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“People were kinder when I was a kid!” “We could sleep with the doors unlocked back then!” “There was justice and respect for others!” You have surely heard something like that yourself. You have very likely seen people making such claims, usually followed by the response “OK, boomer!” This phenomenon is called rosy retrospection.

In social psychology, rosy retrospection is defined as the tendency to view the past in a disproportionately positive light, filtering out the negative aspects and highlighting the positives. It’s a confirmation bias expression. And as any confirmation bias, it can be extremely insidious, with far-reaching repercussions.

So, to figure all this out myself, in this post I’m taking a closer look at rosy retrospection: what it is, its connection with nostalgia, what is said (and what is not, which is as critical), and the repercussions it has for all of us.

Rosy Retrospection is (also) a Generation-Gap Problem

As the “OK, boomer” part in the introduction might reveal, rosy retrospection often – but not always, as we will see – involves a generation-gap aspect. That is, it’s often older people who tend to voice such claims about the past, and it’s often younger people who refute them.

This makes sense, because older people have a personal recollection of the past, whereas younger people do not. That is, older people remember a certain time – with the assumption their memory is fact-based, rather than emotion-based – whereas younger people do not.

The important thing here to understand is that all this is relative on many levels.

The Relative Aspect

First of all, “older” and “younger”, self-evidently, is a relative designation. Boomers are older than Gen Xers, but they both appear as dinosaurs to Gen Zers. This implies that, at the same time, we might be calling others out for their rosy retrospection, while falling victim to it ourselves.

For example, when a boomer says “Everyone had equal opportunities back in the 70s, as long as you worked hard”, a Gen Xer will easily explain why that is untrue, while at the same time claim (and be called for it by a Gen Zer) that a good degree can guarantee you a good job.

To state the obvious, both examples are generalizations. Not all people of a given generation hold the same beliefs. That’s the whole point of avoiding simple answers to complex questions. Humans and societies are very complex. And it is indeed our inability to generalize that renders rosy retrospection problematic.

Rosy Retrospection and Generalizing Progress

Progress is very hard to define on a generic level. That is, we can say things like “computers today are faster than in the 80s” or perhaps “more people in Europe can access higher education today than in the 15th century”, but the more we generalize, the more things begin to fall apart.

On the surface, some claims seem obvious (and might even be fairly accurate depictions). For example, it’s reasonable to claim “humanity has progressed if we compare today with the dark ages”. But progress is neither linear nor universal; it involves steps forward and steps backward, and it also affects different people and different aspects of our societies disproportionately.

The truth is, in any given temporal chunk of human history, we’ll discover that some things have improved for some people and in some places, while others have deteriorated.

Who Are You?

If you are rich, male, Caucasian, cis, straight, healthy, you probably are in as great a state as any such person in the (recent) history of the (Western) world. Similarly, if you are a poor African-American trans woman with health problems, you’re overwhelmingly likely to have faced severe discrimination. Obviously, there is a large gray area in-between.

The reason this relativity is relevant in the case of rosy retrospection is because it blinds those with some degree of privilege. To put it simply, you don’t need to be rich, Caucasian, or a man to have enjoyed privilege. We virtually all do, comparatively to someone else.

For example, it is too easy for a cis person to claim “it was all simpler before, there were just men and women! What’s with the stupid pronouns now, people have gone crazy!” For such a person, the current sociocultural context means unnecessary complexity. However, a non-binary person would have a very different approach to this matter.

This should also be a warning in regard to the “ok boomer” part: A misguided Gen Zer who is cis straight might romanticize a past that a gay boomer knows to be a lie all too well.

The Repercussions of Rosy Retrospection

The societal repercussions of rosy retrospection are obvious: Increased social injustice, marginalized voices become more marginalized, minorities face increased discrimination, and so on. Overall, romanticizing the past tends to favor patterns of dominance.

I mean, can you imagine how intolerably unacceptable would be to hear a very old person saying something like “Ah, buses were much safer to ride in the 60s, because [use your imagination] didn’t dare to ride them”?

Even much milder expressions can also insidiously steer public opinion. For instance, uttering something like “traveling on an airplane was much more comfortable in the 60s” is both partly inaccurate – comfortable as in, what? higher noise level and stinkier engines? – and also indirectly revealing an ideological stance: “Flying should be expensive so that only privileged people can use it”.

The specifics of the claim are beyond the scope of the postNonetheless, it becomes important to realize that "Only rich people should travel" is as problematic as "It only costs $20 to fly from A to B. I had no plans or need to go there, but I might as well do to make a YouTube video about it. Fuck the environment!" , but that the utterance carries ideological baggage (no pun intended) is beyond doubt.

But there are consequences for the individual, too.

As with every instance of confirmation bias, rosy retrospection keeps us from the truth in favor of believing a comfortable, romantic lie. Though for some people self deception is a perfectly valid approach, it’s unsustainable in the long run.