Aging & Wisdom Quote by Brooks Atkinson

Nostalgia gets exposed here as a kind of historical Photoshop: not just inaccurate, but emotionally useful. Brooks Atkinson, a theater critic who spent decades watching Americans perform themselves back to themselves, understands that “the good old days” is less a memory than a story we tell to make the present look uniquely broken. His first move is a clean puncture: the past wasn’t golden, it was merely survived. Then he tightens the screw with a shrewd psychological note - “No one ever thought they were good at the time” - reminding us that people don’t experience their own era as an exhibit. They experience it as noise, uncertainty, bills, illness, war headlines, a shifting moral climate.

The line that matters is “crises that seemed intolerable.” Atkinson isn’t denying that certain moments were objectively worse; he’s highlighting how “intolerable” is a feeling that resets in every generation. That’s the subtext: our panic is not proof of unprecedented collapse, it’s the default human response to living inside change. The quote works because it refuses the comforting binary of then/now and replaces it with continuity: anxiety as the true tradition.

Context matters. Atkinson lived through world wars, the Depression, and the early Cold War - eras frequently repackaged as sturdier, simpler times. He’s warning against that counterfeit stability. The myth of better days doesn’t just misread history; it flatters the storyteller and invites political manipulation, because if the past was pure, someone can always claim to “restore” it.