Nostalgia is a mind's trick
Featuring my favorite topics to discuss
I have seen several funny posts on Instagram with the following, or a similar, message: “You can invite one friend to dinner, and if they start talking about drama that happened over five years ago, you win a million dollars. Who are you inviting?”
I am amused every time a friend sends me a post like this. I am even more amused when they mention the hypothetical drama I would be most likely to rehash.
Other posts in the same vein include questions like:
“You can invite one friend to dinner, and if they start talking about fanfiction, you win a million dollars. Who are you inviting?”
“You can invite one friend to dinner, and if they start talking about [insert form of media here], you win a million dollars. Who are you inviting?”
Et cetera, et cetera
Sharing posts or memes on social media with my friends is most often a silly little diversion that prompts no critical thought. If anything, most of the things we send each other probably deplete my brain cells, if that’s even possible. However, occasional posts–like those listed above–do prompt some degree of self-reflection.
What are the topics that I gravitate toward when speaking? I wonder. What are the topics that I gravitate toward when writing?
The latter question has been on my mind more than the former question, and I think my answer varies based on what sort of writing we are talking about. The things I write about in The Book vary from the things I write about in my journal, which also vary from the things I write about on Substack. That being said, I am writing on Substack right now, so this is the medium we’ll discuss. After looking back through my archive of old posts (today’s makes #32, by the way!), I have identified the following salient themes–or, perhaps, “crutches”--that I rely on most often. They include:
Talking about books/movies/shows/music that I like
Talking about mental illness
Talking about how I think communities should be organized/what it means to have a home
Talking about dead people
Talking about Taylor Swift lyrics
And the big topic of the day:
Talking about memory and the passage of time
This time last summer, I was very much preoccupied with the idea of turning 25 and found myself reaching out to people I know who are anywhere from five to sixty years older than me to ask about things they wish they knew when they were 25. When I wrote this piece, “25 Pieces of Advice for People Turning 25,” and opened with the line “I have been feeling very introspective lately,” a friend texted me to say, “When aren’t you?”
And what a fair point that is.
The truth is that I am almost always thinking about the connections between past, present, and future. When I hear axioms like “the past and future are intangible and therefore nonexistent,” I get sent into a real tailspin because what do you mean I am not just a collection of memories of the past and dreams for the future stacked on top of each other and wearing a trench coat?
In the same way that I am a person who is prone to developing obsessions and having poor eyesight, I am a person who is prone to introspection and daydreaming, especially as it pertains to the passage of time. That is just who I am. I often struggle with existing fully in the moment, but that does not mean that I do not try.
I have not written much this month because I have been busy with house hunting (which sucks), work (which is all right), and visiting friends and family (which is good). On one recent weekend, I visited a friend and her fiancé at her family’s cabin near Seneca Rocks. My goal for the weekend was to be entirely present, especially because this is a friend who I can only see in person once in a blue moon, given that we live 5+ hours apart. Part of my attempt to stay in the moment included leaving my phone at the cabin while we hiked, swam in the river, and sat outside by a fire. The other part of my attempt included gently guiding my mind back to the present moment when I caught it wandering. This is a technique of meditation, something that I am notoriously bad at, but I must say that I did pretty dang good at being in the moment for one short weekend.
The only thing that catapulted me out of the present and into the past that weekend was the cabin’s decor. It felt like a time capsule for my friend’s family in many ways, complete with boxy TVs straight out of the year 2000; VHS tapes of movies like Spirit, Good Will Hunting, and Kiki’s Delivery Service; childhood drawings; and even two Peeps that my friend and her sister left out to decompose (okay, this is a weird one, but the little marshmallow bunnies looked exactly as they would coming straight out of the package and really made me wonder what I have been putting in my stomach all these years). Basically, the whole place was rife with nostalgia.
Nostalgia has been defined as “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations” (thanks, Oxford Dictionary). While getting lost in my own memories is a distinctly solitary activity, nostalgia feels like a more collective experience. I think most children of the late 90s/early 2000s probably feel a degree of nostalgia when they see certain Disney VHS tapes, walk past a Claire’s that is somehow still open at a mall that is somehow still open, or hear the opening notes to Taylor Swift’s “Our Song” or some other song off her debut album.
Ha! Here I am talking about Taylor Swift again, another one of my crutches in writing. It is worth noting that even the title of this piece, “Nostalgia is a mind’s trick,” is a line from a song off her most recent album. Here is the full verse from which the line comes:
My friends used to play a game where
We would pick a decade
We wished we could live in instead of this
I'd say the 1830s but without all the racists and getting married off for
the highest bid
Everyone would look down
Cause it wasn't fun now
Seems like it was never even fun back then
Nostalgia is a mind's trick
If I'd been there, I'd hate it
It was freezing in the palace
This verse (thank you, Taylor) hits on a concept that is fundamental when thinking of nostalgia, which is that the past is often viewed through rose-tinted lenses. Sure, we can look back on the great galas of the early and mid-1800s and see only their glamor, but we should also remember the racism and sexism and the fact that most of us would have been poor servants/peasants rather than ladies and lords. Some might also look back on times as recent as the early 2000s and see only the fashion and media without recognizing that gay people still could not get married in all 50 states until 2015.
So, yeah. Nostalgia is a mind’s trick. But it can also be a source of comfort in trying times.
A quick Google search of “why is everyone so nostalgic?” yields many results, both scientific articles and opinion pieces. A combination of the two published on Psychology Today, entitled “Why Nostalgia Is on the Rise,” was one of my favorite articles that I read over while writing today. If you are as interested in the concept of nostalgia as I am, I would recommend reading the linked article. If you are not, I will give you the basic idea: We turn to nostalgia most of all when our present sucks.
Specifically, the Psychology Today article discusses nostalgia during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. My own experience and memories align neatly with the central idea of the article; I remember spending a great deal of time with my now-husband, then-boyfriend rewatching all of the Harry Potter movies as well as all of Avatar: The Last Airbender when it was released on Netflix, all while mourning the abrupt/unceremonious end to my college years and the strange loneliness of social distancing.
Nostalgia can be a source of comfort, but interestingly enough, a study cited in the article demonstrated that having participants envision a positive future boosted their mental health even more than having them find comfort in familiar items from their past.
I don’t exactly know what to say about that conclusion or what to say to wrap up this piece. Do I quote C.S. Lewis and say, “There are far better things ahead than any we leave behind”? Do I lean into the fact that engaging in nostalgia can indeed bring us comfort in times of strife? Do I try to practice more meditation and live only in the here-and-now?
I knew all along that writing 1,600 words was not going to lead me to any sweeping conclusion about nostalgia. Unsurprisingly, I am bound to keep thinking about, talking about, and writing about this topic, along with all of my other favorites. For now, in place of that sweeping conclusion that does not exist, I will give you an incomplete list of things that make me feel nostalgic:
Mario Kart
Barbie dolls
The smell of chlorine
Kraft mac and cheese
Songs that would play while I rode in the backseat of my mom’s car as a child
Songs that would play at the club in college
Star Wars
Mourning dove calls
And so many more.
Until next time and with love,
Alexa
(Today’s picture: Nintendo DS Nostalgia of Christmas Past)
