The olden days were better, weren't they?

I caught myself doing it again. You know exactly what I mean.

You’re halfway through reading the news, your phone is vibrating with seventeen different “urgent” notifications, and someone on the internet is telling you that if you don’t wake up at 5am, cold plunge, journal, run a marathon and launch a personal brand before breakfast, you’re basically a failure.

And I just can't help thinking: It didn’t used to be like this.

It's not just me is it? Didn’t it feel better in the olden days?

Yeah, I know. Makes me sound like an old man. Makes me sound like I should be shouting at kids for listening to music too loud (I am and I do).

But the feeling is real. And I think it’s getting worse.

Aaah. The good old days.
A simpler time.
Fewer channels.
Fewer opinions.
Less noise.
Less comparison.

Less of this constant sense that the world is happening to you at maximum speed, whether you like it or not.

So what is this nostalgia I'm feeling? And can you feel it too?

Is it age? Is it exhaustion? Or is the world genuinely becoming more chaotic, more performative, and harder to trust?

I mean I guess it’s all three.

Which is annoying, because this newsletter would be a lot easier to write if I had just one thing to focus on...

Nostalgia Isn’t Just Sentimental

Nostalgia tends to show up when the world stops feeling stable.

Nostalgia is what your brain does when it’s craving certainty. When it wants to return to a time that felt...easier. A time when you could roughly tell what was real, who to trust, and what the rules were.

It’s not just “aww, remember Nokia ringtones?”

It’s more like:

“I miss living in a world where my attention was mine.”

And that’s not nostalgia as a cute emotion. That’s nostalgia as a coping mechanism.

Because modern life is built to make you feel behind.

Behind on news.
Behind on money.
Behind on health.
Behind on parenting.
Behind on culture.
Behind on the algorithm’s latest update to the human soul.

Even relaxing is now competitive. Someone, somewhere, is doing recovery more efficiently than you.

And when you live in that kind of pressure cooker, your mind goes hunting for oxygen. So it returns to the past, because the past can’t ask anything of you.

It can’t ping you.

It can’t update.

It can’t demand that you have an opinion within twelve minutes.

It just sits there. Unchanging. Certain. And full of fond memories.

The Death of Trust

Part of what we miss about the past is simple: trust used to be easier.

Not because politicians were saints (they weren’t), or because the media was perfectly honest (it wasn’t), but because the texture of reality felt more consistent.

Now? Reality is wobbly.

We’re watching a world where public figures can lie openly, repeatedly, in the face of overwhelming evidence… and nothing happens. Not even embarrassment. Just more lying, with better lighting.

And then there’s AI. The final boss of “you can’t trust your eyes”.

Because once you’ve realised (and I think we're there now) that images and video can be generated, voices can be cloned, and entire articles can be produced in seconds with zero accountability, the ground shifts.

It’s not that everything is fake. It’s worse than that.

It’s that everything could be fake.

And living in a world of “could” does something strange to your nervous system.

It makes you suspicious. It makes you cynical. It makes you tired.

It also makes the past look increasingly appealing, because back then, a photo was a photo. A recording was a recording. And if someone made something up, they at least had to put some effort into it.

Now the effort is gone. The friction is gone. The cost of producing noise has collapsed. And we’re all swimming in it.

I wrote recently about the way the AI hype machine has tried to sell us a revolution that often feels like “slightly better tools with a lot of confident marketing,” and I feel that tension even more today: huge claims, shaky trust.

When Music Was Made by Mates

Let’s talk about one aspect that you know is close to my heart: music.

I know, I know. Every generation says this: “Back in my day, music was real.”

But hear me out.

There was something about bands. Groups of friends in a room. Messy rehearsals. Bad demos. Arguments over chord changes. Someone’s mum yelling up the stairs to keep it down.

Then they’d release a track and it would make you feel something, because it was made with intent.

Now we’re entering an era where AI-generated tracks can be pumped out at insane volume. I read a stat recently that tens of thousands of AI tracks are being uploaded on a regular basis. I can't recall whether the stat was per day or per week, the exact number almost doesn’t matter.

The point is the same:

The supply of AI shit is now infinite (could be music, art, words, even videos).

And when supply becomes infinite, value gets weird.

Because music isn’t just sound. It’s story. Context. Culture. Shared reference points. It’s the feeling of “we all heard this at the same time and it meant something.”

But how do you have a shared moment when the feed is endless?

How do you have a soundtrack to your life when the soundtrack is being generated by machines that have never lived one?

Maybe the future of music is fine.
Maybe the new generation will love it.
Maybe I am just old.

But I can’t shake the feeling that something gets lost when art becomes content and content becomes sludge.

We’re Not Just Nostalgic. We’re Grieving.

I think this is what’s really happening.

We’re not just reminiscing. We’re grieving.

We’re grieving:

• the loss of attention
• the loss of shared reality
• the loss of “enough”
• the loss of trust that institutions will even pretend to serve the public
• the loss of feeling grounded

And grief makes you look backwards.

Because when you’re grieving, you don’t want novelty. You want familiarity.

You want the emotional equivalent of a well-worn hoodie.

That’s nostalgia.

It’s not a political stance. It’s not an argument. It’s an emotional reflex.

Nostalgia can be comforting… but it can also trap you.

Because if you let nostalgia turn into a rejection of the present, you stop engaging. You stop building. You stop making choices. You become a spectator, muttering “it’s all gone to shit” while the world continues, with or without you.

That’s the risk I'm feeling.

So what do we do?

Keep the Values, Drop the Fantasy

The past wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t morally cleaner. It wasn’t calmer for everyone. It wasn’t simpler for the people who were excluded, marginalised, or just quietly suffering in ways nobody spoke about.

But the past did have a few advantages that are worth naming:

• fewer inputs
• more friction (which meant less instant nonsense)
• more shared reference points
• less constant comparison
• more offline time by default

We can’t recreate that world. It’s gone.

But we can recreate some of the conditions that made it feel better.

Not by pretending it’s 1997 again, but by getting more deliberate about how we live in 2026.

And that’s the point that matters most to me: deliberate living is the antidote to nostalgia-as-escape.

Because if the world is noisy, the answer isn’t to time travel.

The answer is to choose what gets access to you.

So What Am I Doing About It?

For me, it starts with treating my attention like it’s worth something. Because it is.

I’m not trying to “optimise my focus” or build some perfect morning routine. I just try not to give my mind away for free. If something wants my attention, it has to earn it.

I’ve also started choosing people over performance. The internet is full of confident strangers making a living out of looking like they’ve got life sorted, but influencers aren’t my peers, they’re just performers.

I try to keep my information diet small. A few trusted sources, a lot less scrolling, and a willingness to ignore the rest. It isn’t perfect, but it beats living in a constant fog of “is this real?”.

And then I make space for things that can’t be generated:

A walk with Do Radio is my current favourite "life saver".
A proper conversation that goes nowhere (and doesn’t need to).
Cooking something slowly.
Playing an instrument (badly).
Anything that puts me back in my body and reminds me that I’m still human.

Because the goal isn’t to become a bitter person telling everyone the world used to be better.

The goal is to build a present that doesn’t make you want to escape it.

Until next time,

Jon "Grumpy Old Bastard" Kaye

Choosing to live more deliberately