The past that never was

Grappling with aging—and letting go of false promises

We’d be so much better off if we just admitted we’re making it up as we go along.

There’s long been a sense that the right loves past—specifically, a 1950’s “Leave it to Beaver” post-war America when industry was booming, the economy was soaring, and the middle class could just middle class without interference.

Of course, this a pre-Civil Rights, pre-feminist, heavily Christian America, which is why it’s rightly criticized. At times, it feels like the right’s fascination with a nostalgia for a time that never existed is indicative of racism and misogyny. For some, sure, though this phenomenon speaks as much to biology as sociology.

There’s plenty of romanticizing occurring on conspiritualist left as well. Some of this “perfect time” myth points to the 19th century, likely due to the incredible breadth of scientific achievements that occurred, and the wellness space’s seeming insistence that much of this progress is unnatural and therefore bad—even as those claiming it nefarious benefit from its application.

But there’s an era that points back even further, to “ancient times.” Don’t feel bad if you can’t define “ancient” as the term is being used in a meaningless way. As with most every marketing pitch yearning for better, time is triggered in your mind.

Hot commodity

Last week I received a marketing email about a hot new Ayurveda skincare product containing white snow mushroom, which the publicist positions as breakthrough and ancient. This dichotomy is common: something brand new that’s really just been rediscovered, and here’s our influencer that found it. 

This mindset was common when I worked with natural foods companies in the mid-aughts. New products were always rolling in: goji berries, acai, yerba mate, raw cacao, yacon syrup. Each company was dedicated, in marketing if not in reality, to working with regional farmers harvesting their yield organically. And each “superfood” was unlocking an ancient secret to health and longevity that’s been lost in the processed food haven that is the modern American refrigerator—ironically, a byproduct of the Republican golden era. Modernity, then, is something to be rejected, a sentiment you can blast into the world with your smartphone, apparently without irony. 

There’s been an uptick in similar messaging since the pandemic began. Suddenly, germ theory and vaccination weren’t medical breakthroughs but questionable interventions competing with equally valid “ancient” methods. And so you have a resurgence of terrain theory, yet at its most extreme we find the romanticization of the power of thought: if you’re sick, it’s really something you did wrong.

This form of moral escapism has existed in religious thought for centuries: the notion that all health and wealth are mindsets and not attributable in any way to genetics, social constructs, or just plain bad luck. 

Take Melissa Sell, a chiropractor whose certainty that Germanic New Medicine, a “healing” modality created by an antisemite claiming that all disease is actually a "special meaningful program of nature,” results in tweets like this: 

While she’s rebranded Germanic New Medicine as “Germanic Healing Knowledge,” the foundational idea remains: you, and more directly the way that you think about life, is the direct cause of every disease you’ll ever experience, and oh, even disease isn’t real—it’s a teachable lesson meant to show you the true path! And if you die in the process, that too was destined…

If this all sounds religious—Sell likes to call things “biblical”—there’s good reason. Most religions point back to a perfect time that we’ll return to if only we think the right way. The coming of Jesus, or Mohammad. A cataclysmic event that shuttles the righteous to an awesome playground in the stars while the rest of the world burns in eternal fire. It’s simultaneously backward and forward looking—another unquestioned irony. And it’s so persistent a feature of human psychology that it’s likely innate.

So the question is: how do we deal with it? 

A constant chase

My bullshit detector was tripped doing so many interviews with religious leaders and followers of different faiths while in college. If you think you found the “right” one, that leaves a whole lot of others out in the cold—or thrown into eternal swelter. And that’s a really narrow and biased way to view existence. That might be where we come from, given the much smaller groups we used to live in, but it’s certainly not suited to the times we live in now. 

Yet still we look backwards for verification, for proof of something we missed and need to bring back, or reinvent. This idea transcends any particular culture: there was a better time, once, and if only we harness the wisdom of our ancestors will we return. Turning back the clock is so pervasive, it’s the theme of one of the oldest extant texts known to humanity, the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the king of Uruk spans the globe in search of the plant of immortality, which is lying hidden on the ocean floor. He ends up acquiring it and, as many myths go, loses it when he falls asleep en route home when a cunning fish leaps out of the ocean to steal it back.

Gilgamesh, at least, is humbled, having lost his one-time nemesis turned best friend along the way. He returns to Uruk a better leader. But it’s a story, a moral tale, and we have to wonder, how humbled are we when we don’t get what we want? What happens when we discover the ideas we held dearest turn out to be false? 

Teenage fanclub

I know every generation has its challenges, and every one feels urgent. Perhaps now it’s this: there’s a new teenage filter on TikTok that lets older people look like…teenagers. It’s eerie, watching people my age, and older, waving to themselves in the camera that they’re holding pointed at themselves, as the very realistic filter spits back a version with smooth skin and fine lines. And they look happy, really happy, until they look sad—existentially forlorn.

There’s an Instagram feed called Influencers in the Wild, a meta look at influencers influencing. You see not only the person on the screen, but the person filming them, and all the strange looks from bystanders around them. The intended screen disappears. You zoom out to witness the broader scene and how juvenile and disruptive the entire spectacle appears.

influencersinthewild

A post shared by Influencers in the Wild (@influencersinthewild)

It’s all so damn lonely, which is exactly how I felt scrolling through a feed of people using the teenager filter. Voyeuristic. I can’t imagine how they felt. For the most part, it looks like deflation. They want a better past to return and are realizing, in real time, the impossibility of it.

The tool is just another step in a theme as well, from cameras to video cameras to selfie-pointing smartphone cameras. From skin softening lotions to anti-aging serum to botox continually trying to turn back the face of time, even if, in reality, the before time wasn’t actually the Utopia you’ve made it out to be.

In both cases—in individual beauty and in cultural structures—there’s a time that will never be again and that probably never was in the first place, yet we cling to it and chase after it. And the damage is to ourselves, when we realize that time moves in but one direction and our stay is short, and to societies, when people weaponize their small screen and pretend the rest of the world should see exactly what they’re seeing before they post the video that’s made them the center of the universe.

A path…to now

One philosophy continues to be my guiding light: Buddhism.

Not the Buddhism born of a young Indian yogi who needed to carve his own path, and not the Buddhism that was subsumed into Hinduism, and so stretched out across half the world, to be massaged into Confucianism and Taoism to become the hybrid Chan, or Zen, Buddhism. Mine is a very secular and Americanized version, and it’s as simple as can be: 

• There’s suffering in the world

• Most suffering arises from thinking the world is one way and finding out that’s not the case

• There’s a way out of suffering

• The path out involves changing your reactivity to what happens when what you want doesn’t happen

While rooted in psychology, this Buddhism doesn’t preach that the root of sickness is your fault, because disease isn’t something to be explained away with singular principles, and it’s certainly not a soapbox to stand on and yell at people more unfortunate than you with. There’s no punching down. That’s why, I believe, in part at least, Buddha chose compassion as the highest ideal.

Through empathy you learn that others experience things differently from you, and you develop an ability to feel with them—not even necessarily to hold space for them, but to be in their space and listen to what they’re saying.

Sometimes, that’s the key to compassion: just showing up. Sometimes, it takes a little more.

The Buddhism I practice doesn’t require that you buy into it. Nothing is so sacred that it can’t be debated, and those who can’t debate the nature of their philosophy likely aren’t very secure in its validity.

Which brings me to another aspect of Buddhism that helps create discipline around not romanticizing the past: impermanence. Even if there was a perfect before time, the people who lived then probably thought the perfect era preceded them.

Perfection is a farce. When Sir Thomas More coined the term “utopia,” borrowing from an ancient Greek concept, he knew it meant a “no place,” as in, it doesn’t exist. It can’t exist. The constant turning of the mind and its innumerable dissatisfactions won’t allow it.

Bringing us to a final Buddhist principle: contentment. Not being content with the state of the world and its injustices. It’s important to fight for what’s right. But if you’re fighting for what you believe to be right, if you’re trying to survive and share moments with those around you, if you’re trying to create art that others appreciate, or write novels that carry people away, or if you’re out there fighting for the rights of groups who don’t have the voice that you might, you can also feel content that you’re doing alright in this world.

One of the principles that leads to the cessation of suffering is right action, because Buddha recognized that thinking or being alone doesn’t account for the totality of the human experience. 

Thoreau approached this balance between motivation and contentment while on Walden Pond. He advises readers to follow their pole star with unwavering determination like a sailor navigating to their destination. Yet he also reminds us that truth isn’t out beyond those stars, that all times and places and occasions are here and now, so best to grapple with it and carve out some space so that you can settle into that fact. 

All of this has to do with a direct confrontation with this moment, now, not some imagined past. Every time someone’s trying to sell me on an ideal history or the perfect herb or healing protocol that will make everything alright, or even just better—let me update my language—that will optimize me, I know they’re trying to sell me something else.

And if there’s no ideal time to look back to—and I’d argue given all the scientific and technological advancements we’ve made, this is a pretty good time to be alive, despite the problems and challenges we face—then that means the best moment to be alive is right now. 

Which is why we’d fare so much better if we admit we’re just making it up as we go along. In fact, that knowledge helps you actually make something better, instead of thinking that the best times have passed or are waiting for a future in another time that never seems to arrive.