or grandpa is but it could be as early as 30. This would mean that 15 year olds are having children in repeated generations. In such and example, then The Olden Days which would be 30 years ago, would be before July 1992. I find it even more buckwild that The Olden Days is in an age of the internet (but just before Eternal September) and where Mario and Sonic The Hedgehog can be found of consoles.
For me as an old person, The Olden Days take you right back to the First World War. This is an age before most people have electricity, which also is before the internet, television, microwave ovens, radio, washing machines, and even electric light in most people's houses. It is before indoor toilets and maybe even before plumbed sewerage. It is even before the H1N1 Flu Pandemic; which means that The Olden Days also includes a time before the last major major pandemic.
Relative to me, The Olden Days contains the destruction of 60 million people due to flying metal projectiles because 9 cousins got angry at each other and then the demise of another 100 million people because of a tiny unseen enemy which the best defence at the time was wearing a mask and staying away from enclosed spaces. That's not hard to imagine. Relative to me, The Olden Days gets better with electric trains, cars, and the radio all waiting to be opened like presents for the world.
For my grandparents, The Olden Days will be before the days of electricity. People will have had to collect water from street pumps, fountains, rivers, and they they would have needed a fire going in their houses. There is no gas light, no gas cooking, and likely not even literacy en masse.
I do not think that I would have had fun. I can imagine working in an Olden Days office with physical account books and ledgers, perhaps reading the newspaper and novels, but that assumes that I wuld have been in an upper class family and not died before the age of 7 due to cholera.
What this says is that the sliding scale of The Olden Days is actually a useful window through which to view the world complexly. Humans occupy this strange country called "Now" which includes everything which currently exists. Things which have passed, things which have disappeared, things which have been superseded, can only be imagined. I for instance can imagine The Olden Days as it applies to me and I think that I would have coped reasonably well but even The Olden Days for my parents will put you back into a world without electricity. As it is, the world currently contains exactly zero people who come from a world entirely without electricity.
Applying the rules of logic here, The Olden Days relative to the child who asked the question that prompted this, is very likely to be in the age of the post-war baby boom. The Olden Days im this case includes radio and maybe television, and rock and roll, really cool cars, no franchise fast food places, greasy spoon cafes with bad coffee, no motorways, trams and electric trains and still some steam trains in active service, maybe dying of polio and cancer, and still with a hope that the world was going to get better... which it did... for a bit.
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