"It really was better then"

Start with the belief that holds the whole thing up. Not that the past seems better, but that it was, and that your memory is simply reporting the fact.

Richard Walker, John Skowronski and Charles Thompson, in 2003, reviewed a body of research on how people remember their own lives, and drew two conclusions. The first is that people record more pleasant than unpleasant events in the first place. The second, and the one that matters here, is what they called the fading affect bias. The feeling attached to an unpleasant memory fades faster than the feeling attached to a pleasant one. You remember that the thing happened, but the sting goes out of it, while the warmth of the good memories stays. Over years, the effect is that a stretch of life comes to feel better than it was lived, because the bad in it has cooled and the good hasn't.

Their review also noted something worth holding onto. In people who were mildly depressed, the bias was disrupted. The bad didn't fade. So the fade isn't a flaw. It's a healthy mind's way of carrying its own history, and the people who don't have it are worse off. What it isn't is accurate.

Think about what this means for the summer in the photograph. The summer had a rent problem and a relationship problem and a job problem, and at the time they took up a fair amount of the summer. Twenty years on, the memory of the problems is still there if you go looking, which is why the chapter 1 exercise works, but the feeling has drained out of them. The warmth of the beach hasn't drained. So when you go back, you get the beach at full strength and the rent at nothing, and that isn't the summer. It's the summer after the fade.

Now do the same for today. Today has a beach in it somewhere, and a rent problem, and both are at full strength because neither has had time to fade. So you're comparing a past with the bad cooled against a present with the bad still hot, and the past wins, and it will always win, and it would win even if the two were identical.

It really was good then. That's true. It wasn't better in the way the comparison says, because the comparison is between two different kinds of thing, and one of them has been through the fade. The rest of this book is about seeing the fade and correcting for it, and chapter 20 is about putting the problems back so that the two can be compared fairly.