It was simpler back then. Things were more straightforward then. Things were easier then. Things were better back then.

You’ve heard your parents’ generation say some version of this. You’ve heard pop-culture and culture-war people say this. Maybe you have even said this—thinking of your own childhood, free as it was of mandatory water bottles and screens and political correctness.

In her beautiful and moving coming-of-age novel, The Last of the Wine, Mary Renault reflects on Alexis’ father who, in his old age, falls prey to reactionary and regressive politics (because yes, this was as common in ancient Athens as it is today). “Can you wonder only the past seems good to him?” she writes. “A man getting on doesn’t see that the sweet taste he remembers was the taste of his youth and strength.”

What your parents remember, what you remember, wasn’t actually ‘better times.’ We know, from a historical and technological and even health perspective, this is silly. Now is almost certainly the best and safest time to have ever been alive. So that’s not what people fall prey to mis-remembering. What they are recalling is who they were back then, which is to say stronger, more flexible, more resilient, less fully formed. This was before the cynicism, before the atrophy, before the rigidity, back when things were new and they themselves were new.

And this is the point, isn’t it? We shouldn’t reject the present—for all its complications and frustrations—try to go back to an idealized past. No, we should try to summon our past selves to this future moment, bringing to bear on these times the openness, the curiosity, the adaptability, the hopefulness that everyone has in their youth and strength. We can also be a little bit understanding, as Alexis’ friend advised, with the older folks who cannot manage this.