I didn’t know how good I had it at the time

A trend you’ll notice in memoirs, documentaries and autobiographies is when the character looks back on some particular period of their lives with fondness, gratitude and wonderment.

Maybe it was their childhood when they had boundless energy, no cell phones and romped around the neighborhood every afternoon until dark. Or adolescence when they were coming of age and the whole world was still in front of them. Or maybe it was during college when they had zero responsibilities but learning and partying and getting laid.

What about their twenties when they worked three jobs, lived off rice and beans and played in a softball league three nights a week?

Whatever that halcyon period was, the character always makes some version of the comment, those were the days, man. We didn’t know how good we had it back then.

Filmmakers do have a name for this. It’s called the nostalgia filter. It’s where the passage of time causes everything but the best to be rapidly forgotten.

The tricky part is, you can’t always tell what was a dream, a memory or a lie. Wait, did we actually reinvent our past? Were we misremembering our own life on purpose? Was it just cognitive bias at work?

Welles, the golden age filmmaker and actor, knew a thing or two about the nostalgia filter. He once wrote:

Rven if the good old days never existed, the fact that we can conceive of such a world is, in fact, an affirmation of the human spirit. That the imagination of man is capable of creating the myth of a more open, more generous time is not a sign of our folly.

My current theory on the nostalgia filter is as follows. Decide that you’re in the good old days right now. Remind yourself of your relatively good fortune today. Assume that this moment could be as good as it gets, and take pleasure in what you have right now.

Because you don’t want to live your life in a way where it’s only when you look back on it years from now that you think wow, I didn’t know how good I had it back then. That’s a choice we can all make right now. We don’t have to wait for the passage of time to appreciate the present.

Bezos famously coined the term called regret minimization framework, which was the model he used for decision making called. Jeff asked himself the question, in ten years, will you regret not doing this?

In his case, that meant participating in this new thing called the internet back in the early nineties. Which, as we all know by now, turned out to be a pretty wise investment. Bezos knew how good he had it, and didn’t take the moment for granted. If this is a struggle for you, you’re not alone.

Hell, it wasn’t until my thirties that I finally started accepting that nothing was missing for me right now. I actually wrote an animated folk rock opera based around this very idea. There’s one song in particular where the last thirty seconds is just repeats the same lyric over and over again.

This is it, this is as good as it gets, this is it, the best day of my life.

Try that mantra on for size, and see if it makes you feel like you’re living in the good old days right now.

Because in my experience, it’s not a helpful strategy to tell ourselves that today’s product is less than what it used to be.

Regret for our past is a waste of spirit.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
Are you misremembering your own life on purpose?