When we were children, many of us couldn’t wait to grow up. We wanted to be independent, to be responsible for ourselves, to have the freedom that adulthood would afford us.
Now we may be grown, and we think about those carefree days of our youth, wondering what we had missed by spending our time wishing for the future. “We were happy and we didn’t even know it,” we say to ourselves.
The big lie is that one day things were or will be fundamentally different than they are now. We look to the past or the future for our salvation, thinking that is where happiness is to be found.
Perhaps we’re mistaken to look so often in this way. Perhaps these are the good old days.