Ruined Nostalgia
One cognitive bias is the nostalgia bias. There’s a great wikipedia article on it that’s worth studying:
The other day, I watched a video that was a great slap in the face against the nostalgia bias. It was James Hoffmann’s coffee-themed YouTube channel in which he tried coffee that had been packaged in the 1930s.
There are similar channels where people try preserved food from a long time ago. The channel for Steve1989MREInfo is one:
However, what jumped out from James’ video wasn’t just that the coffee was old, it was that the premier coffee was actually bad by today’s standards. It showed that almost 100 years of coffee culture has advanced coffee to where it is a significantly better beverage than it was in the past.
This made me think that there are at least hundreds of things that touch our lives everyday that are significantly better than even two decades ago, even though we might reminisce about the past. Thanks, James, for the reminder that times aren’t so bad.
