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Anyone else who don't care much for their past?
I'm 46 years of age. My childhood and youth and post-youth life wasn't traumatic or anything. I had an okay life. I guess I might even have had a good life. But for some reason, reminiscing about it just doesn't feel pleasant. Some folks find talking about their past highly enjoyable. So why don't I like it? Is this normal?
I'm in the same boat as you. No trauma or anything particularly bad happened in my childhood or as a young adult, but there's just nothing there for me. I occasionally get a feeling of nostalgia when I hear a song I hadn't heard in a decade or something, but it's quite rare. My wife will often want to reminisce about things she/we did when we were younger, but I just get nothing out of it.
I have always assumed that it's just because I have grown into an entirely different person. If current me met 15 year ago me, there would be nothing to talk about. My hobbies, career, music interests, and pretty much everything else about me has changed. There's no wishing I could go back and experience any of it again.
By the same token, I don't look very far forward. I have my retirement savings and whatnot all set up because I accept that it is a thing that will eventually happen, but there's no real planning for what I will do with it. I expect that by the time I am nearing retirement age I will be another entirely different person again.
Few quick questions just out of curiosity and to spark conversation.
Are there any parts that make you feel good emotions?
Do you feel nostalgia?
Are you usually a person who feels emotions in the first place? I find that my memories are tied to emotions, smells, and music (which seems to be a common experience for many). Do any of these trigger anything for you?
What do you mean by not liking it? Does it make you feel unpleasant or just nothing at all?
If you answered "unpleasant," are you able to diagnose which parts feel unpleasant? Memories I don't enjoy are usually attached to insecurity (deserved or not) about the way I acted. I can recall times I was too quiet, too talkative, rude, etc. and I don't enjoy those memories at all.
Thanks, that's some good angles.
I don't really feel positive emotions about actual memories, but if, say, a song is seen in isoluation from my life, I can feel nostalgia. As you said, smell and music is big-time nostalgia triggers. Don't know about emotions, though. I mean, I guess I have those, but are those nostalgia triggers?
"unpleasent" pretty much covers how I feel. Now that I think about it, I think that even though some memories are pretty nice in themselves, they're still tainted by being my past. So the overall effect is still in negative.
Curiosly enough, when I dream, I sometimes dive into my past with really rose-tinted glasses.
My childhood wasn't always super pleasant. But I have a mental safe space I can go back to. I wonder, do you have anything like this?
For me, it's remembering my grandmother's house. I would draw things and she treasured everything I made. She would shovel snow on the porch steps so we could sled down them. She would set up a tiny piece of plywood on her driveway with a 2x4 under it so we could ride our little bikes over a "ramp." And after all of that, I would lay down on her big porch swing and she would rock me to sleep. I can still smell the Kerosene heater and hear Conway Twitty or Johnny Cash playing when I think of it.
It was the most safe I ever felt in my whole life, every single time. Do you have something like that?
Sounds wonderful!
I don't have a place I go back to like that. But if I had, I think it would been my boarding school. I know they have a bad rep, but this one was pretty nice. I remember I said, quite seriously, that I wanted to be burried there.
Hey, I'm not sure if this will help at all, but I like exploring my feelings using this circle chart. I wonder if it would help you delve deeper than just "unpleasant."
https://imgur.com/a/oVXSXX8
I kinda hate who I was in the past. There's plenty of trauma to unpack as well, and often i find myself just preferring to lock the demons in a box than trying to force them to move out.
I definitely don't mind reminiscing the good times. But reminiscing the bad times feels awful, and sometimes buried memories get un-buried when doing so.
My sister reminded me about how I used to comfort her and make dinner for her when my parents were too busy fighting. I didn't remember this at all.
And by all measures, I have a good life. But our brains are malleable things, and often we choose to forget that which ruined us.
I seem to remember reading an article about adverse childhood experiences - ACEs, as they call them - and I remember seeing that besides the obvious things like physical and sexual abuse there were also a lot of small things they listed that felt mundane. It's the small things that over an extended period of time might be considered emotionally abusive. I think it's important to realize that even the small things can be trauma.
Of course that's not to say that these are knives stuck in your back, or that society owes you back for it, or that you need to go to a psycholgist or anything dramatic like that. But I do think that it's important to adknowledge to yourself that you were hurt by them - that you are not invulnerable to that kind of experience, especially back when you were a child.
But then again, I think I have taken the opposite road. When I think of my childhood, it's really hard to remember the things that were great and really easy to remember the things that were not so great. I grew up in Las Vegas and it's a completely different place now than it was when I was a kid, so it's not like I can walk down the streets to relive the good things. My memory lane has almost literally been demolished.
I have noticed that other than fixating on a few negative/embarrassing experiences. I don't think much about the past. I believe this is an ADHD trait to an extent, though it obviously may not be so in your case. But I'm very present and near-future oriented. I'm not ambitious or dreaming about the future and I'm not thinking fondly of the past. It's in the past so it's not really "real" anymore.
A very apt quote I found online about this once was "It's not so much out of sight, out of mind; more so out of sight, immediately forget it even fucking existed in the first place".. that definitely speaks to me. (I do consider myself very ambitious and am actually constantly looking 5-10 years in the future, but my past is just something I never dwell on..)
Object permanence? Who needs that? That’s half the reason I removed the doors to my bedroom closets.
Just another person chiming in to say "same". No major trauma, but my brain/internal monologue is highly critical and tries to replay every single miniscule social gaffe I may have made, so I think over time I just tried not to recall too much to avoid that particular groove/spiral of thoughts. At least staying in the present is healthy according to the Internet? :)
I think about the past more and more these days. I am reaching 38 now and feel nostalgia almost every day.
I had plenty of good times, but I was mostly an insecure and try hard teen and young adult, but I think most about the good things. I don't really care about the bad and the cringe because that's just part of life.
I think that ties with my feeling that life is going by faster and I'm getting old. I am thinking way too much about the past and the future at the same time and this prevents me to live in the present.
I have a somewhat comfortable life, traveled to Thailand last year, will go to Peru soon, but I can't stop feeling that life is just escaping me.
And I want to have a child, but not right now. But at the same time I can't wait much longer because I'm almost 40.
Sorry I just had a train of thoughts and unpacked a lot while I am typing.
But yes, I think about the past a lot. At the same time I don't feel like revisiting because whenever I do things I did back then, it just feels "meh".
When I visit my hometown and go out to events I stumble upon a lot of people of my teen years. It feels like I am back there sometimes and talking to them is the worst because all we can talk about is the past. I find this a little sad.
Such parallels! I just turned 39 last year and spent last year trying to generate interest in a high school reunion in a Facebook group I made. The thing is, I didn't like most of the people I went to school with, but perhaps (maybe the same as you) I'm nostalgic for a different time in my life - a time when things felt simpler, and when our lives were just beginning.
On the subject of having a kid - we just had our first in January and it's a huge lesson in how to (once again) live in the here and now. I'm looking forward to the period of parenting everybody talks about where you get to see the world through their eyes and that for some, it makes you feel young again.
I guess that feeling of things being fresh -- particularly movies and video games -- is something I'm eager to relive. I'll have to remind myself that her experience is her own, but that as her dad, I can get excited about the things she likes in ways that my parents could not.
Curious about your experiences with old friends - why does it feel like you're just trying to relive the past? Do you only tell stories from back in the day? Are you stuck in the roles that you had back then?
Mostly. We had a reunion almost a decade ago and the only things everyone talked about was what we did in the good ol' days. I guess when everyone left school and parted ways, there was not much more in common.
I think school is a place you are forced to find a group that you can get along because you spend so much time there.
It's rare that I find these people out there now because I live in another city so when I find one or two there is not much time to develop anything more than the basic chit chat.
That said, I go to my hometown one or two weekends per month and my best friends are still my childhood friends (we are friends since we were 8) and we always hang out, drink and talk about everything so this nostalgic feeling is kind of irrational.
Fridays when I am visiting I always send a message and we spend all Saturday hanging out making barbecue and drinking so I can't really complain.
I feel this. I was a major videogame addict growing up in the snes, PSX and N64 era. I played a lot.
These days when I sit to play something I just fire up stardew valley and spend two hours doing the same thing.
It's rare that a new game grab my attention and when it does, it is mostly games that has simple mechanics and are kind of retro (hollow knight, shovel knight, stardew).
I think about buying a PS5, but I feel like it will be off most of the time.
Yeah, so many games are just retreading old ground for those of us who have been there, done that. We're not the target audience anymore.
That said, I'm playing the new Zelda with my wife and we're loving it. It really does a great job of blending old and new and worth it if you haven't given it a go already.
I'm not exactly the same as you, but I don't feel that I have really done much to be proud of. I don't know if I have really achieved anything since high school that feels like it really represents what I'm capable of. I think I've achieved a lot of things that sound impressive to a lot of people but I don't feel like I've had to do anything at all really to achieve those things. I wouldn't really even call it failing upwards because failing requires you to have stretched yourself beyond your limits in some way. I think I really just stumble through life just accepting whatever is given to me because I don't really know how to reach for more.
I would say I'm generally happy in life, but when I actually reflect on the subject, I don't see anything to be happy with beyond just having an understanding that my emotional state is up to me so keeping a positive outlook is important.
I think I have the same sentiment as you, OP.
I'm also harsh on what I perceived as mistakes or missteps my past self made. It ends up being a pretty vicious cycle.