You Won't Know the Good Old Days Were Happening

This essay is part of The Truths of Aging Nobody Talks About. A MORTL series on what it means to grow old in America.

There’s a particular kind of conversation that happens between people of a certain age. Someone mentions a period, a decade, a neighborhood, a stretch of years, and the room shifts. The voices get quieter. Someone says, "Those were the days," and everyone nods, and there’s a moment of collective mourning for something that, while it was happening, nobody particularly noticed.

This is one of the most disorienting truths about aging: you almost never know you’re in the good old days while you’re in them. The golden era is only visible in retrospect. While it’s happening, it’s just Tuesday.

Ask someone to identify the best period of their life and they’ll almost always name something that’s over. The years when the kids were young. The apartment in the city before the mortgage. The job that was hard but felt like it mattered. The friendship group that has since scattered. The body that could do things this body can’t.

What’s striking is how rarely people name the present. Even people who are, by any objective measure, living well, healthy, financially stable, in good relationships, tend to locate their best years in the past. This isn’t just pessimism. It’s a structural feature of how human memory works.

Memory isn’t a recording. It’s a reconstruction, and the reconstruction is heavily influenced by emotion. The periods we remember most vividly are the ones that were emotionally significant. Which often means the ones that are over, because endings create emotional significance that middles don't. The last day of summer is more memorable than the forty-third day of summer. The final year before a move is more vivid than the third year of a comfortable routine. We remember endings. We live through middles.

The psychological research on what’s sometimes called "impact bias" helps explain this.^[2] We’re systematically bad at predicting how we’ll feel about future events, we overestimate the impact of both good and bad things, and we’re also bad at accurately remembering how we felt about past events.

In one study, supporters of the candidate who won the 2000 U.S. presidential election overestimated afterward how happy they had been when it was decided. Periods of life that contained significant highs get remembered as better than they were to live through.^[2]

The good old days also weren’t uniformly good. The decade you’re nostalgic for also contained the argument that went on for three days, the job anxiety, the health scare, the money worry, the relationship that almost didn't make it. Memory edits those out, or softens them, or reframes them as the difficulties that made the good parts worth it.

What you’re nostalgic for isn’t the period as it actually was. It’s the period as your memory has reconstructed it, stripped of its mundanity and its difficulty and its uncertainty.

There’s also the question of what you were paying attention to at the time. A 2010 study sampled people’s thoughts and moods through the day on their phones. Their minds were somewhere other than what they were doing almost as often as not, and they were typically less happy when they were.^[4] A mind that’s somewhere else misses the day it’s in, and some of those days turn out to be the good old days.

Nostalgia isn’t inherently harmful. The research on it is actually more positive than you might expect. Nostalgia tends to bolster social bonds, increase positive self-regard, and generate positive affect, and loneliness is one of the things that triggers it.^[1] Looking back at good periods of your life with warmth isn’t the same as being stuck in the past.

The trap is when nostalgia becomes comparative. When the past stops being a source of warmth and becomes a standard against which the present is found wanting. When "those were the days" becomes "these aren’t the days." When the memory of a better time becomes evidence that the current time isn’t worth fully inhabiting.

This is a particularly common pattern in aging, and it has real costs. When you judge the present against the past, the present loses every time: less satisfaction, more rumination, less appetite for the relationships and activities still available to you. The past isn’t coming back. The question is whether you’re going to spend the present mourning it or living in it.

One of the most useful reframes available is the recognition that golden eras aren’t singular. Most people who have lived long enough have had more than one. A period in their 20s, a period in their 40s, perhaps a period they’re in right now without knowing it. The research on aging and wellbeing actually suggests that older adults, when they aren’t in the grip of nostalgia-as-comparison, report higher levels of emotional wellbeing than younger adults.^[3]

The emotional regulation that comes with experience, the clarity about what actually matters, the freedom from certain kinds of social anxiety. These are real advantages that tend to accumulate with age.

The possibility that you’re in a golden era right now, or that you could be, with some adjustment of attention, isn’t a consolation prize. It’s a genuine possibility. The question is whether you’re paying enough attention to notice.

"Be present" is the most repeated and least useful piece of advice in the modern wellness canon. It’s repeated so often that it’s lost all meaning. So here’s something more specific.

Three things help in practice: novelty, social connection, and physical engagement. Routines are the enemy of presence. Routines aren’t bad; the brain just stops paying attention to things it has seen before. Introducing novelty, new places, new activities, new conversations, forces the brain back into active engagement with what’s actually happening.

Social connection is the other major factor. The periods of life that people remember most vividly and most warmly are almost always periods of significant social connection. The apartment with the roommates, the years when the family was all together, the job with the team that actually liked each other. Investing in relationships isn’t just a source of happiness in the moment. It’s an investment in the quality of your future memories.

And finally: write things down. It doesn’t have to be a diary; a record is enough. The act of writing about an experience, even briefly, even badly, forces you to pay attention to it in a way that passive experience doesn’t. It also creates the raw material for future memory, which means that the good old days you’re living right now are more likely to be remembered as such if you have some record that they happened.

You won’t know the good old days are happening. That’s almost certainly true. But you can make it slightly less true, with attention and intention, than it would otherwise be.