Past, present or future? When we want to live reveals what we believe

If I lived in 1926 or 1826 or earlier, I would be a visionary lunatic, talking about electric cars and smartphones and the Internet and food delivery services and daily showers.

I'd also be dead quickly since I'm a Type 1 diabetic and insulin wasn't invented until 1921.

But it's not just the obvious shortcoming. In a time-travel scenario, I would be absolutely useless in describing how the internet works or what satellites are or how to make a refrigerator. I couldn't tell anyone how microwave ovens work or how we can be vaccinated against smallpox or how televisions somehow capture pictures being "transmitted" from somewhere distant and show up on a box in our houses.

Meanwhile, I'd be totally unprepared to be a farmer or work in a factory. My college education would be no help in working a wood-burning oven or washing clothes without a Maytag.

Yeah, I'd be terrible in the past. Maybe you would be, too (although I suspect you know more about how things work than I do. Other than "unplug it, count to 10 and plug it back in," I don't know how to fix things).

Would you want to live in the past? To exist in what's perceived as a simpler, less busy, more friendly time, when neighbors knew each other and we didn't have a million things competing for our attention. By that, I mean we were less "busy" because it took 10 hours a day to maintain a house and most jobs required six days a week, 10 hours a day (unless you were a farmer, when it was seven days a week, 12 hours a day). When we didn't have a million things competing for our attention because we were trying to survive simple infections.

Apparently, many Americans would prefer to live in the past: According to a YouGov poll from last year, 45% of Americans would prefer to live in the past, with 25% preferring sometime in the past 50 years (perhaps the 1980s, when cocaine fueled America and Joey Buttafuoco was a celebrity? Perhaps the 1990s, when we all were watching the O.J. Simpson trial?). Another 20% would prefer anytime before 1976 (maybe 1919, when nearly 1% of Americans died of the Spanish flu and the Ku Klux Klan was running large parts of the country? Maybe 1776, when the American Revolution began and the average life span was 38 years? Maybe 1224, when most people took a couple of baths a year?).

When asked, people have misty, water-colored memories (from "The Way We Were," a song from more than 50 years ago) of the past. 

The key point highlighted by the authors of an article on the survey is that far more people would chose to live in the past than the future, with just 14% of people saying they'd like to live in the future. Another 40% said they like the present.

When broken down by demographics, far more Republicans and white people prefer the past – particularly the more distant past. Surprisingly to me, as many women wish to live in the past as do men, suggesting they're more familiar with the "Little House on the Prairie" books than the fact that women couldn't get a house mortgage without a male co-signer until 1974.

My suspicion is that popular media dramatically influences how we view the past and future. Many movies about the past romanticize life – when honor was above all, when families were close, when romance was real, when people were patriotic and passionate and willing to sacrifice. Hollywood doesn't make many movies about dreary lives of people who lived their entire 35-year existent on a remote farm, working to survive with a spouse who was their only option and then dying of consumption.

Meanwhile, futuristic movies, books and TV shows involve all-controlling entities forcing people to wear monochromatic uniforms and being oppressed with very little chance to break from the enforced conformity. We want to live in the times of "Outlander," not in the times of "Soylent Green" (Wait. I just checked and "Soylent Green" is set in 2022. What? But I stand by my point).

I'm risk-averse. Given the choice, I definitely don't want to go to the past (where I would be the inept, confused, pathetic dying diabetic) and I fear the future (with AI programs dictating what we do, while "Everything you think, do and say is in the pill you took today," as it says in the song "In the Year 2525").

I'll take the present, where other people can worry about how smartphones and microwaves work and I can benefit from refrigeration. And I can Google when "Soylent Green" took place.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.