on nostalgia

it is remarkable, really, when you slow down and consider it, what nostalgia often means.

there is a voice in my head that routinely chimes in that has me longing, if only briefly, for stretches of my life that were on every objective measure worse than the one i’m sitting in hearing that voice.

and why? i suppose it’s because of “more.” it is very difficult, given our mental faculties, to counter the idea that more remaining days would be better than less. they simply would be. more remaining chances for good. i want as many more of this morning i sat with a hot cup looking out the window as i can before i take a dirt nap.

but it is not the case that at that moment. that time i sat there. that i was made better or worse for having either ten or a thousand more of those days ahead of me.

nostalgia tells us that a rewind would be better because there would be more highway to run and with that space and what we’ve learned since we could do more with that highway.

it’s all a fucking lie. it’s a lie that’s very convincing to a mind as mine. there are moments when i am perfectly happy and content that i desire to be in a past self that was not perfectly happy and content. just because i had more chances ahead.

but for what? the cumulative experience of those days is not a thing that i will ever be in contact with. i will only ever, at best, have the moment at hand. surely there might be some decisions made that i would be better for had they been not made. and maybe that eraser would serve me well.

in my most sane states i just don’t know that it fucking matters. if the world ended right now a five year old would have the experience of it as it happened and so would a ninety year old. neither could possibly know otherwise, and their longings for how it might have played out differently won’t be contingent on whether they actually had done anything or not. we will all be longing for things to have been otherwise when they prove to be not.

this powerful notion of nostalgia — this, what david foster wallace called, “the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing” — might serve us at times. it might be so that it motivates us to make more of what is around us.

but what it most powerfully does is fixate us towards some thing that did not exist. that could not have existed. it moves our gaze from where we are to what is for all intents and purposes air as we clench our fists.

seeing this will not free me from it. it is late. i am awake. i should not be. here again i am nostalgia-ing. that i may have had a better chance at tomorrow if i were closer to asleep now than i am.

and i will continue to believe, with some sort of delusional religious fervor, that if i could go from 24 to now again i would be “better.” i would see more potholes. i would seize more opportunity.

nostalgia would like me to believe that at some exit ramp i could choose to not be me. this has never been true.