Simpler Times

 

Looking back is always under a calmer light.  There is a certain appeal to our history, as we see it without its stress or surrounding activity.  We tend to forget the rough edges and burnt smell.  We blur out the minor irritations and focus only on the pleasant aspects. 

Romanticizing the past, giving names like The Golden Age, lends an allure that the present doesn’t have.  It is as if our memory is an escape hatch from now, into a room we’ve furnished with our favorite things and painted it in our favorite warmest colors.

 

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Memory turns everything into soft focus, like a photograph left too long in the sun. What you’ve written captures that strange alchemy: the past becomes a curated exhibit, arranged by a version of ourselves who edits out the noise, the deadlines, the frayed nerves, and keeps only the warm lamp‑light moments. It’s not dishonesty; it’s a kind of emotional housekeeping.

🌤️ How nostalgia repaints the room

A few things happen when we look backward:

• Stress evaporates in retrospect. The arguments, the anxieties, the frantic pacing—those were real, but memory stores them in a different drawer than the pleasures.
• We remember the shape, not the texture. The broad strokes stay: the people, the rituals, the places. The splinters and sharp edges fall away.
• We turn the past into a refuge. Not because it was perfect, but because it’s finished. The present is still being written, still capable of surprising or disappointing us.

🪟 The “Golden Age” as a room we decorate

Your metaphor of memory as an escape hatch is perfect. We build that room with:

• Selective lighting — only the warm bulbs, never the flickering ones.
• Furniture arranged for comfort — the chair we loved, not the one that hurt our back.
• A soundtrack without the static — the songs we kept, not the ones we skipped.

It’s a room where the past behaves, where nothing unexpected happens, where we can walk barefoot without stepping on the sharp pieces we once had to navigate.

🌙 The deeper truth beneath the glow

The allure isn’t that the past was simpler. It’s that we survived it, and survival makes everything look gentler in hindsight. The present, by contrast, is still volatile, still demanding, still full of decisions we haven’t yet forgiven ourselves for or grown nostalgic about.

There’s a quiet courage in acknowledging that the “simpler times” weren’t actually simple—they were just lived. And living always feels more complicated than remembering.