Nostalgia, Now, Novelty

File this under “things I heard on a podcast a long time ago and can’t get it out of my head”. Nostalgia was once thought of as a disease. After hearing the episode of Hidden Brain on this topic, I couldn’t stop thinking of the idea of nostalgia as an illness. I’ve spent most of the last decade working to be more deliberate in the present moment, which means I have spent a lot of time appreciating just how difficult that can be. For every moment I spend in nostalgia, I spend another moment thinking of the unknown future… the novelty of life yet to come.

I’ve learned to give myself permission to spend time with nostalgia and novelty. The part that I have gotten better at is acknowledging those moments. I remind myself that it is a math problem. There is a great deal more time in the past and an infinite amount of time in the future (well, as a mortal man, it’s not really infinite) but the present moment is just now. I mean now. There it goes again. It’s fleeting. See what I mean.

Having grown up in the 1980s, I live a life that is blanketed in the nostalgia of my past. And when I say I grew up in the 80s, I mean all of them. The 1980s can be a bit like Woodstock (millions of people claim to have attended that didn’t) … since it was one of the coolest decades ever… where people born in the early 1960s all the way to the last day of 1989 claim to have grown up in the decade. I became a teenager as MTV was becoming the cultural phenomenon it would become, I graduated high school in 1989, I had a mullet for crying out loud!

And the novelty of the future is wide open, like a movie that keeps changing. A year ago we all thought we missed the boat on crypto and now we’re wondering if AI will take our jobs from us, all the while we deal with tragedy and injustice all over the world.

I will continue to work at staying in the present moment, in the now, allowing myself to take the occasional mental vacation to nostalgia and to novelty.

(Photo by Ales Krivec on Unsplash)