nostalgia Options

[brooklyneast05]

via sandy's tumblr

“Nostalgia is a longing for circumstances that no longer exist or have never existed. Nostalgia has a utopian dimension due to the considerable role that imagination plays in it. Hence, nostalgia is often about a virtual reality that cannot be actualized. In this sense, nostalgia is not always about the past; it can also be directed toward the future or the present. Nostalgia is a bittersweet longing as it combines the pleasurable feeling of the past with pain and suffering because of its absence; its content is very positive, but its absence generates pain.”

are you a nostalgic person?


also on the same note, do you remember the past well? i remember the past very good. i remember a ton of stuff that happened to me as a kid or at school etc etc. i have friends though who just don't remember hardly anything from their childhood. i don't get why. it's really weird to me. i'll tell them to tell me a story from when they were a kid and they don' really have any. i have a million stories and feel like i had a really eventful/fun childhood with good times.

[Joanne]

I think I'm a nostalgic person. I often catch myself thinking about how awesome life was back when I was younger, free of worry and stress. And I always daydream about hypothetical things, like what it would be like if something totally crazy happened -- how would I react, what would other people think,... but then again, I guess everyone experiences that.

As for your second question, I don't know. I like to think that I remember the past well, but I always have a feeling that I tend to exaggerate things when I think back, good and bad. And the weird thing is, I'm not quite sure if most of my memories are actually memories, or just things I remember from watching my childhood home videos so much when I was little. Does that make sense?

[mipadi]

I'm more of a regretful person. There are a number of key things in the past 5 years of my life that I wish I had done differently.

But on a more serious note, I put on the nostalgia goggles a lot, too. I think the past always looks better, because you can take a bunch of happy memories that occurred over a long period of time and quickly compress them into a short memory span. For example, I often look back on my freshman year of college with nostalgia, thinking, "Man, that was a fun year." But that's the thing: it was a whole year. I'm thinking about all the fun stuff in a span of a few seconds or minutes, whereas it actually stretched out over several months. Most days of my freshman year were mundane, and for the most part the bad days haven't stuck with me at all, so I don't even think about them.

Those two ideas, though -- regret and nostalgia -- kind of tie into the nostalgia for the future that your quote talks about. I always look at high school graduation and college graduation as opposites: high school graduation is about opportunity, since it means you're going off to college and have your whole future, any path, ahead of you; whereas college graduation is more about shutting doors, as you've already made key decisions about your life and now you have to commit to them. Sometimes I miss the situation in which my whole life was ahead of me and I could do pretty much anything I wanted; your life doesn't feel like that once you've been out of college for a few years.

[brooklyneast05]

yeah i'm a nostalgic person. i always look at the past and think man life was good. everything was better. i was happier, less worries. i made so many more memories as a kid. i don't feel like i make that many memories now.

that's a good point about opportunity vs shutting doors. i feel that way too i think, even though i don't want to. i constantly stress over whether i picked the right doors and whether i would be happier doing something else. i feel like i'm stuck with the doors i went through though. i mean yeah i could technically always go back and pick some other one, but that's not really convenient anymore since i'm too far down the hall.


i really do wish i was a kid again. people always wanna grow up. i don't think i ever wanted to grow up very much.

[iRapediCarly]

I use to not be. Then I started doing drugs.




Alrite, Ill make a better post. Nostalgia is great, I love the feeling and all, but when I hear about people wanting to be kids again, I just think they want an easy way out, kind of like saying, hey, can I just throw away all this responsibility and go back to being able to do anything and get away with it. I loved my childhood, but the past is the past, theres a reason why you get smarter when you get older. I never wish for an easier life, I just wish I was better at the life I have now.