The Rearview Mirror Effect

My wife and I love the Apple show Ted Lasso. We started watching it when many others did, with the first season in August 2020.

Yes, it’s corny, hokey and Pollyannish, but that’s why we love it.

And back when it launched, at the height of the pandemic, we needed it.

Lasso’s unbridled but grounded optimism, humility, and humor were a salve for the weirdness, bitterness, and uncertainty of the time and it still is.

I won’t waste space on the plot lines over the years, but season four, which just launched and is about halfway through, has Ted coaching a women’s soccer team in Richmond, England, where the previous seasons were also located.

Episode five of this new season featured a great quote from Ted, specifically, “There’s a reason why the rearview mirror is smaller than the windshield.”

I Googled it after I heard it just to see if it’s an original line. It isn’t. There are plenty of other prior references to the “windshield and rearview mirror” theory, which basically translates to “spend more time looking ahead than backward.”

And a corollary, I suppose, is “if you spend too much time looking in the rearview mirror, you’ll likely crash.”

A former boss of mine had a similar theory that he admittedly stole from the nationally known Atlanta pastor Andy Stanley: “When your memories exceed your dreams, the end is near.”

Both sentiments are helpful guideposts for individuals, particularly for those of us in the last trimester of life. But I think they’re equally helpful to organizations and groups, whether it’s a business, a club, a political party, a sports team, or even a nation.

While reminiscing can be fun, and our past experiences absolutely should provide lessons learned for the future, it’s simply not healthy for a person or organization to dwell on the past or to wish it back.

The magazine Psychology Today had a piece a few years back that outlined the personal downsides of longing too much for things past. Those downsides include personal stagnation, idealizing the good things in the past while ignoring the bad, dissatisfaction and discontentment with the present, loss of personal authenticity, and escapism.

The article said: “The present rarely lives up to our idealized memories. Nostalgia whispers, ‘Remember when life was simpler?’ But life was never truly simple; it’s just that our memories have filtered out the complexities.”

When it comes to today’s politics, I think this backward-looking tendency is a key driver of our divisions because, in a perverse way, it breeds a level of resentment for what we perceive we’ve lost. Saying you want something to be like it used to be is an easy leap toward blaming others for why it’s not. And from there comes vilification, fear of the other, ridicule, and calls for score-settling and retribution.

Welcome to the 2026 midterms.

The British rock band Oasis reunited last summer for a blockbuster tour that sold out stadiums around the world. I was fortunate to see them at London’s Wembley Stadium with my wife and some good friends, and it was the best live show I’ve ever seen.

A highlight of any Oasis show is their anthem “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” It’s as close to an alternative national anthem as any other modern British song. My wife, friends, and I sang it with Brits in bars, taxis, trains, and of course at the show itself. The lyrics don’t have much to do with the title, or really anything decipherable, for that matter, like a lot of Oasis songs. But the tune is great and the chorus lifts you with its call to avoid looking backward with anger.

Good advice these days. Better to look ahead, with hope.

One final note. This is my last bi-weekly column for the Coastal Breeze. We’re moving to St. Pete this fall, which will occupy a lot of my time over the next few months. I might pop back up as time and events warrant, but I wanted to take this moment to thank our publisher Val Simon and editor Lynn Alexander for the opportunity to write for the Breeze these past few years. It’s been a highlight of my time here in Marco and I truly appreciate their support and guidance at every step along the way. The Breeze is a gem of the Marco community, and we’re all privileged to have such a quality community paper that’s produced so well, week after week.

And thank you all for reading and responding. I hope that together, we’ve created some civil dialogue on issues we all face collectively.