Teenagers Incur Unpayable Emotional Debt by Living at the Speed of Light
We weren’t made to bear this endless nostalgia
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Everything was better when I was younger.
I look back on the 2000s with an uncanny fondness: Hacker culture, Avril Lavigne’s style, the unfinished Half-Life series, pixel art, the movie Chocolat, and Pokemon. I bet you feel the same way — the world was objectively better when I was a kid.
What — are you saying it was definitely better when you were a kid? That’s weird. It’s unlikely you and I — and the other 27,000 people reading this — share birth year so either this blog is the center of a birthdate statistical singularity of 90s kids or you and I are victims of the same cognitive bias.
It seems we are. A survey conducted by YouGov (reported by the Washington Post) suggests that we’re not violating any probability law here. We’re just made to be nostalgic for our teen years, whenever they happened.
Why our teen years?
Oppenheimer would say it’s because kids are unaware of the world’s cruelty and bitterness. Occam would razor it down to “life was simpler then.”
