Why we often, mistakenly, think the past was a golden age

This argument – for example, “Why isn’t music as good as it used to be?” – reflects a historical selection bias, one colorfully described by the designer Frank Chimero. “Let me let you in on a little secret,” he writes. “If you are hearing about something old, it is almost certainly good. Why? Because nobody wants to talk about shitty old stuff, but lots of people still talk about shitty new stuff, because they are still trying to figure out if it is shitty or not. The past wasn’t better, we just forgot about all the shitty shit.”

The past reaches us after brutal selection; nearly all the dross has already disappeared.

Classic radio plays the songs that survived, not the three hundred forgettable singles released beside them. We admire old buildings partly because the ugliest were demolished. Business history remembers the audacious startup that won and loses the thousands whose equally confident plans ended with an unpaid hosting bill. Meanwhile the present arrives live, unfiltered and making mistakes in public, before time has separated the durable work from the disposable daily noise.

Some nostalgic claims may still be true. Products can be more repairable, streets better designed and creative clusters genuinely astonishing. The cheat happens when a curated past is compared with the entire noisy present and the difference is diagnosed as civilisational collapse.

Whenever somebody announces that advertising, music or talent “isn’t what it used to be”, restore the missing denominator. How much mediocre work existed then? Which failures disappeared from memory? Which current successes have not had time to become classics? Nostalgia can identify something genuinely lost, but only after it stops rigging the sample. Usually the old days look cleaner because memory has quietly sent the dross to landfill. Selection makes quality look common in retrospect.