After college, my wife (who was then my girlfriend) and I got an apartment in the Seattle suburbs. It was amazing – a perfect location, a beautiful apartment, even had a view of the lake. The economy was such a wreck at the time that we paid almost nothing for it.
A few months ago I reminisced to my wife about how awesome that time was. We were 23, gainfully employed, living in our version of the Taj Mahal. This was before kids, so we slept in until 10am on the weekends, went for a walk, had brunch, took a nap, and went out for dinner. That was our life. For years.
“That was peak living, as good as it gets,” I told her.
“What are you talking about?” she said. “You were more anxious, scared, and probably depressed then than you’ve ever been.”
Of course, she was right.
If I think deeper than the initial knee-jerk memory, I remember being miserable. I was overwhelmed with career anxieties, terrified that I wouldn’t make it, worried I was about to be fired. For good reason: I was bad at my job. I was insecure. I was nervous about relationships being fragile.
In my head, today, I look back and think, “I must have been so happy then. Those were my best years.” But in reality, at the time, I was thinking, “I can’t wait for these years to end.”
There’s a Russian saying about nostalgia: “The past is more unpredictable than the future.” It’s so common for people’s memories about a time to become disconnected from how they actually felt at the time.
I have a theory for why this happens: When studying history, you know how the story ends, which makes it impossible to imagine what people were thinking or