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Your sense of nostalgia
I'm curious what your sense of nostalgia is like?
For me I think it's reasonable low. Like I look back at certain things, events and people of my past and I will think fondly of them. But I don't think about it often, and I almost never think "I miss that thing", more so that I enjoyed it at the time and I'm glad that it happened.
What about you? How do you view nostalgia? Does it bother you that things aren't the same as before? What things do you miss?
My memories can be really intense sometimes. I have a variety of triggers that put me right back in actual moments. Sometimes good moments, sometimes bad, sometimes neither.
My brain does it all - I can see, hear, and even smell whole entire memories.
Ive always been like this, but I think its gotten more intense as Ive gotten older.
Oh wow that's crazy! My memory is terrible, my friends and family constantly remind me of things I could not have recalled without help, and with far greater clarity.
Interesting that it's gotten more intense as you've gotten older, do you think your memory has gotten better, or just the sensations attached to the memories?
I’m not sure, it could be a lot of different things. I dabbled in psychedelics for a while and so my brain is definitely different from what it was, but I also finished college, got a job where I use my brain a lot, and had some pretty intense life experiences as an adult and the ability to see those vividly might affect my ability to see other mundane memories vividly.
I never put this together before, but your comment made me realize that my intense nostalgia for everything and my daily cringe fests from embarrassing things I did in the past are two sides of the same coin. It's rare for me to look back on my experiences through a neutral or indifferent lens.
Nostalgia has been pretty strong for me the past couple of years, I think about the past constantly and miss it on a daily basis. It’s mostly centered around technology for me, although there’s a good amount of 90s culture and just in general happier times that I miss. I truly do feel like things have progressively gotten a lot worse over time, from a tech and societal perspective. But on the plus side it’s led me to rediscovering things like playing Sega Genesis on a CRT, being a member of a number of pubnix servers, blogging, etc.
I get it’s not health to be so stuck in the past, and possibly it’s a underlying sign of depression, but it’s hard not to with the state of the country/capitalism.
Your description of your nostalgia describes some of my friends well to be honest, and it's party why I wrote the post, because it's quite different to the way I think of the past (and present).
I think you might be on to something with the mental health side of things. I had a long battle with pessimism and anxiety which I feel like I've overcome to a great degree, and I wonder if that factors into the positive outlook on the present vs the rose tinted glasses of the past.
Interesting you bring up 90s culture, I have a friend who's basically turned his life into the 90s life over the past 10-12 years. He's bought himself four different cars from the 90s. His home office is a standing desk but his computer set up looks like it's from the 90s. He's got a huge collection of music CDs and movie tapes.
The guy seems like one of the happiest of my friends.
I get hit by it when I notice my friends and family looking older. This often comes with an event like them not having the energy to do something anymore that they used to love. I remember the energy they used to have and long for them to still be able to do that thing. My dad can’t play pickleball anymore.
Also Crystal Pepsi. It was the only cola I ever liked. If they did bring it back it would probably taste awful because they keep doing that to pop.
I'm the same as you. I'm a 90's kid and fond of that time, but I don't want to go back. A lot of things from back then I enjoyed, but don't have a super high regard for.
E.g. There's a new Disney+ documentary in the Goofie Movie. I liked it as a kid, but that's it. In the last 10 years I discovered that a surprising amount of people LOVE that movie. They still love the one song from it. I had no idea. I get the love for the classics like Lion King, Aladdin, Sleeping Beauty. But Goofie Movie was never up there for me.
I can probably name on two hands the number of things I'm genuinely nostalgic for or still have a love for.
Nostalgic moments hit me hardest when I think of people who have already passed. I lost a coworker years ago and she was someone I really appreciated and Im surprised how often she pops into my mind and I remember her presence with a warm glow but also sadness. I also have a cousin who I really looked up to as a kid. He was a very talented guitarist and he was the epitome of 'cool' to a geeky kid like me and I always appreciated his gentle spirit and wise and encouraging words. Then last year I found out that he was very sick with cancer and before I could even see him again, he was gone. That really rocked me as I rarely saw him but I always had a special fondness for him and he was always on my 'gotta visit again soon' list. But it never happened. And now I find myself nostalgic for the times we had together as kids. Such is life, sometimes the good ones move on too early and its hard not to look back with nostalgia at what we shared.
I have some happy memories and unfortunately a larger number of negative ones. I don't really have nostalgia for anything. I think nostalgia springs from a more comprehensive sense of a time or era, and takes more than a single event to invoke. The closest that comes to mind was from high school age, and one evening my best friend and I dressed as pirates and sword fought in a plaza where tourists passed through. We weren't busking, we were just doing it for fun. A couple of old ladies called us something negative in a stuffy old lady way, and we laughed at them. Coupled with this memory is a sense of the freedom we had to do silly stuff like that and the suspicion that we would probably get in trouble for sword fighting in public these days. But do I want to go back there? - no.
I understand what you mean, I'm sorry to hear your negative memories out weigh your positives ones.
Does that effect your life today? Do you find yourself striving to make more positive memories or do you live life day to day?
As an adult, life has been a lot better, and I think people would tend to say I'm a positive and pleasant person. I'm not always, certainly, but I try to appreciate small things (good weather, a well composed photograph or setting) when life is confustulating at a higher level. So to answer your question I think it's the latter. I'm not sure how one would go about making a positive memory. I think big picture wise my life is a good one.
It's pretty strong for me, in particular tactile (and smell but I think that is typical). It's one reason I like my classic vehicles, old tech, vinyls, etc. Modern stuff is great, but just using older things brings me a bit of joy that new stuff doesn't.
Case in point: in our new house we decided that we wanted a stereo in our living room rather than a TV. I was open to a new Sonos or something but we found this hi-fi audio shop on the outskirts of the city. The website looked like a geocities page locked in time.
We roll up around 11am on Saturday morning. We find this shop which has been operated by audiophiles since the 70s. We spent several hours with them demo amps and speakers that they have refurbished. They relished having customers who wanted to engage with their passion directly. For the price of an entry level hobbyist amp we got some ESS loud speakers and a Marantz 1060 with tuner. Everything clicks with weight and milled steel knobs turn like smooth oil. Signal strength is an analog needle that swings back and forth as you run through frequencies with a directness and tactility absent in modern tech.
My older vehicles are a similar experience. It feels like operating the vehicle when you drive. There are no distractions.
It all sounds romantic, and it partly is. But this is all stuff we can still do with modern efficiencies. It's just that the price point to have buy stuff like this is peak luxury that many of us can't or shouldn't find a way to afford.
I like old media, but I don't feel nostalgic about movies, music etc.
Im with you. My Marantz 2225 amp/tuner has been in my living room since I bought it in 1983 when it was already 7 or 8 years old. It works perfectly and the sound through my similar vintage Yamaha speakers blows the doors off my wife's iPhone playing compressed Spotify digital music through our Bose speaker. There's no replacement for quality, and the nostalgia is a bonus.
I'll go months and months between nostalgic periods. And then I'll be out there grocery shopping or whatever and I'll run into someone I haven't seen or thought about in years, like an ex girlfriend or a high school soccer teammate, and then for the next week or so, I'll relive and oftentimes fondly remember the good old times.
The most recent example of this was I was at the airport picking up a cousin who was flying back from a work trip and while waiting for him, I ran into my former coworker, we worked together at Arby's when we were in high school. After chatting with him for a few minutes, we went our separate ways, but I kept thinking about those old days when I was a young, irresponsible, high school kid having a great time working at Arby's. It took me a few days to get out of that nostalgia.
Situations like this happen once or twice a year.
That's kinda nice to be honest! It can be good to have a trigger like that to relive some of the memories you might not otherwise think about day to day and just bathe in them for a few days.
Man, I just do not have the memory for people like that. I've worked probably over a dozen jobs in my life, all the way back since I was 15, and I think out of the likely hundreds of people I've worked with, I probably remember the names of 8 or so. I don't remember the names of anyone I worked with in highschool. Wish I could retain that kind of information.
How close were you with some of those people and how long did you work with them? I also have some coworkers from high school or college days whose names I wouldn't be able to tell you. Or if I saw them out in public, I likely wouldn't recognize them. However, the people I worked with for along time and was close with, I still remember their names and have fond memories of them 20-25 years later. In th example I provided above, my high school Arby's coworker, that was back in the early 2000s, most of 2002 and several months of 2003, and I still remembered him because we worked three nights a week for about 16 months, and then we played coed soccer for a couple of years after high school before he moved across the country.
My sense of Nostalgia is similar to yours. I can think of a time where I'm glad it happened, but that's about it. I don't usually want to go back nor do I experience it again as vividly as some others here.
I never understood why nostalgia was such a strong factor for people, but now I that I've read people describe how much they actually experience. It makes sense.
I am currently writing a short story on that subject. I am writing it in Portuguese. I used chatGPT to translate the excerpt below into English.
The Nostalgia Machine