Often, I feel that nostalgia is the most significant factor in influencing my life. There are times when I can be perfectly cognitively aware that things were not really better before than they are now, but I can’t help reminiscing that life once was better. Maybe, eventually, I’ll stop sensing the distance between what I remember and how it actually was, and truly believe that things used to be better way back when.
“Way back when stories” were the tales my grandmother used to tell me when I was kid about her own childhood. She told me about how a bus ride to the movies, a ticket to the show and a box of popcorn only cost ten cents. She used to talk about digging a swimming hole in her backyard and filling it with water during the Great Depression. She talked about how things were safer in her childhood. Overall, the message of the stories was always that people were simply better back then.
Now that she’s over 50, I hear my mother echoing the same kind of sentiments as my grandmother. She talks about how all politicians are corrupt, which, according to her, is a new development. Politics are irrevocably partisan now, she says, as they never were before. Perhaps nostalgia doesn’t come into play to the same degree as it did with my grandmother, but there’s certainly some nostalgic factors that make my mother misremember the past as it actually was.
I can see this kind of nostalgia in myself, as well. I taught at a high school last year, and I remember thinking that my high school classmates and I worked harder, were assigned more work and cared more about school than the students in this school. It was a shockingly back-in-my-day! sort of moment for me—like I remembered that I'd trekked twenty miles to go to high school or something—and I surprised myself. Perhaps high school was hard for me personally, but I don’t think that there’s been a huge degradation of the typical high school student in the last five years.
Nostalgia plays an important significance in everyone’s life. It influences our quality-of-life in that we often think that the world—and everything in it—used to be better. It makes living-in-the-present impossible, and by nature requires comparisons between people, places and experiences from one’s past.
What role does nostalgia play in your life? How do you work on living in the present?