I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

The speaker challenges the sentimental myth that youth is inherently carefree. The line suggests that what adults call “freedom and joy” is often a retrospective construction: memory edits out fear, constraint, and confusion, turning a difficult period into a golden age. Implicitly, youth can be experienced as pressure—limited agency, dependence on adults, social surveillance, and the intensity of first losses and humiliations. The final sentence is a sharp diagnosis of nostalgia: people praise youth not because it was truly easy, but because time has blurred its hardships. The quote’s bite lies in reversing a cultural cliché and exposing how selective remembrance shapes collective beliefs.