Tamagotchis, Flannel, and the Illusion of Simplicity
What I remember most about growing up in the 90s was the endless summers. When you’re young, there’s something almost sacred about the season because you have all the time in the world to go out and explore. And explore I did. Apart from spending entire days in the pool with Super Soakers, I vividly remember the screeching sounds of the internet and running to the bathroom during commercials. What’s missing from my memories is just as important as what remains: the internet was barely there, and notifications didn’t rule my life. In fact, the only thing making obnoxious sounds was the Tamagotchi, and luckily, I didn’t even own one, which spared me the guilt of letting a digital pet starve to death. Ultimately, the most palpable part of my reminiscing isn’t an object, but the feeling that life seemed simpler.
Yet here’s the paradox: those years didn’t feel simple at all. I was as anxious about the world, but in slightly different ways. Will the girl with the choker like me after giving her the CD mixtape I worked so hard on? Will people make fun of me for wearing flannel shirts? And do I really have to rewind the VHS tape before returning it? Which raises the question: Why do we consistently romanticize the past while being overwhelmed by the present? Psychology suggests that memory and time perception distort our view. This means we edit the past to look simpler than it actually was. Today feels overwhelming, but in 20 years it will look simple too. Maybe it already is, and we’re just too close to notice.
Why Memory Makes Yesterday Simple
When we think of the past as simpler, an important concept comes into play. Rosy retrospection is a cognitive bias that makes us remember the past more positively than we actually experienced it. The upside of this “rose-tinted glasses” phenomenon is that it helps us maintain a positive self-view and promotes our well-being. The “rose-tinted glasses” metaphor is appropriate because when under its spell, we see the past as having a pleasant glow around it. This is the case because the emotional intensity of the past tends to fade over time, allowing the positive aspects to become more prominent. The downside of overglamorizing the past is that it makes the present less appealing and the future hard to predict. If anything, this should have been called the “mud-stained glasses” effect. You know, the one where you look back at your teenage haircut.
This happens because our memory is different than that of a computer. While computers “compress” a file to retrieve it perfectly when necessary, our brain finds patterns and structures to store information efficiently. We don’t store a perfect recollection, but a general “gist-like” version of what happened. To save time and energy, our brain makes the past feel neat and coherent, even when it wasn’t. This phenomenon is called memory compression because our brain filters out the unnecessary details, keeping only the parts that seem meaningful. This explains why you’ll remember your first kiss forever, but not what you had for lunch yesterday.
Another important concept is the foreground effect. The present (or foreground) dominates our awareness because it’s happening right now. These present experiences involve uncertainty, decisions, and unfinished outcomes, which makes the present feel chaotic. The past (or background) involves a series of events that have happened already and therefore, recede into memory. Since the outcomes are known, they feel resolved and less complex as a consequence. In other words, we simplify the past as a background narrative because our attention is focused on the unresolved present. Basically, the past is like background music: you don’t notice it until someone points out you’ve been listening to Coldplay on repeat.
Decision Fatigue: Why the Cereal Aisle Is Basically a Horror Movie
The paradox of choice refers to the mental fatigue that happens when a person has too many options to choose from. This leads to difficulty making choices and reduced satisfaction when you finally make one. In extreme cases, choice overload leads to avoidance of decision-making entirely. This cognitive state is the result of our limited mental energy. We’re simply not meant to make a large number of choices. That’s why there’s always one guy in the cereal aisle staring at cornflakes like they hold the secrets of the universe. Every moment of your life, you have an unlimited number of choices, and this leads to uncertainty, choice, and risk.
Ultimately, that’s really the heart of it: too many choices feel overwhelming in the moment, but once they’re behind us, they collapse into a single, neat storyline. This is what makes the idea I introduced in the previous section so powerful. I’m referring, of course, to the idea of uncertainty vs. resolution. We see something that’s unresolved, like the present, as complex, but we see something we know how it turned out, like the past, as simple. The present feels heavy because every decision carries weight, and we don’t know how any of them will turn out. This constant ambiguity creates cognitive load because your brain is always thinking about possible “what ifs”. It’s why I lie awake at 3 AM wondering whether I should’ve gone to music school or bought Bitcoin in 2012.
Once something is resolved, its outcome is fixed. We no longer have multiple paths, but a single one: the one that happened. We might have experienced thousands of worries once, but as soon as the experience resolves, we’re left with the actual result and nothing else. When most people think about high school, they forget how they worried endlessly about grades, popularity, and their future. Now they look back and think, “Those were simple times.” At the time, though, it was a storm of unresolved uncertainty. All that stress gets erased, but somehow we all vividly remember the sound of dial-up internet. How else can we turn that screeching jingle we once cursed into a weirdly comforting lullaby of the past if not for nostalgia?
The Anxiety Tax on Freedom
But my original question doesn’t just concern modern science. Humans have struggled with time and meaning for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and philosophy has also provided its fair share of answers. Most of those answers come from existentialists. To existential philosophers like Heidegger and Sartre, the present embodies the idea of possibility, which leads to anxiety. The past, on the other hand, means closure. In other words, the uncertainty and freedom of choice make the present complex, and the past feels simple because it’s fixed. This explains why choosing a Netflix show or drafting an article is a dreadful experience as we do it, but when we think about it later on, we glamorize it.
As usual, Nietzsche has something meaningful to say on the matter. For the German philosopher, the present is heavy because you’re responsible for shaping it, but the past is light because it can’t be changed. There’s a heaviness to “now” because it demands responsibility, and there’s a lightness to “then” because it demands no agency at all.
Finally, the Greeks had a myth called the golden age, a legendary era of peace, prosperity, and innocence. The myth represents a longing for a lost and ideal past, a utopia of sorts that never existed. The people in this age were a “golden race” who lived without hardship, sorrow, or sickness. When they died, they’d do it peacefully, and they’d turn into benevolent deities. Although the Golden Age is specific to Greek mythology, all cultures have a unique variation of it. This means there’s a human need to envision a time free from suffering and conflict. Golden age thinking describes the fallacy of believing that the past was better than the present. We have a never-ending desire for a simpler, more harmonious existence, so the Golden Age myth will always persist.
High School Felt Like the End of the World, Until It Wasn’t
On a more personal level, we all have memories of apocalyptic moments that turned out trivial. Some of the things you worried about when you were a teenager felt important then, but now you can’t even remember them. You really wanted the girl with the plaid skirt to go to prom with you. Getting rejected felt like the end of the world, but now you can’t even recall her name.
Then there’s the fact that everyone claims that their generation was simpler and therefore better. This is another fallacy. I grew up without internet, my parents without phones, my grandparents without electricity, and my great-grandparents without antibiotics. Sure, life was simpler without electricity: you just went to bed when the sun did, which is very romantic until you remember winter exists. Although technically, the further you go back, the “simpler” things become, that doesn’t make them better. Living in a world of progress isn’t that bad. It’s amazing having access to vaccines, antibiotics, and a world where global poverty continues its historic decline.
When we think back about the 90s, we think of life before smartphones and how relaxed we all were. In reality, it was one of the most stressful decades in recent memory. Think Waco, Ruby Ridge, the LA Riots, Columbine, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and those are events that just happened in the US. Around the world, things weren’t that much better. There were genocides in both Bosnia and Rwanda, and the Persian Gulf War happened. We tend to think about the 90s as this perfect time in history, but we forget that there were major conflicts, terrorism, mass violence, and a series of natural disasters.
The world has seen a lot of progress since the 90s. We went from using cash and checks to making online payments. We booked trips through agencies, and now we use an app. Therapy, mindfulness, and stress management are no longer stigmatized. There are also better vaccines and improved cancer treatments. Sure, the ’90s had their moments, but at least today I can buy socks at 4 AM without leaving my bed. If that’s not progress, I don’t know what is.
Complexity Is Just Simplicity in Progress
The present is an unresolved plot with endless possibilities, but the past is a finished story. When you’re experiencing the present, it’s complete and utter chaos. As difficult as it is to accept, the moment the present becomes the past and the plot resolves, it’ll look neat and organized in our memory. There are some practical ways to “compress” the present like memory does later. We can journal, reflect, and even use storytelling. Moments of crisis, such as moving to a large city or getting divorced, can become funny anecdotes eventually.
As difficult as it is to understand, the present will one day look simple too. Recognizing the biases I mentioned throughout the article is important because it shows that “complexity” is often perception and not reality. Instead of idealizing the past or drowning in the present, notice how complexity eventually resolves into simplicity.
Conclusion: Back to Endless Summers
Although I think about the 90s with love and nostalgia because it gave us Tamagotchis, VHS tapes, and girls with chokers, the decade was as stressful as the present. In my mind, the 90s might look like an endless summer, but that’s because my brain carefully edited it to look that way. I simply chose to forget the other seasons and conveniently remembered the one I liked the most. Today will look simple in 20 years; the challenge is learning to see it that way now.
