It’s funny, isn’t it – every generation’s “good old days”, and the advent of what they say was the “greatest music ever”, usually happens to coincide with their childhood and early adulthood.
Oddly enough, the time they feel the world started going to ruin also follows a typical timeline (roughly when they started paying taxes and being forced to choose what to eat for dinner every evening).
But that doesn’t mean that the past really was much better, and it’s not necessarily just nostalgia.
At least, that’s according to a phenomenon known as “rosy retrospection”.
What is “rosy retrospection”?
If nostalgia means looking sentimentally and wistfully at the past, “rosy retrospection” is “a bias where individuals judge the past as being disproportionally superior to the present,” a 2022 paper reads.
And that distinction is important, the authors wrote.
Though nostalgia was on...
English (US)