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Past you had more evidence
How memory softens
The effect is called the fading affect bias, and it works as a psychological immune system. A dog that dies when you are ten stings less by fifteen, and distance, distraction, and reframing do the rest. Tragedy plus time equals comedy is about as close to an algorithm as psychology has.
A certain breakup
The cost shows up in emotional matters, where age brings distance instead of extra wisdom. One man spent a long time thinking about whether to end a relationship, decided to leave, and felt certain about it. Later he bumped into his ex at random and was knocked sideways, unable to work out how he could have been so certain then and so regretful now.
Less evidence later
The earlier version of him remembered what the relationship felt like: being uncertain, sitting on the couch with nothing to talk about, going to bed worried about whether he was making the right call. The later version is further from that evidence. A future self can hold less information than a past one, even though it is older.
Why do bad memories fade faster?
Psychologists including John Skowronski and Richard Walker have studied this pattern across many experiments, in which people rate how they felt about events when they happened and again later. On average, the negative feelings shrink more than the positive ones. One explanation is that people tend to think about unpleasant events in ways that reduce their sting, such as reinterpreting them or fitting them into a larger story. The facts of the memory usually stay intact while the emotion attached to it softens.
Why do people misjudge their past decisions?
In 1975, psychologist Baruch Fischhoff gave people descriptions of historical events and asked them to estimate how likely different outcomes had been. Those who were told the real outcome rated it as far more predictable than those who were not told. He called the effect hindsight bias, and later researchers have found it in many settings, including medicine and politics. Fischhoff reported the original findings in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
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