The Past Is Always Rosier than the Future. Here’s Why

Humans hate uncertainty, our brains are hardwired to run away from situations that do not guarantee a certain desired outcome. Let alone the future, people don’t even like the present compared to the past. “The Good Old Days” everyone says, but there’s a huge bias that everyone has while saying that and perceiving the past differently.

If you’re like most people, you long for the days when things magically used to be stress-free, nothing used to go wrong, and things didn’t get out of hand. If not the above, at least you can’t remember what exactly stressed you out at that time and hence that must have been a great part of your life.

Let me break it to you, most times of your life are alike or in fact, the time before today has actually been worse. The monotony of the present is what hides the problems of the past, and makes you remember only the good part.

Humans are hardwired to be pessimistic about what comes next, it’s something ingrained into our survival mechanism. If humans got complacent, they would not go out in search of food and starve to death. In today’s world, if you get complacent and do not work towards your future, you can lose a lot, a lot of great opportunities that won’t come if you don’t go out and find a better place to work, a better place to stay and so on and probably a lot of money would be left on the table.

There’s another reason at play here, Confirmation Bias, it’s the bias you have towards something that your brain agrees to. If you think the past is bad, your brain will find occurrences of things that are bad, and if you think the past is good, your brain will find scenarios from the past likewise.

Most people are happy about what has happened long ago, but unhappy with what is happening right now or in the recent past or future, that’s because they remember those instances more vividly or the close future is much easier to predict than the distant future.

As time progresses, we lose more and more context of what happened long ago and what’s left is standout memories from that time, mostly positive because who wants to remember something painful. It’s simple, you wouldn’t remember something painful because it will give you pain when you think about it later, if it doesn’t pain you today to think about an instance in the past, your brain has accommodated that instance as something that leads to something better.

Old people saying “Oh the past used to be better, no technology, no phones, more peace” don’t really realize that we are living in one of the best times of human history, no large-scale wars, more peaceful governments, food on the table, assurance that an enemy country won’t suddenly invade your home and better connectivity and access to information at a level that even kings just a hundred years ago could have never dreamed of. There are positives to it and there are negatives to it, but as a whole, there are far more positives to today than there was in the past.

On a personal level, it’s easy to think that you just want to be a child again, but think again, almost no personal freedom, no responsibilities and complete dependence on others. I would choose today over the past ten times out of ten.

This pandemic might have spurred negative emotions in a lot of people, and they have the right to be worried and sad about all the losses in the world. But this is not the first time we are witnessing a pandemic, there have been many in the past, compared to them, we are just too lucky to be living through a pandemic where we have not lost on any facilities that were available to us pre-pandemic either. Food, Clothes, the Internet, Medication, Healthcare, you name it, it is all there even today and will be there long after you’re gone. Human innovation and the will to live a better life only creates a better world as we go along.

Yes, there are genuinely worrying aspects like Climate Change that even I have lost hope in because it’s a problem that, contrary to popular belief, we are facing today rather than the future. But there’s a silver lining, we are moving towards a time of greater use of renewable energy, less fossil fuel usage, and more efficient vehicles and processes. We can’t get rid of climate change, we are way past that, but we can minimize the damage and I am faithful, not optimistic, that we might do something good in the long haul.

So next time you feel it couldn’t get any worse, remember that it can, and when you long for the good old days, remember that at that point too, you were looking for a better future.

It is important to realize that you are actually living through one of your future ‘Good Old Days’ and even though there might be better days ahead or behind you, today’s still a gift and there’s no other option, it only gets better with time!