The lost golden age and other stories we live inside

Psst ... I'm sorry the footnote formatting is so weird in this piece. Actually I'm sorry I tried to include FOOTNOTES in a NEWSLETTER!! I need to get a life, honestly ;)

Hello loves,

Let me tell you a story. Back in 1944, two psychologists named Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel ran an experiment. They brought 114 people into their lab and showed them a short animated film of simple geometric shapes moving around a screen. Then they asked a question: what do you see?

Try it. Watch the film yourself. What do you see?

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Almost nobody in the initial research group, or amongst the thousands of people who've watched it in replications of the study, answered rationally: "I saw two triangle and a circle moving around the screen". No. Almost everyone saw a narrative. Some saw a bully harassing two young lovers. Some saw a slapstick comedy love triangle. There's conflict! There's drama! In other words, there's story.

Jonathan Gotshell talks about this in his excellent book The Storytelling Animal, and uses it to illustrate a subtle point: it's not just that we all CAN tell stories from random inputs like this. It's more than that: we HAVE to tell stories. This is what our brain does naturally, all the time. Stories are how we make sense of the universe. Story is the human operating system.

America, hey?

So, obviously, the present moment in world politics feels extremely goddamn weird right now, even if you don't live in the United States.

And do I think that's somewhat because there are actual James Bond villain-level villains actively dismantling one of the world superpower governments for their own enrichment. And some of what's happening is just unmasked reactionary racism and sexism and nativism and naked greed.

But it also feels like there's something more unstable going on, on a much wider cultural level, involving regular people all around the world. And maybe this is just how all cultural shifts have felt to all people in all of human history. Maybe every era feels apocalyptic when you’re living through it. Like, I don't think the past five years have been weirder than, say, 1914-1919 (WWI), or many other especially weird half-decades.^[1] But 2020-2025 definitely feels like it's been ... above baseline weird, right?

I've been thinking about how some of that is because the stories we live inside of have fragmented. It's not just that some of what other people are doing right now feels wrong to me — often, it feels inexplicable. Like I’m living in a fundamentally different story from many of my neighbours.

I'm not the first person to observe that a lot of that's simply because individualised algorithms now control most of our media intake.

It will take several more decades before we can really begin to reckon with how disruptive social/algorithmic media has been on culture. The last time we had a communication technology shift as seismic was the Gutenberg press. And for the hundred-odd years after THAT was invented, things also got really fucking weird! The most fundamental stories that Europeans used to understand their world, Catholicism and the "natural hierarchy" of feudalism, were shattered by the Protestant Reformation, a series of Peasants’ Wars, and a whole lot of Uh, What The Hell Is Even Happening.^[1] Some of these changes were ultimately good, albeit pretty disruptive to live through at the time (e.g. I'm quite glad I do not have to serve a liege lord), and some of them were plain awful (e.g. witch trials). It turns out that if anyone can print a pamphlet, anyone can spread fake news, who knew, and it took a long time for societies to develop the cultural and legal guardrails to manage the ensuing chaos.

The past two decades of digital media have been a new printing press moment. It's like we're all trapped in a Heider-Simmel experiment, but everyone is getting served up different animations by the algorithm. Or even weirder, we're seeing the same animations, but we're interpreting them through different stories. The same triangle to some may be a noble warrior defending its homeland, and to others a power-hungry villain out to exploit the defenceless. The triangle must flee from a terrible threat: climate change, or immigrants, or the fertility crisis, or the wokerati, or late-stage capitalism, or a corrupt deep state, or brown people, or fascists, or unaligned AI, or nonbinary teenagers, or neoliberalism, or globalists, or wicked billionaires, or the culture studies department of elite universities.

Each of us is watching shapes move around our personally tailored phone-sized screen, so increasingly we can find ourselves inhabiting a fundamentally different story even to people who live under the same roof.

I think about these stories as our personal "understories", the grand narratives that we instinctively filter our experience of the world through.

From William Davies on Faragist TikTok:

Handing so much power over to algorithms ... has had some disconcerting effects on the wider public sphere, if we can still speak of such a thing. For the last few years, users of Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) have noticed that a rising proportion of what they are shown on these platforms comes from sources they have never ‘followed’, ‘liked’ or ‘subscribed’ to. Some of it will be inane, some of it shocking; much of it will be infuriatingly hard to ignore. This is what the media scholars Benjamin Guinaudeau, Kevin Munger and Fabio Votta have referred to as ‘virality from nowhere’: somehow, the videos in question are racking up good numbers in the attention economy even though users have no sense of how or why they came to be shown to them. The turn to algorithmic curation has become known as ‘TikTokisation’, whereby the goal of every platform is to keep serving up whatever content seems likeliest to retain a user’s attention for another few seconds, no matter how useless, weird or unpleasant.

The Lost Golden Age

Here's a popular understory on the rise right now: we are living in an age of decadence and decline. Our civilisation was once great, but gradually it has been eroded. Our enemies have exploited our weaknesses and now attack us from within. But if we are courageous and pure-hearted enough to fight back, we can restore our society to its former greatness.

This is, of course, the nostalgia narrative of MAGA, and of Farage urging the UK to "take our country back", and of white South Africans pining for the good old days when things were better (for them), and of tradwives, and of Putin describing himself as the new Peter the Great returning Russian land to the empire.

It's not a new story. Mussolini, the first fascist, said his goal was to rebuild the glorious Roman Empire. Hitler? Same. The Third Reich was supposed to be the new German Empire, and if you’re wondering what the First Reich was — yep! Roman Empire^[1]. Even today, you can’t throw a rock in Silicon Valley without hitting some techbro waxing poetic about Marcus Aurelius. Okes, people just really really love a Roman Empire.

But the Lost Golden Age is a far older story. 1000-year old Hindu texts say we are living in the worst and most degenerate of times. The Torah tells of the Jews cast out of Israel lamenting the fall of the Temple. Homer's Iliad laments the lost age of heroes. Camelot is gone. Atlantis is sunk. The elves have gone into the West. Heck, the very first understory I was raised in was the story of The Fall: how we lived in Eden, then we lost it by sinning. Across cultures and centuries, this is one of the most fundamental stories we keep telling.

It's such a common story because it's a compelling story. It captures our anxiety about the present, our disappointment, our sense that our lives aren't what we were promised they'd be (which is why it's a particularly common story amongst people who've lost relative status). But it's also a hopeful story. Unlike the utopia tale, which promises us we can build a world better than anything that's ever existed before, the nostalgia story gives us PROOF that the world can be better. See, the story says, the good world can exist, because it already existed. We just need to take it back.

But you know, there are lefty versions of this story too. I'm a total sucker for the tale of idealised matrilineal pre-colonial pre-agrarian societies living in perfect harmony with nature. I have a crunchy granola mom in me who secretly believes Western medicine is poison and thinks you should try chewing willow bark for that headache and that if your great-grandmother wouldn't recognise what you're eating, it's not real food. I complain all the time that my brain evolved to be friends with 119 people and harvest berries, so it's honestly rude that people expect me to reply to emails. I often grump about how the internet peaked in February 2004 when Facebook released the Poke button and it's all been downhill since.

The funny thing about these narratives is that when I really interrogate them, I think they're absurd! Rationally, I'm THRILLED paracetamol and vaccines exist. And despite how difficult and weird the past five years have been, I still believe this is the best time to be alive in the whole of human history. If I was behind a veil of ignorance, and you asked me to choose any possible year to have been born, I'd probably choose this one, because it's the time I have the best statistical chance of surviving childhood and not dying of hunger/murder.^[1]

But the understory of the Lost Golden Age exists in my unconscious regardless, and frames many of my instinctive interpretations of things going on around me.

Maybe some of the eternal appeal of the Lost Golden Age story is just that we - personally - get old. Our joints start to creak, and the world we were taught to thrive in changes around us and teenagers tell us our clothes are uncool now, and no-one will tell us what the fuck is a skibidi, or if gyatt is a noun or an adjective. Increasingly, we find our own Golden Age in the past.

Like, I often find myself feeling grumpy about LLMs and then remind myself of this quote by Douglas Adams:

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

Competing stories

The problem with the Lost Golden Age story is precisely that it's a very compelling story, which means it's easily weaponised by people trying to gather power. There's a reason this is a favourite story amongst aspiring dictators and autocrats. The Lost Golden Age story sucks.

But other understories have their problems, too. Utopia stories, applied to the real world, have lead to some of history's worst mass deaths when they've treated real human lives as instrumental means to an end, or tipped into totalitarian purity thinking.

The understory that's most prominent in my own mind a lot of the time really sucks: what I can only describe as 2010s YA Dystopia. My brain instinctively interprets most world events as being the opening scenes of some Hunger Games-Octavia Butler-World War Z-Margaret Atwood-Mad Max-Last of Us nightmare hell mashup scenario. This story really sucks, because it's The Fall without the promise of redemption. This story says: we had our shot but we blew it, we've destroyed our beautiful world and the dead wasteland apocalypse is inevitable now, the rich will laugh at us from their bunker orgies right until the moment there's a leak in their airlock and the robotic-fungi-viruses wipe them out too, and maybe that's for the best really, better in the end if all humans vanish off the earth so the cockroaches and Keith Richards can figure things out without us.

It doesn't matter what the triangle's doing because all triangles are going to be dead in 20 years anyway.

This doomerism is terrible. It's not what I rationally believe^[1]. But it's an understory that lives in my brain rent free. If I'm not vigilant about it, it sneakily distorts everything I see in the world.

It's not the only understory living in my unconscious. There are a bunch of half-baked tales squirming around down there. The story that says if someone's powerful they must be evil. The story that says the world is built on blood and theft. The story that says money is the only real form of power. The story that says things can never really be different to how they are.

Stories make the world seem simpler than it is. Stories need conflict, so they divide the world into goodies and baddies. In the Western tradition, stories are usually about individual heroes going on individual quests, rather than being about collective action. But the world's not simple. And it's usually not individuals who change the world alone.

Different stories about the same feelings

While our stories are different, the feeling underlying many of them is the same: anxiety.

We're living through a time of extreme change. That makes people anxious. When change happens, we don't know if it's going to be good or bad. We just know that the models we use to predict what the future's going to be like, fail.

And heck, there's a lot to be anxious about right now, almost everywhere. There's an autocratic takeover happening in the world's biggest economy. Many of the programmes supporting the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world have been suddenly defunded, undoing decades of progress, and people are dying of treatable illnesses and starvation. We're living through ecological collapse and climate disaster. 110,000ish dickheads held a racism jamboree in my city this weekend. There's a non-zero chance misaligned AI might wipe out all life on earth within the next decades, and a near-certainty it's going to seriously disrupt our economies. There are at least two active genocides unfolding (Sudan, Gaza). Most of us were stuck inside our homes for several years to avoid a plague and more of us than ever before are isolated and lonely.

And maybe you interpret that anxiety through stories about billionaire tech oligarchs or about corrupt deepstate politicians or unchecked immigration or whatever. The anxiety's the same.

When we find ourselves trapped in the most vicious arguments, the ones where the other person feels not only wrong, but monstrous, we're usually not disagreeing about facts. It's more fundamental: our underlying stories are in conflict, and increasingly, cast the other as villain.^[1]

But it can be hard to recognise this is happening, because usually our understories are unconscious. How often, when we disagree, do we do so on the level of, "I think what's going on here is that you fundamentally believe the world is a place where people get what they deserve, and I believe that the world is a place where the weak are exploited?" How often do we argue explicitly on the level of the understory? How often do we even interrogate our own?

I've been trying to pay more attention to my own subconscious stories about the world. And trying to understand better the understories of people who see the world differently to me.

That's not to say that all stories are equally true. Or equally harmful. What I'm saying is that we have to talk about the understories themselves, not just the issues we're applying them to, if we have any hope of understanding each other, let alone changing anyone else's mind.

Practically, here are some ways I'm applying this to my own life:

1. I'm actively slowing my media consumption, reducing the amount of day-to-day news I read and replacing it with more deep analysis, long essays and non-fiction books, seeking out more content that helps me test and refine my understories rather than just feeding my brain more animations that reinforce the stories it already believes and making me feel afraid. Like I recently enjoyed this analysis by Naomi Klein about the apocalyptic understory motivating some of the American far right, and this piece in the LRB about how TikTok's driving the rise of Farage.
2. I'm making an effort to diversify my media sources. For instance, I've been seeking out more analysis about parts of the world I know less about, like The China Project and The Continent (I'd love more recommendations, if you have any!). America is not the world. Alex Hochuli wrote a great piece about this back in 2020, calling this the "triumph of American idealism", and Rebecca Davis makes a similar point about South Africans trying to import Charlie Kirk rhetoric right now.
3. I'm trying very hard to spend less time living inside the internet and more time living in my real life, with full-dimensional real people, trying to have deeper conversations with them about the stories they see the world through. When I find myself getting drawn into arguments with them about facts, I remind myself of Jonathan Swift's maxim that you can't reason a person out of a position they never reasoned themselves into, and instead try to probe at the feelings that lie underneath.
4. Talking about the real world, where it's necessary, I am also looking for ways to use my white body to help protect people who are under actual attack, and I'm supporting calls to prosecute people spreading hate speech. De-platforming hate and calls for violence isn't censorship, it's the basic hygiene of a functioning democracy. We cannot be tolerant of intolerance.
5. I'm trying to tell better and more hopeful stories about the future. Because stories have an uncanny way of becoming real.

I don't know, friends. It's hard not to feel gloomy and confused about the state of the world. It's ... a weird time.

Wishing you hopeful and loving stories,

Sam