The Illusion of Simpler Times: A Watts-Wallace Perspective

Listen, now. There's this exquisite paradox about nostalgia that we've all fallen prey to—this notion that there was some golden era when life possessed a crystalline simplicity that has since dissolved in the acid bath of modernity. But this is, if you'll permit me a moment of gentle amusement, a most fascinating self-deception.

What we call the "simpler past" is merely our own past ignorance dressed in ceremonial robes. It's not that the world was simpler—good heavens, no—it's that we were simpler. Our consciousness had not yet expanded to encompass the infinitely complex systems that have always been churning away behind the veil of our perception.

And here's where things get really interesting (and by "interesting" I mean the sort of fascinating that makes your frontal cortex feel like it's being gently massaged by a philosophical Zen master with footnotes): we experience this false nostalgia while simultaneously being crushed beneath the weight of what I'm going to call Total Informational Awareness™—this constant, soul-crushing firehose of global knowledge that no human nervous system was evolutionarily designed to process, let alone integrate into a coherent worldview without the psychological equivalent of system crashes and kernel panics.

When we were children—and I mean this both literally as youngsters and figuratively as less-informed beings—we experienced the world through a gloriously narrow aperture. There was a beautiful ignorance to it all! We didn't know about every tragedy unfolding in real-time across the planet. We couldn't possibly conceptualize the complex socioeconomic forces shaping our neighborhoods. We existed in our own little bubbles of experience, and within those bubbles, there was a kind of freedom.

The trick, if one may call it that, is not to retreat into some fantasy of a simpler past—for such a past exists only in the museum of our selective memories—but rather to become conscious curators of our own experience. To be in the information age but not of it. To understand that your attention is the most precious currency in this economy of endless content, and to spend it with the same care a Zen monk might use when arranging stones in a garden.

You see, time itself is a sort of illusion—not in some trite way, but in the profound sense that this moment, right now, is all that has ever existed or will exist. The past is memory; the future, anticipation. Both are mental constructs. And if we can recognize this—really grok it at the level of lived experience rather than intellectual masturbation—then we can perhaps recapture that childlike quality of immersion in the present without retreating into the myth of "better days."

Be a filter, not a sponge. Choose what gets in. Recognize that what seems like unity or simplicity in the rearview mirror of time was actually just the blessing of not knowing, of not seeing, of not being constantly connected to the great electronic nervous system we've collectively constructed. And perhaps in that recognition, we might find a way to be present again—not despite our awareness, but because of it. A higher innocence, if you will, achieved not through ignorance but through the compassionate curation of our own consciousness.

And isn't that—this deliberate, mindful filtering—isn't that actually the most sincere form of freedom available to us here in the hyperconnected wilderness of postmodernity?