The nostalgia drug

Artwork by Luke Chueh, via google image search. Used without permission, but hopefully he won't mind!

Today, I applied for a government job, and part of the application required me to list my last five residences. Of course, I can hardly remember the address of the apartment I lived in my last year of college, so I was fishing for the answer. I went into an email account I've held since then, and started from the very first email in the account, going forward in time to look for some reference to the address. This fact-finding mission drew me into a whirlpool of nostalgia that I had not expected. As I read through emails I had sent to old girlfriends, to my now-wife as we went through "just friends" periods, to professors about 5-page papers that, at the time, seemed like near-impossible tasks, I was sucked back into a time that I had nearly forgotten.

I could hear my voice in the old emails, but my language was different, my word choice, my salutation and conclusion. I ended emails to friends with Bjork-infused phrases like "warmth, sack," and "with great sincerity, sack." I talked of impending debate tournaments and beer-infused social events. The whole thing was so surreal. More surreal was the way that reading the words sent some chemical signal to my brain that made me feel I was, once again, the person who wrote those messages, and it was a drug-like shock.

We've all experienced this before, most likely. Some smell will come out of nowhere and remind us of some vague impression of a time in our past, and we'll be momentarily transferred to that time in the past. Or a song will come on that reminds us of our childhood. Whenever I see any reference to the movie Scarface, I think back to our honeymoon on a remote Bahamian island, where we watched a videotape of the film during a rainy day. Whenever I go into a library, the smell of the air freshener and the books reminds me of my first summer as a high school freshman at debate institute, where I discovered an ecstatic world I had never known to exist. This emotion can be intense.

But I worry that it's not healthy, and something that we should avoid exposing ourselves to excessively. I've heard before that, when we think to times past and sentimentalize over them, we tend to filter out any pain or dissatisfaction that we felt during those times, remembering them only as good and perfect pasts. This usually occurs because we think of good times past when we are discouraged by our present, and we are reaching back to figure out how things were different before. . . before we started feeling so bad. But if we think about it rationally, we'll remember times in that past when we were just as upset or unhappy as we sometimes are today. Nostalgia and sentimentality can be self-deception and escape in the same ways that drugs or alcohol can.

I think sometimes of a once-favorite uncle of mine who experienced a midlife crisis sometime in his 40's. Left his wife for a four-times-divorced and slightly younger woman, almost certainly making his decision in a moment in which he convinced himself that his life as a single man was a blissful, perfect time, free of the hardships that his marriage had brought on. I saw him about a year after he made his decision, and I could see the misery and shame in his eyes. He had wrecked the worlds of his two children and left his wife to struggle on her own financially. He had let his sentimentalization get the best of him and forgotten that his notion of a perfect yesterday was not based in reality.

That's not to say that there isn't value into some reminiscing over good times. Half of the pleasure in doing something fun or exciting is the knowledge that you're creating memories to cherish and share later on in life. Hearing an old song with old friends and uniting around a shared past can be a wonderful experience. Smelling a scent that reminds you of a past love, or of falling in love with the woman who has since become your forever, can be a happy reminder of a life well-lived. But, as with any other escape, one must approach these things with caution and consume them with discretion. We have to remember that we live in the now, and we never can return permanently to that past, and, honestly, if we did, we'd probably be disappointed to learn that it wasn't as perfect as we had remembered it to be. It's great to remember the good things that we've experienced, but it would be a tragedy to convince ourselves that that's as good as it'll ever get.