I catch myself saying “things used to be better” and forgetting how bad things were. Everyone does. Every generation mourns declining standards, weakening morals, lost golden ages. “Restoration” rhetoric works because it promises a return to a state that never existed as we remember it.
The reflex has evolutionary roots. Organisms that braced for the worst outlived the optimists. We inherited that threat-detection bias and now aim it at abstractions—social cohesion, educational quality, political discourse.
The distortion is measurable. Crime rates drop while people swear crime is rising. Lifespans stretch while nostalgia insists we were healthier before. Literacy spreads while critics declare reading levels collapsed. The narrative feels true despite the data.
The military taught me to separate real deterioration from expected friction. New recruits always seem worse than my cohort—until I remember how unprepared I was. Systems look more chaotic from inside than from outside. The mission always feels harder than the last one.
Knowing the bias doesn’t kill it. When something feels like decline, I ask: compared to when, measured how, filtered through whose memory? The answer shows I’m tracking a story that fits my assumptions, not what’s happening.
The most dangerous version: believing decline narratives about my own capabilities as I age, turning a bias into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Sources:
- Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (2018)
- Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018)
- Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011)
- Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence (2013)