"Things were simpler then"

Here's a version of the golden version that sounds like plain description. Life was simpler. Fewer choices, fewer screens, fewer things to keep track of. You could just get on with it.

Simpler for whom? In the golden version you're twenty-three, and life is simple because most of its complexity is being held by someone else. Your parents have the mortgage. The government is a thing on the news. Your health is a thing you have. You don't know what the job market is doing because you're not in it yet, or you're in it at the bottom, where the view is short. The simplicity you remember isn't a property of the decade. It's a property of being twenty-three, and the people who were forty-five in nineteen ninety-six did not find it simple. They found it exactly as complicated as you find now, and they were sighing about nineteen seventy-one.

Some of the simplicity is real, and I'll grant it. There were fewer channels, fewer ways to be reached, fewer decisions to make about things that used to make themselves. That's a change in the world and not in you, and chapter 5 doesn't deny that some changes are. But look at what the golden version does with it. It takes a real change in the number of small decisions and turns it into a general claim that life was easier, and life wasn't easier. Life had the rent and the bad back and the friend who'd gone quiet. It had a different set of complications, held by a different set of people, and you were on the easy end of the distribution because you were young.

There's a thing knowledge does that's worth naming. The more you understand how anything works, the more complicated it looks. At twenty-three you didn't know how the health service was funded or what a pension was or why your parents were tense about the car. Now you do, and the world hasn't got more complicated, but your view of it has filled in, and a filled-in view looks like a complicated world. Eibach's finding from chapter 5 is at work here too. The change is in the observer.

Things were simpler then because you were simpler then, and knew less, and held less. The whole record, if you go back and look, has your parents at the kitchen table with the bank statements, and that was the same world, on the same day, in the same house as your simple summer.