Simpler or Harder?

Sometimes I feel like I miss a time period during which I wasn't even alive.  lol  I tend to idealize times past, especially the 50's in suburban America.  The I Love Lucy and Dick VanDyke illusion.  When all the women wore figure flattering dresses and spent their days cleaning, cooking, & socializing.  I think taking care of a house, especially if there's a kid, is a full-time job in itself, and now we're (women) expected to do all this PLUS enter into the workforce.  Really?  No wonder our kids are so screwed up!  Nobody has time to raise them properly!  I miss times past, when things like sewing, knitting, embroidery, cooking, these were all valued skills for a woman to have.  And people could spend an evening together just talking, and maybe playing music and singing together.  When women's legs were special.  When's the last time you heard a guy praising a woman's legs?  I've never heard it.  Ever.  Boobs, ass, yes.  But anyway.  Was this time really as great as it seems in retrospect?  It was relatively soon after a major war, so I suspect there were lots of people who had lost someone near and dear.  No air-conditioning I believe.  Frozen foods were a new and novel thing and it was much cheaper to use canned things.  Yuck.  I think some foods were just not available unless you lived in the area where they grew, and I think there just weren't as many recipes to provide variation @ dinner.  And you'd be cooking without air-conditioning.  I think people were more close-minded then.  Less acceptance for differences, whatever they might be, and a less empathetic view.  No internet!  I don't know how this....like.. ok, internet was not an everyday at-home thing when I was a kid.  Not for me, not for anyone.  But NOW...  I can't imagine being without it, really.  How would I LEARN anything?  I think I look at least 1 thing up on Wikipedia every single day.  And whenever I need a recipe for anything, look it up online!  How do I do this knit stitch?  Can I freeze this food?  Which side is the appendix on again (hopefully not the side of me that hurts right now)?  Where is Uruguay?  Who was Amy Winehouse?  When is the next Meg Cabot book coming out?  If I had to look all this stuff up by going to the library and pouring over books for hours...I probably just wouldn't bother, & I'd come to terms with being ignorant.  It'd SUCK!  So what do I really want?  I guess I want the impossible: all the benefits of our crazy, fast, commercial, artificial, computerized lives now, but going back to some of the more simple, innocent ways of the past.  PS: Kindle scares the crap outta me.  I can see a future with no books, everything electronic.  How Terrible!!  I may expand on why later.