“The past wasn't as good as you remember. The present isn't as bad as you think. The future will be better than you anticipate.”

This is one of my favourite Morgan Housel quotes. He first posted it as a tweet ten years ago, and it has reappeared in a few of his pieces since then.

His context is from an economic perspective, but like most of his writing, it applies to multiple areas of life.

The past not being as good as you remember is easy to relate to. As a kid, you scoffed at your parents when they explained how much better things were back in their day, only to find yourself today questioning if that’s even music that your kid is listening to and wondering why they haven’t made a good comedy in the last 15 years.

The past seems better because of the memories we’ve tied to it. The music and movies may not have been objectively better, but that doesn’t matter because we weren’t enjoying them objectively.

Nobody likes to hear that the present isn’t as bad as they think it is, especially if your startup just failed or you were just laid off. But in a broader economic sense, perhaps some hindsight and reflection may change our perspective on the current situation. It’s an interesting exercise to compare our perspective in the moment versus our perspective after a few years have passed. 

Housel’s final phrase - the future will be better than you anticipate - has been a challenging one for me recently. I’ve maintained a hopeful outlook for the future, but it’s being challenged a lot lately.

I read a book earlier this year that helped affirm that humanity is on a positive trajectory. Factfulness by Hans Rosling is eye-opening and shows that most of our assumptions are distorted. He shows, through decades of data, that life is actually improving globally. Key metrics like poverty, health and education have all moved significantly in the right direction over the last 40 years and are continuing in the right direction.

My takeaway from Housel’s quote is that it reveals that our perspective can be both a strength and a dangerous trap. We shouldn’t stop trusting our instincts, but we do need to step outside of our own story and build in reality checks to question the stories we’re telling ourselves.