Nostalgia was better in my day

And because, it seems, Britain can’t leave any emotion unpoliticised for more than five minutes, nostalgia keeps getting funnelled into that blunt, chest-thumpy story about how “England used to be great”, which is usually code for “I used to feel more comfortable”, and sometimes code for something nastier than that. The problem is: if you actually do the boring, grown-up thing and look at the numbers, a lot of life really is better than it was. People live longer - in England and Wales, average lifespan has roughly doubled since the 1840s, with life expectancy at birth rising from about 40-ish years to late 70s/early 80s by 2020. (Office for National Statistics) Smoking — one of the great, slow public-health miracles - has been dragged down over decades, and is now in single digits by some measures. (Office for National Statistics) Roads are dramatically safer than they were in the era when seatbelts were optional and cars were basically sharp metal opinions; road fatalities have been in long-term decline since the mid-1960s. (House of Commons Library) Violent crime, measured properly rather than by whatever’s trending on your neighbourhood WhatsApp group, has fallen a long way since the mid-1990s, even if some categories buck the trend and reporting changes muddy the water. (Office for National Statistics) Even the air is cleaner than the coal-and-diesel Britain many people are weirdly keen to cosplay; sulphur dioxide emissions have dropped massively since 1990. (GOV.UK)

So if the “back then” story doesn’t survive contact with reality, what is nostalgia doing? What is it trying to retrieve?

Ollie, from the Protospace crew sent a YouTube essay around the team the other day. The gist (in the spirit of “too long, didn’t watch”, though I’ll come back to that) is simple: technology used to be utilitarian and beautiful. Not luxury-beautiful, not “because we made it expensive” beautiful, but cared-for beautiful. The things that held the world together - lamp posts, switches, signage, machines, public infrastructure - carried a kind of dignity, as if the act of making had been taken seriously. Lamp posts as sculptures, not just poles with LEDs; objects that admitted they’d be looked at every day, and therefore tried not to insult you.

It’s easy to romanticise this. There’s a whole industry built on fetishising knobs, dials, walnut veneer, and the implied moral superiority of things that click satisfyingly. But there’s something real under it too: a longing not for the past, exactly, but for standards - for evidence that someone, somewhere, gave a damn.

This is where Protospace has made me notice something that feels like an unwritten rule, a kind of shared nervous system: things done well are not a nice-to-have, they’re the point. There’s a fancy (but not fancy) coffee contraption in the office - the sort that looks like it belongs in a small museum dedicated to friction, pressure and Italian stubbornness - and it’s not there because we’re trying to cosplay Shoreditch. It’s there because good coffee is a daily, repeatable example of care: you can taste when someone has phoned it in.

I like fixing things, not in a “dad with a shed” way, but in the more dangerous way: the way that makes you notice how much of modern life has been designed so you can’t fix it. Richard seems to be in a long-running, oddly spiritual relationship with pizza dough, which is basically applied systems thinking with flour. Ollie gets that particular form of rage - the one that isn’t anger so much as grief - when something could be great but is instead merely passable, like the universe has settled for a B-minus. Simon tears about on a niche Japanese bike, which is both an aesthetic choice and a small act of defiance against the beige tyranny of “good enough”.

None of this is about consumerism. It’s not “buy nicer stuff”. It’s about the deeper idea that care is visible, and that when care disappears, the world feels colder even if it’s technically more efficient.

I hate the phrase “form over function” because it’s usually deployed as an excuse, not a principle. It’s what people say when they want you to accept ugliness and friction as the unavoidable cost of seriousness, as if beauty is frivolous and joy is for weekends. But the best things - the things you keep, the things you trust - don’t force that trade-off. They don’t make you choose between usefulness and delight. They’re both. A tool can be elegant. A system can be humane. A service can be fast and kind. A website can be clear and have a soul.

There’s also a personal wrinkle here that I don’t think we talk about enough: I got lucky with timing. My formative years were pre-digital in the way that matters - not pre-technology (we had plenty of that), but pre-permanent-internet. There was a world where you could be bored and no one tried to monetise it. Then, in my teens and twenties, technology exploded in a way that felt genuinely liberating. Half-Life didn’t just entertain me; it cracked open a sense of what virtual worlds could be. The Prodigy didn’t just soundtrack nights out; it made the future feel loud and possible. And yes, I loved popping wheelies on my bike because that’s what you did when you were ten and the whole street was your test track.

That era felt like a blend of function and form: not just new gadgets, but new vibes. The stuff worked, the culture around it was alive, and - crucially - it didn’t yet feel like everything was designed to harvest you. You could be a user without becoming a product.

So my definition of nostalgia isn’t rose-tinted, and it isn’t a demand to rewind history to some imagined golden age. It’s more like a curation instinct: pick the best of what was, blend it with the best of what is, and refuse the lazy idea that progress means sacrificing the human bits. We can build an incredible transport system where you glide through an IoT-connected environment on whatever mode you fancy - rail, scooter, bike, autonomous pod, teleportation if Elon finally shuts up and invents something useful - but we don’t forget that people move around for the sheer joy of it. That life is meant to contain pleasure. That experiences are meant to be felt, not just optimised.

And this is where the “what’s got better” story matters, because it stops us making the wrong argument. If you tell people “it used to be better”, they can (rightly) point to all the ways it wasn’t: the casual cruelty, the smaller freedoms, the dirtier air, the more dangerous roads, the shorter lives. But if you tell the truth - that many outcomes are better - you free yourself to ask the more interesting question: why does it sometimes feel worse?

That’s the puzzle. We’ve reduced smoking dramatically (Office for National Statistics), made roads far safer than the 60s (House of Commons Library), lowered sulphur dioxide emissions by huge margins (GOV.UK), and even globally, extreme poverty has fallen enormously since 1990 (though progress has slowed and become more fragile). (World Bank) Yet a lot of people walk around with the sensation that the world is shabbier, meaner, more brittle - that everything is either locked behind a subscription, designed to be replaced, or padded with dark patterns that make you feel like you’re arguing with an automated gate.

Maybe nostalgia isn’t really about the past at all. Maybe it’s a protest against a particular flavour of modernity: the one that strips out craft, compresses attention, and mistakes “efficient” for “good”.

Which brings me to the “Signals” posts we were talking about over lunch - this whole drift towards AI-generated content that reads like it was written by a polite intern who has never been in a room with an actual human being. It’s all hooks and bullets and “three takeaways”, as if life is something you should scan, like a terms-and-conditions update. It assumes, by default, that people are time-poor and curiosity-poor, that we can’t cope with nuance, that we need everything pre-chewed.

For some people, sure, that’s true in that moment. People are tired. People are overwhelmed. People are trying to keep their head above the water. But I don’t believe that’s the whole story, and I don’t think it’s what people want underneath the exhaustion. I think a lot of people are starving for the opposite: for things that are made with care, that take time, that have texture, that offer them the tiny dignity of being treated like an adult with a brain and a heart.

This is where the Reith Lectures landed for me this year. Rutger Bregman’s 2025 series - framed around the idea of a “moral revolution” - is basically an argument that the thing we’re short of isn’t cleverness, it’s courage; that elites can become cowardly, and that history turns when small groups decide to act differently. (downloads.bbc.co.uk) There was even that whole, darkly comic episode where he accused the BBC of cutting a line from one lecture on legal advice, which only underlined his wider point about institutional fear. (The Guardian)

But the part that stuck to my ribs wasn’t the culture-war froth around it. It was the underlying idea of moral ambition - not “be nicer” ambition, but the bigger thing: choosing a standard of life that is about contribution rather than status, about building rather than performing. (downloads.bbc.co.uk)

And I’ve been turning over the thought that my own moral ambition - the thing that actually motivates me when I’m honest - is beauty and joy.

Not beauty as decoration. Beauty as a sign that someone cared enough to make a thing coherent. Joy not as forced positivity, but as the feeling you get when something works, when it fits, when it respects you. The joy of a well-run event where people who didn’t know each other two hours ago are suddenly swapping ideas like old friends. The joy of a system that doesn’t punish you for being human. The joy of a piece of writing that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up because it feels true, not because it’s “high-performing content”.

That sounds sentimental until you notice how radical it is to insist on it. Because the default setting of so much modern life is a low, humming contempt: for users, for citizens, for attention, for repair, for time. We’re told, constantly, to accept less - less durability, less patience, less surprise - while being offered more noise in return.

So yes, I’m spotting more nostalgia in things, but I’m trying to be precise about what I mean by it. I’m not nostalgic for a country that was “great” if that greatness depended on who was excluded, who was silenced, who was forced to endure. I’m nostalgic for moments when care was visible, and I’m ambitious - morally ambitious, if we’re borrowing Rutger’s language - about dragging that care forward into the present, and then into whatever future we’re sleepwalking towards.

The future is coming either way. The question is whether it arrives as a sleek, frictionless, soulless upgrade you can’t opt out of, or as something better: a world where we keep the gains (the longer lives, the cleaner air, the safer roads) and also rebuild the bits that make life feel worth living - the craft, the dignity, the human scale, the permission to linger.

If that sounds too big, fine. Start smaller. Start with the coffee. Start with the dough. Start with fixing a thing instead of binning it. Start with writing something that refuses to be a scan. Start with a lamppost that looks like someone cared.

That’s not nostalgia as retreat. That’s nostalgia as a compass. And right now, I’ll take any compass that points towards a life with more beauty, more joy, and fewer excuses.