5 Psychological Phenomena That Can Explain Why You Might Favor the Past

The past is an illusion.

The past always had an enchanting impact on me. I tended to view my past and the concept of the past with a kind of admiration I never had for either the present or the future. In my eyes, the past was always glorified. It was better, in so many ways, both from today and tomorrow.

Not so soon after, in fact, after a psychology degree, and reading many scientific explanations around this topic, and carving out countless writings that discovered this theme both in my journal entries and my published work, and well, after growing up, I realized the admiration I was experiencing was more of an illusion; the past I viewed wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

Indeed, as I delved deeper into this inclination, the magic of the past started to dissolve. What really happened during my past admiration state was that my brain fell for some psychological biases that made me favor the past and deem it better than the present and the future in different, intricate ways.

These “past biases” are common in people in that they have certain names in the psychological literature. It’s possible you experience them too if you have an unexplainable attachment to your past or any kind of past, for that matter, or simply tend to view the past better than the present and future times.

Of course, not everyone has an admiration for the past, at least not to the same degree, but many people indeed tend to fall into these biases that make them see their past in a better light, especially when looking at a wider time frame and not the specifics. The reason behind it is how our memory functions.

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