John Gruber quotes from a WaPo article:

So, we looked at the data another way, measuring the gap between each person’s birth year and their ideal decade. The consistency of the resulting pattern delighted us: It shows that Americans feel nostalgia not for a specific era, but for a specific age.

The good old days when America was “great” aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices. Or when you were 15 and athletes and musicians still played hard and hadn’t sold out.

John goes on to point out that he tends to feel nostalgic for the time when he was in his 20s.

I can understand that.

Ever since I wrote that series about Harrisburg and AJ and WMSP, I’ve had nostalgic feelings about that time in my life, the late 70s when I was in my late 20s.

I loved the apartment I was living in and there were a lot of other things I liked about that period. Not everything was great. I remember I used to complain about how little I was earning at Channel, but in that environment I was earning enough to afford a car and buy a piano, so I wasn’t doing all that badly.