I catch myself being nostalgic for the early 2000s. The internet felt new. Phones were for calling. Social media had not eaten everything yet. Things seemed simpler.
Then I remember that the early 2000s included a financial crisis that destroyed people’s retirements, a war that killed hundreds of thousands, and a job market that locked out an entire generation. The things I am nostalgic for, the MSN Messenger conversations, the forums, the sense of possibility, existed alongside genuine suffering that I was privileged enough to miss.
My nostalgia is someone else’s trauma. The golden age I remember was someone else’s dark times.
Memory does not record reality. Memory records highlights and edits out context. The good stuff gets preserved. The bad stuff fades. Time passes and all you remember are the highlights, and you wonder why the present feels worse. The present feels worse because you are living all of it, not just the highlights. The early 2000s had boring days and frustrating commutes and tedious work and personal struggles. You just do not remember those. You remember the good parts because that is what memory does. Someone ten years from now will be nostalgic for 2026. They will remember the good parts and forget the anxiety and the AI disruption and the housing crisis. They will look back on now as a simpler time. They will be wrong, just like we are wrong about the past.
There is no point in human history that was good for everyone. The roaring twenties were great if you were not poor or a minority. The post-war boom was great if you were a white man with a factory job. The eighties were great if you did not have AIDS or live in a country America was destabilising. Every era that gets romanticised was terrible for someone. Usually for a lot of someones. The nostalgia erases them. We remember the aesthetics and the music and the cultural artefacts, not the people who were suffering while those artefacts were being made. This is uncomfortable to sit with. You want to believe there was a better time. You want to believe things used to work. But things never worked for everyone. The working was always partial and the suffering was always present.
The tech industry is particularly bad about this. People wax nostalgic about the early days of computing, when everything was new and anyone could make a difference. Conveniently forgetting that the field was almost entirely white men and the barriers for everyone else were enormous. People remember the early web fondly, the blogs and forums and weird personal sites. Conveniently forgetting the harassment, the lack of moderation, the communities that formed around hate. The early web was great for some people and a nightmare for others. Even my nostalgia for early internet communities ignores the people who were excluded from those communities. The women who were harassed out. The minorities who were not welcome. The people who could not afford computers or internet access. My golden age was someone else’s locked door.
I am not saying the present is fine because the past was also bad. The present has real problems. Many things are genuinely getting worse. Criticism is valid and necessary. But nostalgia is not criticism. Nostalgia is a feeling that substitutes for analysis. It says things used to be better without asking better for whom. It romanticises an imagined past instead of understanding the real one. If you want to make things better, you need to understand what better actually means. Not just better for you. Not just better in the ways you notice. Better for the people who were suffering then and are suffering now. Better in ways that your nostalgia conveniently edits out.
Here is the flip side. Someone right now is having the time of their life. For someone, today is the good old days they will remember forever. A kid somewhere is discovering music that will define their youth. A couple somewhere is falling in love. A person somewhere is finally getting the opportunity they have been waiting for. The present, this messy anxious uncertain present, is someone’s highlight reel in formation. The future will be nostalgic for now. They will look back on 2026 and wonder why we did not appreciate what we had. They will be as wrong as we are about the past. But they will feel it just as strongly.
I still feel nostalgic sometimes. It is human. The feeling is not wrong. But I try to hold it lightly, knowing that it is partial, knowing that my good memories coexisted with suffering I did not see. The past was not better. It was different. Some things were better and some things were worse and it depends entirely on who you were and where you were and what you had.
The things I am nostalgic for were someone else’s dark times. I try to remember that. It does not make the nostalgia go away, but it makes me less confident that going backwards is the answer to anything.