Your brain is lying to you about the “good old days”

Vox reader Dov Stein asks: Why do people think the past was better when so many things have improved?

That’s a very good question, one that I’ve thought about a lot as someone who runs a section of Vox dedicated in part to covering how meaningful economic and scientific and social progress can and has been.

Nothing new about yearning for a supposed golden ageor The feeling that the present does not measure up to an imagined past. But you’re right that the hatred of today seems worse these days – and you’re right that the hatred ignores all the many, many ways in which today is better than yesterday.

Much of the world is gripped by a politics of nostalgia, one based on the assumption that we need to go back in time to a time when everything was better. After all, what is “Make America Great Again” but a slogan that unequivocally argues that the US was great, once; not much, now; and become great, again, by turning back the clock. It’s not just a right-wing thing – climate change politics is based on the idea that the climate of the past was the best.

I share your frustration so many people miss those ways where the present has progressed in the past. It’s not really our fault: Humans have short and bad memories, which leads us to forget how bad things were even in the recent past, and take for granted the improvements that have been made. But it goes deeper.

Do people wish they could turn back the clock?

Obviously! A 2023 survey from the Pew Research Center found that nearly six in ten US respondents said life was better for people like they were 50 years ago. While some groups, such as Republicans and seniors, are more likely to say the past was better than the present, these sentiments are widespread. And that nostalgia is deepening — the share of Americans who say life is worse now than it was was up 15 percent in 2023 from two years earlier.

This is not an American phenomenon either. Another Pew poll, it is from 2018surveyed people from 27 countries. In 15 of them, a plurality of respondents reported that the financial situation of the average people in their country was better 20 years ago than it is now. A poll by YouGov of people in the UK found that 70 percent of respondents felt the world was getting worse, compared to less than 10 percent who felt it was getting better. (Although to be honest, the UK has one extreme 21st century.)

Beyond the polls, there is evidence that popular culture is stuck in a nostalgia loop of the past. According to MRC Data, a music analytics firm, old songs represent about 70 percent of the US music market, while the market for new music is actually shrinking. Movies and TV programs turn around too much of sequels and reboots, keep mining the same old stories. (In 2024, nine of the top 10 highest-grossing movies were sequels — and the one exception, BADan adaptation of a 21-year-old Broadway musical which is an adaptation of a 29-year-old novel which is a prequel to an 85-year-old movie which is, itself, an adaptation of the 124- year-old. old novel. Well.)

You see a lot nostalgia politics memes like this:

Were things better in the old days?

Put aside pop culture like movies or music, where I think we can all agree that whatever happened when you were 15 to 25 years old represents the pinnacle of human development, the answer is: no, definitely not, almost entirely.

Get the meme above. As Matthew Yglesias WROTEthe argument implied by nostalgia political memes is that “the material standards of living of the typical American family have worsened since the post-WWII era. This is completely false.”

Is it always! Beyond the fact that we have access to all kinds of technology that didn’t exist 70 years ago even the richest people on the planet, Americans more, richer now than before. You can see that in everything from car ownership – which is twice as high today as it was in 1960 – to the size of our homes, which almost 25 percent larger on average than in 1960. An interesting statistic from Yglesias’ piece: In 1950, there was running water is common then because there is air conditioning now.

Just economics. Educational attainment — the percentage of Americans who graduate from high school or beyond — is greater today than before. While that is true college wasn’t that expensive back thenit is also rarer; A small proportion of the US population had a bachelor’s degree in 1960, while today more than a third of adults have such degrees.

Perhaps most important of all is social progress. The 1950s can be a great place if you’re like the family in the meme above – if you’re okay with drastically reduced living standards. But that’s not true if you’re a woman who wants to work, or a person of color, or LGBTQ, or disabled, or anyone other than a straight white man. In the 1950s, interracial marriage can still be bannedlaws against sodomy can still on the books for decadesand the Civil Rights Act is another decade. Oh, and we live under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation even more than what we are facing now.

And that’s just in America. In 1950, more than half the world lives in extreme poverty, meaning they lack enough money to afford a small place to stay, heat and enough food to prevent malnutrition. In 2018, it was close to 10 percent, even though the global population has more than tripled in that time period. Nearly 30 years have been added to the average global life expectancy since 1950 — that’s roughly equivalent to adding more lives for people. While the world is experiencing a democratic rebellion in recent years, do not forget that in 1950 three-quarters of global population lives what political scientists call “closed autocracies,” including most of Europe. Today less than 20 percent of the world’s population lives under such oppression.

Of course, saying that the past is better than the present means making a judgment about what we mean when we say “the past.” Not all improved, and sometimes periods of improvement are followed by periods of decline. The arc of history does not only go up and to the right. But if you step back a little, although you can see some dips, the trend lines are very clear.

So why? ACT too many people think that?

One reason, I think, is the reality of progress itself.

I said wrote late last yearas the world evolves politically and materially, so do our expectations. There is a term for this in climate science: “shifting baselines.” When things improve — by, say, developing a vaccine that essentially eradicates polio — we don’t remain in a constant state of gratitude that we don’t live with the same limitations and threats that our grandparents did. . We reset our expectations, and forget how things used to be. When progress stumbles — like the great recession of 2008 — we can’t stay grateful that we’re better off than we were. Instead, we are upset that we are a little worse off than we were a few years ago, even though we will almost certainly be better off a few years from now.

Our brain helps to trick us. Thanks to “selective memory,” people tend to forget negative events from the past, and reinforce positive memories. This is one reason why our feelings and memories about the past can be inaccurate – we literally forget the bad things and give the good things a nice, pleasant light. The further the memory goes, the stronger the tendency becomes.

We are also wary of change. Psychologists call this “loss aversion” – we fear that the pain of losing something is more painful than the benefit of gaining something. As a result, change can feel fundamentally scary, which also makes us feel more warm about the time before the change: the past.

Then there is the inexplicable pull of nostalgia. I mean it when I say that for most people, whatever movies or music were popular when they were kids is the “best” pop culture. What most of us wish for when we think that the past is better is not the past itself, but our past YOURSELF — when we were young. Because as things get better over time, we get older, along with everything that goes along with that experience. And no amount of progress – at least not yet – can reverse that.