Your brain lies to you when it tells you it was better before

It is not new to think that the world of yesterday is better than that of today. It is also not new to fantasize about a so-called golden age, also past.

Many people are prey to this politics of nostalgia, with the desire to return to a time when – supposedly – ​​everything was better. This is also the strength of Donald Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again”, which implicitly underlines the loss of prestige of an idealized America. The time has therefore come to restore it to its past greatness. Bryan Walsh, editorial director of Vox, draws up this observation and explains to us how he understands this mechanism.

Apparently, he explains, people would even like to be able to go back in time. In any case, this is what a survey carried out in 2023 by the Pew Research Center indicates. In fact, six out of ten Americans said that life was better for people of the same social class fifty years ago. 15% of the American population surveyed also said that life today was worse than in the past. As we can see, it’s a real societal phenomenon.

But behind the polls is actually evidence that popular culture is stuck in a nostalgia loop. As MRC Data, a company that analyzes music trends, shows, 70% of the current music market in the United States is occupied by old songs. The same goes for films and series: nine of the ten most profitable films of the year 2024 were in fact sequels to previous chapters or remakes of old films. Nostalgia, when you hold us…

Bryan Walsh therefore suggests putting popular culture aside, while recognizing that everything we experienced musically between the ages of 15 and 25 represents the zenith of our personal life, even if this is false.

Old age and nostalgia, an unbeatable combo

As Matthew Iglesias, co-founder of the Vox site, points out, it is wrong to think that our material standard of living has deteriorated since the end of the Second World War. Americans are much wealthier today than they were in the 1960s. For example, car ownership rates are twice as high now as they were then. Air conditioning is now as accessible as running water was more than sixty-five years ago. In France, the standard of living has also increased since the 1970s, INSEE tells us.

So why do so many people feel the opposite way? Bryan Walsh suggests that part of the problem is progress itself. With the major technological advances experienced by our societies, our expectations are evolving accordingly. A scientific term describes precisely this process: the evolution of baselines. This reflects the idea that we do not remain in a constant state of gratitude for meaningful progress. Example: the polio vaccine, which virtually eliminates the disease, does not remind us that our grandparents were at risk of contracting it.

In fact, with selective memory, our brain deceives us. Humans have this unfortunate tendency to attenuate negative memories of the past to reinforce the positive imagination of their past life. Psychologists also highlight the apprehension of change in individuals. This is what they call “loss aversion.” Simply put, it means that we are often sad at the thought of losing something, while the benefits it can bring us seem less important.

The main problem is probably that we are all getting older, Bryan Walsh reminds us, with all the direct implications this has for our physical and mental health. And until proven otherwise, there is still no progress enabling us to combat this.