Your brain is lying to you about the “good old days” | Hacker News Reader

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

vox.com

15 pointslr013 comments

Rosy Retrospective Bias [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection

I wonder if all the examples are biased and cherry picked. I dont think all people talk about good old days, especially those who went through WWII, and certainly not 1950s or 1970s.

It seems to me as though one can talk about the good old days, talk about progress, talk about things getting better, worse, or anything in-between. There are countless examples to draw from and endless lines of reasoning. Sometimes it's an interesting conversation but often it's not—you get the same rehashing of historical events and what-about-this. But basically what I see is a never-ending ping-pong game of "it's getting better" and "actually it's getting worse" (and vice-versa).

I'm more interested in the next conversation, one which moves on from this banal stalemate. What if nothing is happening at all? What if the questions we're asking about memory, the past, and progress rest on faulty assumptions?

> It’s not just a right-wing thing — the politics of climate change is grounded in the idea that the climate of the past is the best one.

This seems like an extremely wild take on climate change.

Indeed. I guess I'm just foolishly nostalgic for a period 50 years ago when animal populations were double what they are now. https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/living-planet-report-2018

I mean, it's both true in a sense (nobody can predict the future; how can you know we're not accidentally going to create paradise on earth with all that CO2 and methane?), but also a fairly pithy insight.

With detailed records of the past via ice cores, today's climate is unprecedented. We're reasonably certain climate change is a bad thing. Very thinky and educated people have spent a long time looking into it. Oh look! Here comes a columnist who has observed that all those scientists can't predict the future! Checkmate, nerds!!!

I do think there is something to be said about the aspirational nature of life in some of these older memes. But, I'd wager we have some pretty high aspiration ads nowadays, too?

This is similar to the idea that the hit songs of a previous generation somehow are indicative of all songs for that generation.

Curious how this compares to all of the period dramas for the victorian age stuff. Do people really think life was that good during these times? Really?

> Beyond the fact that we have access to all kinds of technology that did not exist 70 years ago even for the richest people on the planet

This is a standard element of conservative/libertarian gaslighting: "Do not complain about your precarity or inequality, because you HAVE COLOR TV!!! OMG, NOT EVEN KINGS OF OLD, COLOR TV!@!! FOCUS ON THE TV, IT'S COLOR!!112!!"

> It’s not really our fault: Humans have memories that are both short and bad, which leads us to forget just how bad many things used to be in even the recent past, and take for granted the improvements that have been made.

That works both ways. Bad things can become the new normal, the degradation only clearly visible at the transition, then fogotten.

It's not just color TV. For example, people in the 2020's eat a lot more restaurant meals than people in the past did. Yet restaurant meals are more expensive today relative to other goods than they were in the past.

Virtually all consumables show similar patterns. For example, housing is significantly more expensive than it was in the past, yet square foot of living space per person has increased substantially.

Having a house would bring me a lot more happiness than a TV and eating frequently at a restaurant. In fact, having a house would bring me a lot more happiness than all tech improvements in the last 30 years combined.

> This is a standard element of conservative/libertarian gaslighting

I think a lot of things are worse than they once were, but there's also no other point in human history I'd rather live in than the present.

One thing does not need to exclude the other, and context is also important.

If the context is Pizza Hut, I'd say the good old days are the beginning of the 80's if you are old enough to remember it. Pizza Hut today have no soul IMHO.

Is the 50's the context, good old days would be the music (The Jarmels). But considering the VietNam war at the same time, it would be terrible times.

A young member of the chattering class tells us that everything is better and cites Matthew Iglesias.

The article is adorned with a picture of the 1950s. We are not talking about the 1950s, not even culturally. The 1950s were a boring period, which is universally acknowledged.

If you talk about culture, especially in Europe, look at 1850-1930.

If you talk economics, look at the 1990s. The chattering classes look at stock market indices, we look at employment, manufacturing, house prices and purchasing power.

So please, do not lecture me about "my brain" and have a look at your own.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com