"Everything's got worse"

The golden version has a wider form, and it's the one that gets talked about in pubs. Not that your life was better, but that the world was. Safer, kinder, simpler, more decent. Everything's got worse.

Richard Eibach, Lisa Libby and Thomas Gilovich, in 2003, looked at where that belief comes from. In survey data, they found that people who'd been through big personal changes, becoming a parent, a change in their money, were more likely to say the world had changed too, in things like crime and freedom. In experiments, they changed what people knew and found that the people then saw change in the world that wasn't there. And when they drew people's attention to the fact that they themselves had changed, the sense that the world had changed shrank, as long as people had the attention to spare to think it through. Their conclusion was that changes in the self get mistaken for changes in the world, and that this mistake helps produce the widespread belief that society is in decline.

Look at what's changed in you since the good old days. You've become a parent, perhaps, and a parent sees danger everywhere because a parent is supposed to. You've got older, and things that were exciting are now tiring. You know more, and knowing more about how things go wrong makes the world look like it goes wrong more. You've lost people, and a world with fewer of your people in it is a colder world, but it's colder for you, not in general. Every one of those is a change in the observer. Every one of them gets read as a change in what's observed.

There's a test you can run. Pick a thing that's got worse, and ask whether the person who made the observation has changed in a way that would make it look worse whether or not it was. Streets feel less safe. Are you walking them at midnight at twenty-five, or at seven with a pram at forty? Music has got worse. Are you listening to it the way you did at seventeen, all day, with nothing else to do? The answer won't always be that the world hasn't changed. Sometimes it has. But you'll be surprised how often the change is in the instrument.

Everything hasn't got worse. You've changed, and the world looks different through you, and the golden version is partly a portrait of the person you used to be, mistaken for a portrait of the times.