The good old days

What year would you go back to?

A little nostalgia, a few things we forgot, and a look at what's changed since.

The year was

What made it great? (optional)

The year you were born (optional, makes it personal; never stored)

These numbers tell part of the story. They don't measure your friendships, your music, or what that year meant to you.

Not everything got better

Housing has gotten much harder to afford in many places. Plenty of people say they feel lonelier. Progress isn't automatic, and some of it reverses. People have to make it happen.

You can love the past and still bet on the future.

An experiment by Josh Stein at Threshold Ventures. We back people building what comes next.

How this works

Psychologists call it rosy retrospection: we tend to remember experiences more fondly than we felt them at the time (Mitchell et al., 1997). This is a small experiment in adding the context back.

The numbers are fixed data from Our World in Data (UN, World Bank, UNESCO), worldwide. "Now" means the latest year available. Older figures are historical estimates. The story is written live by Claude each time, using only facts drawn from Wikipedia that we check against a verbatim quote; the footnotes link to them. It's a small selection of indicators, not a verdict on everything.