Photo by Anton H. on Pexels
One day, while walking down one of my school’s hallways, I saw on the “What’s Trending” Board (made by the UMatter club, dedicated to improving student mental health and fostering a supportive school environment) that the 2015/2016 aesthetic was trending. This confused me, because even if you were a high school senior, you would have only been in the 3rd grade during that year.
This made me wonder: why are we romanticizing a time that most of us probably don’t remember? In fact, despite being very young, my most prominent memory is of my grandparents being annoyed about politics and repeating the classic statement, “Things used to be so much better.”
The key reason for this constant longing for the past is due to one key reason: nostalgia. Nostalgia refers to a wistful sentiment of yearning to return to the past, or to some condition once felt. In the 17th century, it was considered a disorder, thought to be a form of homesickness. Today, though, psychologists believe it to be much more complex—an emotional state to bring comfort and coherence regarding a current situation.
Studies and research have found that nostalgia can boost self-esteem, increase feelings of connection, enhance feelings of meaning, and act as a safety net during times of high stress. It reminds us that there was once good, and therefore, we want to go back to it.
But our memory is often faulty. You’re like an archeologist; your memory is a random assortment of dinosaur bones. You have to assemble it into a structure, but you don’t really know what bone goes where, so you just take your best shot. The process of retrieving memory is based on reconstructing it and is prone to bias.
A phenomenon known as fading affect bias sees that memories associated with negative emotions typically fade more quickly than those affiliated with positive sentiments. This is mainly because what we enjoy thinking about, in this case, positive events, will stick with us due to that repetition. We don’t want to think about our negative experience, and so therefore we don’t; leading us to eventually forget. Researchers have coined the term retrieval-induced forgetting.
So when we go back to build that dinosaur, the bones we have would only be the ones from our positive memories, meaning when we reconstruct the scene, key details and events are missing. Our memories shape how we look at things, feel about them, and react to them, influencing just about every action.
Not being content with the presents makes us crave the past—we already know what happened, and we can imagine how we can change it for the better.
Part of it stems from fear of change and letting go; the continuation of identity. People like knowing who they are, and it’s the past that tells you who you are based on your past experiences, actions, and memories.
The past also provides certainty, a feeling of pride. You get to look back and see all you survived, and you’ve done. This can also make you feel worse about yourself in your present situation, looking back at what you once were or did. But this can be flipped, since you can also look back and see how much you’ve improved; it’s all a matter of perspective.
This occurrence is further caused by modern media that pushes a narrative from the past, often seen in books and movies, that can push the idea that things used to be better in the “good ol’ days.” However, these often gloss over or don’t include the full picture, just based on what the story is like. Many people also look back upon their youth as being a better time, and as a reaction to modern problems and current events.
Bringing this back to the 2016 aesthetic poster in the hallway, with how hectic things feel right now, people crave the past, which was “better,” even if it wasn’t. Our brain tricks us into feeling that it was a great time based on all those little things we remembered that we liked.
But is it really so bad? Well, there really isn’t an overt issue with romanticizing the past, but it can be unhealthy and cause feelings of distress to live too long in it; then you’re living in the past, but no one else is there. It’s important to remember that the past really wasn’t so great. Remember what made that time so great; what are you missing right now? And bring yourself into the moment, live in the present since you’ll never get to again. You can do this by cycling through all your senses; what do you see, feel, hear, smell, and what can you touch? What can you taste?
And maybe your past really was better, then that’s perfectly fine. It’s just important to remember that whatever you are feeling right now is not permanent; it will change. So take it slowly; you don’t need to have the whole future planned out. Work through your feelings right now. It’s not permanent, but you’ll always be stuck if you live in the past, rather than looking towards the future.
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