“We turned out fine”
is just survivor bias with better branding. ▌
There’s a certain kind of nostalgia that only exists because people survived it.
You see it when people talk about measles like it was some kind of childhood milestone instead of what it actually was—a highly contagious disease that killed people, disabled people, and left families permanently changed.
“Back in my day…”
Yes.
Back in your day, some kids didn’t make it.
We just don’t tell their stories at the same volume.
Romanticizing disease requires distance.
Distance from hospital rooms.
Distance from oxygen masks.
Distance from seizures, fevers, and the quiet panic of parents realizing this might not turn out okay.
It also requires selective memory.
Because the truth is inconvenient.
The truth doesn’t fit neatly into nostalgia.
What we’re really romanticizing isn’t the disease.
It’s survival.
It’s the fact that we made it through, so we assume the risk must not have been that bad.
That assumption is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Vaccines disrupted that narrative.
They didn’t just reduce disease.
They erased the shared memory of how bad those diseases actually were.
Which is, ironically, why people now question whether the vaccines are necessary.
Success made the danger invisible.
But invisible doesn’t mean gone.
It just means you haven’t seen it lately.
So when people talk about measles parties like they were harmless traditions, what I hear is something very different:
“I was lucky.”
And luck is a terrible foundation for public health policy.