Edited by Vanishree
People love going down ‘memory lane, especially on the internet. Every few days, they come across some fond memory of theirs and share it on social media seeking people who might relate with them. From things as trivial as a packet of chips that aren’t manufactured anymore, to things as meaningful as their past achievements or achievements of the society as a whole, the online community finds something or the other to rave about. This throwback culture has gained a lot of momentum in recent years.
But why? Why would someone want to remember such happy days of their lives, despite knowing that they can never go back to them? Why long for an experience that you can only reminisce and not relive? Shouldn’t this make people sad more than it makes them happy? I guess not.
The effects of nostalgia are more powerful and beautiful than the sound of it. It comforts us on more than one level. On a personal level, it acts as an adhesive that binds our sense of self. It is that emotional experience that ties together who we were, who we are, and emphasizes the promise of who we could be. By doing this, nostalgia prevents us from forming a fragmented identity. It ensures that we remember the things we have achieved, and reminds us of what we’re capable of achieving. On a social level, nostalgia makes sure that we don’t feel as lonely as we might’ve if we didn’t have collective memories. It places us in an ongoing stream of memories with so many others, and it is moving us to realise that we were neither alone when we experienced a situation for the first time, nor are we alone when we remember it. It increases our social connectedness, and there’s nothing more essential to social animals like us.
This very comforting nature of nostalgia gets us through the most transitional phases of our lives. Change, whether good or bad, threatens us at different levels. It frightens us because we don’t know what the change might bring or how it might affect us, or if we will have any control over it. However, one thing we do have control over is our memories – sort of. So we simply take a look back and comfort ourselves with the memories of our good old days. They distract us from the unpredictability of our future, reaffirm our faith in ourselves, and sometimes give us enough courage to face the future.
Our obsession with the good old days is understandable, but were they as good as we make them seem? Often, they are not. The processes involved in our memory are not only super selective, but they also distort reality to some extent. Nostalgia glorifies and over-romanticizes things, but since it makes us feel wholesome, we can’t charge it for misrepresenting our memories.
However, sometimes our mind cherry-picks memories and sequences them in a way that we remember an experience more negatively than it occurred in the first place. The latter might happen when we surround ourselves with people who influence our memory in a way that we try and retrieve only the negative parts of it. These are the people who ask us, ‘Do you remember when she hurt you?’ instead of asking, ‘Do you remember the time she wrote a song for you as an apology?’ This reinforces us to keep reliving only the negative parts of our memories, which intensifies our time. Therefore, it might be useful to try to be around people who stimulate the best of what we can bring to today from our past. We need people who influence our memory retrieval processes in a way that we get the best out of our nostalgic memory.
I guess humans are perplexingly beautiful that way. We fight the irreversibility of time with highly vivid memories that we have stored in us and use this bitter-sweet experience of nostalgia to bond with more people who are in the same boat as us.