Roman, I've spent a good chunk of my life wishing I could go back. To experience what was when I wasn't present, to make different decisions, to do better in the heat of the moment... I wished I could take it all back. What ails you now is old hat to me.
I've spent so long researching, thinking, and dreaming of events prior... It's taken me a long time of serious, serious reflection to realize that based off of everything I've since dug up and found... there is nothing there for me. After years of accumulative attempt to effectively, artificially reverse my entire perception of time, I've only learned that the world was just as troubled then as it is now. People behaved the same way. Culture worked largely to the same degree. Nothing was truly purer, and nothing was purely truer.
The inconvenient reality for me is that if I was picked up and plopped right back into what had already happened through the course of time, my life wouldn't improve. Because that's not up to my environment, that's up to me. And that ability in you doesn't change when given time, it changes when you decide it so.
My best guess as to what's going on in people like you and I is that there are inadequacies in our current lives that no matter where we turn, we cannot find a solution for. Thus we are left with no other choices but to simply try to revert back to a point in time where said insurmountable issues simply didn't yet exist.
That's one of the definitions of "the good old days" after all, when people didn't
remember facing the personal tragedies they do now. Naturally, the mind then leads itself to put memories and historical knowledge in a place they don't deserve.
Sparing you the rest, my findings ended up cementing for me when I found the following:
"I know now that we can't escape the past. Nor can we rewrite it, hoping to lessen our pain. The best we can hope for is to continue to learn, to take from the past only that which is good, and move on. Perhaps, in the process, we will build a brighter future."
Indeed, I hope we can come away from all this with something in hand.