"Everyone I know feels the same"

There's a reason the golden version is hard to give up, and it isn't a private one. Everyone agrees. Say it at a dinner table and you'll be nodded at all round. If the world hadn't got worse, how would so many people have noticed?

Go back to Mastroianni and Gilbert's seventy years. In every one of those years, everyone agreed. In nineteen sixty the dinner tables agreed that things had got worse since the war. In nineteen eighty-five they agreed that things had got worse since the sixties. The agreement was total and continuous and the measurements of the present didn't move. So agreement isn't evidence of decline. It's evidence that the fade and the exposure bias work on everyone, which they do, because they're features of memory and of what gets reported, and not of one person's temperament.

Consider who's at the table. People roughly your age, who lived through roughly the same years, whose bad memories have faded on roughly the same schedule, and who have been exposed to roughly the same bad news. Of course they agree. They're running the same instrument with the same error. If you put a table of twenty-five-year-olds next to you, they'd agree with each other too, and the years they'd be mourning would be the ones you're calling the decline.

And consider what agreement is for at a dinner table. It's a way of being together, and the golden version is one of the most reliable ways of being together that adults have. "Do you remember when" is an invitation, and "it was better then" is the handshake, and nobody's checking the claim because checking it isn't the point of the evening. That's fine. Chapter 21 is about visiting the past with other people, on purpose, because it's one of the good things the past is for. What it isn't is a survey.

There's a version of the pre-birth finding you can run at your own table. Ask the group whether things got worse between eighteen ninety and nineteen twenty. Nobody has a view. Ask whether they got worse between their own childhood and now, and everybody has a view and it's the same view. If the decline were in the world, it would be visible from anywhere. It's only visible from inside a life, looking back, and that tells you where it lives.