Nostalgia runs the past through a filter. The present is the only raw footage you get.

Memory is not a recording. It edits while it stores, dropping the boredom and the anxiety and keeping the good light, which is why a year you remember fondly may have been fairly hard while you were inside it. The present has no filter applied yet. It arrives complete, including all the parts that will be edited out later.

That is worth holding when now compares badly to then. You are putting raw footage up against a finished cut. Judge this week against what last year actually felt like, not against the version your memory has been quietly improving.