Why Do We Remember The Past As Better Than It Really Was?

It’s funny, isn’t it – every generation’s “good old days”, and the advent of what they say was the “greatest music ever”, usually happens to coincide with their childhood and early adulthood.

Oddly enough, the time they feel the world started going to ruin also follows a typical timeline (roughly when they started paying taxes and being forced to choose what to eat for dinner every evening).

But that doesn’t mean that the past really was much better, and it’s not necessarily just nostalgia.

At least, that’s according to a phenomenon known as “rosy retrospection”.

If nostalgia means looking sentimentally and wistfully at the past, “rosy retrospection” is “a bias where individuals judge the past as being disproportionally superior to the present,” a 2022 paper reads.

And that distinction is important, the authors wrote.

Though nostalgia was once thought of as a psychological disorder, we now think it may benefit our mental health and can even contribute to healthy ageing.

It might also help us to gauge how well we, and society, are progressing and offer comfort when we need it.

But researchers say rosy retrospection is linked to “denial, discounting, and indifference towards any shortcomings, impediments, or difficulties of associated past events,” and seeing the present world as worse.

It’s “unique” in that it pretty much always biases the person with it against the life they live now.

That can mean that you don’t appreciate positive changes, while nostalgia can make you grateful for something – like not having to lug a 760g mobile phone with you if you wanted to chat on-the-go.

Experts think this could be because our minds tend to focus on emotionally intense experiences, whether positive or negative.

And for many people, those are tightly packed into their early adulthood – as the authors said, “this period in life becomes for many an emotional bookmark within the mind against which most experiences are mentally compared and contrasted”.

That cognitive bias might make us “critical” or “impatient” of the way the world is now.

The authors of the 2022 paper suggest that it’s important to be aware of the biases inherent in rosy retrospection and, where possible, to build new moments to look back on later.