Every age has its happiness and troubles. — Jeanne Calment

Every age has its happiness and troubles.

Author: Jeanne Calment

Insight: We tend to romanticize the past and catastrophize the present. When we look back, we see mostly the good parts—summers felt longer, music was better, life seemed simpler. But every generation has felt squeezed by real problems they couldn't escape. Your grandparents worried about wars, recessions, and whether they'd have enough. You worry about different things, but the weight of worry itself feels the same. This matters because it breaks a common mental trap. You don't need to convince yourself that life used to be better to feel justified in struggling now. And you don't need to believe things are worse than ever to take your current challenges seriously. Both can be true: your time has genuine difficulties, and your time also has genuine goods—connection tools, medicine, knowledge—that earlier generations would have envied. The real insight is that restlessness and satisfaction aren't stages we graduate out of. They're woven into living itself. Accepting this doesn't make problems disappear, but it stops you from adding a secondary problem—the feeling that something has gone deeply wrong with you or now just because you're not perpetually happy.