Is Nostalgia Overrated?
I’m very happy with my life and career, but I do find myself having serious attacks of nostalgia, and I don’t quite know why. Even though I’ve got to travel the world and do amazing things, I still want to go back to my teenage years and change little aspects of it. It’s strange, but it does continue to bug me.
Edgar Wright
This is something we can relate to on some level. No matter what we do, how much we work hard, how involved we are in what we do, we slip back in time. We look back at what happened in the past with a sense of longing for the same. We want to go back to ‘simpler times’, where we see life as much more satisfying and devoid of the negative aspects of the reality we love in.
We often reminisce about those days where smartphones and the latest gadgets didn’t hold their sway over our attention and time like they do today. We wish to talk to people who we last met five or ten years ago. We look back at some memory during school days and wonder what would have happened if we had done something different instead of ending up where we are today.
But nostalgia is like one of those mischievous characters in the back of your head, trying to occupy your mind and waste it’s potential. When you could be living in the moment and making the best of what is there for you, you are brooding about people or events in the past that have literally nothing to do with who you are today!
I prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest.
We look back in the past through rose-tinted glasses, more often than not. Our mind, contrary to what we think, doesn’t record each and everything that happened in our lives. We subconsciously rewrite our own history, whether it is to write out all the problems we had in the past or create more negative subplots, to suit our own narrative that we build about ourselves.
It doesn’t always make sense logically, but in our heads we try and judge everything based on what we think had happened in our lives. We convince ourselves that it was all ‘past perfect’, that there were nothing that troubled us back in the past too and that the present reality is terrible in comparison.
True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.
But in life, the only true constant is change. Things will change, for the better or for the worse, no matter what you try and do it. So it is when you make a transition to a different phase of your life that nostalgia rules your emotions more often than not. Our default tendency is to crave for stability and so we stutter when we have to make a decision to change, even when it is for the better. We want to be in charge of our lives and constant flux doesn’t help that cause. This is when we look back into the past and look at the best bits of it and feel better about ourselves.
Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Under its influence, ordinary songs take on dimensions and powers, like emotional superheroes.
The thing with nostalgia is it is bittersweet: sweet in that we recollect the best parts of our past and make ourselves feel better and bitter because we know these memories won’t come back and we have to resign ourselves to the new reality.
Some believe that nostalgia can have positive effects:
A 2015 study showed that nostalgic reminiscence can be a stabilizing force. It can strengthen our sense of personal continuity, reminding us that we possess a store of powerful memories that are deeply intertwined with our identity. The person who listened to his grandpa’s stories as a little boy, played youth baseball and partied with friends in high school is still that same person today.
Research I’ve conducted since 1998 has shown that nostalgic memories tend to focus on our relationships, which can comfort us during stressful or difficult times. Although we’ve become independent and mature (perhaps even a bit jaded), we’re still our parents’ child, our brother’s sibling and our lover’s confidant. In developing a retrospective survey of childhood experiences, I found that remembering that we experienced unconditional love as children can reassure us in the present — especially during trying times. These memories can fuel the courage to confront our fears, take reasonable risks and tackle challenges. Rather than trapping us in the past, nostalgia can liberate us from adversity by promoting personal growth.
But there are many caveats: many of these studies have small sample size, and the amount of positive feelings gained by reliving the best part of our past is marginal and short term.
Ultimately, the thing is like I said earlier, life is full of change. Things that happened in the past may not be valid or make sense in today’s context. For example, from a personal perspective, I did not utilize the Internet and the smartphone technology for my high school education as I focused on books and tried to avoid the lure of the social media technology. But today, I cannot go back to the study habits that I had in high school, simply because the world around me has changed in the past few years. It is unrealistic to yearn for doing things the way I did it back then.
But what I can do is adapt to the modern situation and find the required solutions. You know, simple things like using PDF’s of useful textbooks instead of buying the covers, going through websites like GeeksForGeeks and all. You know, because:
I don’t suggest that nostalgia is something which should be done away with. It will strike you, but you can harness the energy you get from reliving the past to make your present much better and your future bright. The key is to not let nostalgia consume you. For then you are at the mercy of the past, being a slave to it and letting it consume you.
Thanks for reading and have a nice day!
