The Nostalgia Trap: Why Yesterday Wasn't Actually Simpler

A meditation on memory, consciousness, and the courage to be present

The Beautiful Lie We Tell Ourselves

There's a particular kind of magic in the way we remember the past. Like a soft-focus photograph that blurs the rough edges while highlighting the golden moments, our memory transforms yesterday into a sanctuary of simplicity. We tell ourselves stories about "the good old days" when life made sense, when choices were clear, when the world moved at a human pace.

But here's the thing that would make both Alan Watts and David Foster Wallace nod in recognition: this simplicity is largely an illusion. Not because the past was necessarily more complex, but because we were simpler. Our younger selves navigated the world with a narrower beam of awareness, processing less information, worrying about fewer variables, seeing fewer of the infinite threads that weave together to create any moment.

What we mistake for a simpler world was actually a simpler us.

The Paradox of Expanding Awareness

Think about it this way: a child walking through a forest sees trees, maybe some birds, perhaps a squirrel. A botanist walking through the same forest sees dozens of species, understands the complex relationships between soil composition and tree health, notices the subtle signs of seasonal change, recognizes the calls of specific birds and what they mean about territory and mating patterns.

The forest hasn't become more complex. The botanist's awareness has expanded.

This is our predicament in the modern world. We've become, collectively and individually, like that botanist. We see more, understand more, carry awareness of more. The 24/7 news cycle isn't just feeding us information—it's expanding our consciousness to encompass crises and connections we would never have been aware of before. We know about supply chains in Southeast Asia, political movements in countries we'll never visit, scientific discoveries that reshape our understanding of reality.

Our ancestors weren't dealing with less complexity. They were simply unconscious of most of it.

The Weight of Knowing

David Foster Wallace spent much of his career documenting what it feels like to be a hyper-aware human in an overwhelmingly complex world. He understood that consciousness, while being our greatest gift, can also become a form of exquisite torture. When you're awake to the infinite complexity of existence, every decision becomes a labyrinth, every moment a universe of possibilities and responsibilities.

This is why we find ourselves longing for the supposed clarity of previous eras. When your great-grandfather chose a career, he likely had three options in his small town. When you choose a career today, you have access to information about thousands of possibilities, global markets, shifting economic trends, and endless predictions about which fields will exist in ten years.

The choice wasn't simpler then. Your awareness of the choice is incomparably more complex now.

The Curation Challenge

Here's where the real work begins. Alan Watts often spoke about the art of living, and in our current moment, that art has become largely about curation. Not just of information, but of consciousness itself.

We live in what might be called the age of infinite input. Every day, we're presented with more information than our ancestors encountered in months. More opinions, more crises, more opportunities, more entertainment, more outrage, more beauty, more everything. The question isn't whether we can process it all—we can't. The question is: how do we choose what deserves our attention without falling into the nostalgic trap of wishing it would all just go away?

This isn't about going backward. That path leads only to willful ignorance, which is its own kind of suffering. Instead, it's about learning to be intentional with our consciousness in a way that previous generations never had to consider.

The Practice of Presence

Watts would remind us that the present moment is the only place where life actually happens. The past exists only in memory, the future only in imagination. But in our hyperconnected age, we've forgotten how to be in the present without simultaneously carrying the weight of everything else we could be thinking about.

The practice isn't to shut out complexity, but to develop what we might call "conscious attention"—the ability to choose, moment by moment, what deserves our mental energy. This means:

• Recognizing when nostalgia is serving you versus when it's limiting you. Sometimes longing for the past is genuine wisdom about values we've lost. Sometimes it's just a way of avoiding the creative work of building something better in the present.
• Understanding that your ancestors had their own forms of overwhelm. The farmer worried constantly about weather and crop failure. The medieval merchant lived with the terror of bandits and economic collapse. The complexity was different, not absent.
• Accepting that consciousness expansion is irreversible. Once you know about climate change, income inequality, or the vastness of the universe, you can't unknow it. The path forward is through integration, not regression.

The Courage to Be Complex

What if, instead of yearning for a simpler past that never truly existed, we developed the courage to be appropriately complex beings in a complex world? What if we saw our expanded awareness not as a burden but as an evolutionary advantage—a tool for creating more conscious, more compassionate, more beautiful lives?

This doesn't mean we need to pay attention to everything. It means we need to get much better at choosing what deserves our attention. It means developing the wisdom to distinguish between the complexity that enriches our lives and the noise that merely agitates our minds.

Wallace wrote extensively about the difference between being conscious of something and being enslaved by that consciousness. The difference lies in choice—not the choice to know or not know, but the choice of how to hold what we know.

The Freedom in Conscious Selection

Here's the profound shift: when we stop believing that the world has become more complex and start recognizing that our awareness has expanded, we reclaim our agency. We move from being victims of information overload to being curators of consciousness.

This is perhaps the most sincere form of freedom available to us in our hyperconnected age: not the freedom from complexity, but the freedom to engage with it consciously, selectively, and with purpose.

We can know about the suffering in the world without drowning in it. We can be aware of injustice without being paralyzed by it. We can understand complexity without being overwhelmed by it.

The key is remembering that consciousness is a tool, not a prison. And like any tool, it serves us best when we learn to use it skillfully.

Living Forward, Not Backward

The next time you find yourself longing for simpler times, pause and ask: what am I really longing for? Is it genuinely simpler circumstances, or is it the feeling of having fewer things to worry about?

If it's the latter, you have options that don't require time travel. You can choose to worry about fewer things right now. You can decide which of the infinite inputs deserving your attention actually deserve it. You can practice the radical act of being present to this moment, with all its complexity, without needing to solve every problem or understand every nuance.

This is not about lowering your standards or becoming willfully ignorant. It's about recognizing that consciousness without choice is chaos, and choice without consciousness is blindness. The sweet spot—the place where we can live most fully—lies in the conscious choice of where to direct our gloriously expanded awareness.

In the end, we are not victims of complexity. We are beneficiaries of consciousness. And that consciousness, properly wielded, is not a burden but a gift—perhaps the greatest gift we have to offer both ourselves and the world.

The question isn't how to return to simpler times. The question is: how do we become worthy of the complexity we've inherited? How do we live with appropriate wisdom in an age of infinite information?

The answer, as both Watts and Wallace would remind us, begins with this moment. Right here. Right now. In all its beautiful, terrible, overwhelming, magnificent complexity.

And that's exactly where we need to be.