Ah, the good old days. Do you remember them?
We were younger then. We were freer then. We used to have so much fun.
If only we could get back to those good old days. Even the nostalgia isn’t as good now as it used to be.
It’s my 44th birthday on Sunday, so this is a good time to talk about the past, and why you might think you want to live there.
Why the past is always greener
We make up our memories as we go along. Memory is fiction, “based on a true story” or “inspired by true events”, as Hollywood puts it.
And we’re selective about what we remember. As we get older, our memory for positive past events becomes better than for negative past events. (We remember strongly negative events in more detail, but all else being equal we’re more likely to remember the positives about the past.)
That inevitably means that the present suffers by comparison. The negatives about the past slowly drop out, as we forget that when we were young we had no money, we had no sense, we had less control over our lives, and a lot of the time life was hard and painful. We remember the good times.
Everything falls apart
One of the things I remember vividly from my time at high school was coming across this quotation in one of my history texts:
This modern age is corrupt and corrupting, bespattering men with its evil imaginations, while its filth, spreading to others, goes on increasing without end.
The reason it struck me so powerfully was that the author, Guibert of Nogent, died in 1124.
Now, in medieval times it was common to think of the past as a golden age and look back on the high civilisations of the Greeks and Romans as having been a peak that we’d since declined from, but there are still plenty of Guiberts around today.
Politicians take advantage of this, as they do of every flaw in our thinking. There’s always at least one politician around whose answer to everything is to turn the clock back 20 or 30 years – back to the “good old days”. You know, when men were men, women were women, and everyone knew the difference and respected it. There was respect in those days. And if we just went back to doing things like we did them then, those good times would return, the people who don’t look like you would keep their heads down and do as they were told, and there’d be jam for everyone. Jam, I tell you!
This kind of rhetoric is designed to put you in the mindset of a child – dependent, kept safe by someone who knows more than you, relying on them to provide safety and certainty. And that’s an attractive proposition, until you realise that you’d be giving up your freedom in exchange.
The best part about the past was the future
Read some 1950s or 1960s futurism some time. It’s beautifully utopian. Here’s an article from 1968, the year after I was born, predicting what life will be like in 2008.
Automatically controlled cars take us at 250mph between domed, climate-controlled cities. Modular homes that need no maintenance can be built in a day. In these pleasant surroundings, “the housewife” (who appears to have almost nothing to do, since automated machinery takes care of all the household chores) serves meals on disposable plastic plates. (The author was pretty accurate on computers and communication technology, surprisingly, but the coming changes in the status of women and environmental issues seem to have passed under his predictive radar. My guess is that he was an engineer.)
The average workday is about 4 hours, but you need to do 2 hours of study a day (through that wonderful educational medium, television) just to keep up with the pace of change. You go on holiday to undersea resorts or space sattelites.
And, of course, heart disease has virtually been eliminated by drugs and diet. Because people are perfectly rational and would never live lifestyles that would harm them.
The best thing about the good old days is probably that we had opportunities and possibilities opening before us – in fact, we were changing. That’s where the hopeful tone of the retro-future comes from. There was a vast opportunity opening up to create the life we wanted to live – filled with leisure, enabling us to be healthy, wealthy and wise, able to do anything we could imagine.
The experience we actually had, as we went through those changes, was different. The real future turns out not to be nearly so frictionless and convenient. There are unintended consequences to our decisions (individual and collective). We end up in a web of responsibilities and obligations, and our youthful hopefulness gets trapped, buzzes for a while like a doomed fly, and then gets the juices sucked out of it and is left a hollow husk.
The old days become the good old days, when we hadn’t yet made those decisions and commitments that haven’t worked out as well for us as we hoped.
And so we idealise those times, and without realising it, orient ourselves towards trying to be those people again. It’s not only buying a sports car that marks a mid-life crisis. It’s about wanting it all – the uncommittedness and flexibility of youth as well as the connectedness, prosperity and power of middle age.
You know what scares me? I’m getting back in touch with a few people I was at university with, and some of them – by no means all – don’t seem to have changed their opinions since I caught up with them last. They seem to think that the level of insight that we had at the age of 22 was deep enough to carry them through the rest of their lives.
Or have they gone out and explored and then come back round? At twice that age, are they trying to return to that certainty, that feeling of “I may not have much ability to affect the world, but at least I’m right”? I don’t know.
What I do know is that if your best years are behind you when you’re middle-aged, you’re doing something wrong.
Change, progress and growth
Change isn’t always for the better. “Progress” for its own sake, that replaces things that are deeply valuable (like old-growth forests) with things that are superficially valuable (like consumer products), doesn’t get my vote. We have to distinguish between growth and death, between creation of new possibilities and destruction of the branch on which we sit.
Just because you’re changing doesn’t mean you’re progressing. And just because you’re progressing doesn’t mean you’re growing, either.
Action Now
So here’s an exercise for the middle-aged among us.
- Think back to a time when you were young, when you looked forward to possibilities and opportunities. Make it as vivid a memory as possible, using all your senses. If you were young in the 80s, like I was, for example, think about flouro clothing and those twirly patterns people wore, and the big hair, and the music with the synthesizers and guitars. Sit in that feeling of potential.
- Now imagine you’re packaging or bottling that feeling of potential, of excitement about the future, of opportunities for growth opening up all around you. Give it a shape and a colour.
- Now bring the package or bottle with you into your present life. Open it up and let it infuse you, let it integrate into your adult, capable, connected self.
- Look around you mentally and see the possibilities and opportunities you have now. Feel the enthusiasm and excitement about them.
- Now get up and do something to start making one of those possibilities into a reality – a reality that will challenge you, help you grow and develop and become a more amazing person.
This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life.
