The pain of nostalgia

This is from a UK GUARDIAN article in 2014.. the nostalgia has changed a bit. The danger of nostalgia remains the same.

Nostalgia is a dangerous thing. It’s a signifier that you hate how your life has turned out. It’s a sign that you’ve mentally locked off, and you’re doomed to spend the rest of life drifting in a false reverie of a past that didn’t exist. Nostalgia is why Tim Lovejoy still dresses like it’s 1996 and is primed to weep the moment anyone mentions Ocean Colour Scene to him. It’s why all your Facebook friends spend their days in a whirlwind of incredulous bafflement at the passing of time, forever asking people to like JPEGs about conkers, all because they’re trapped in a loveless marriage to a woman they accidentally knocked up after ironically slow-dancing to I Want To Know What Love Is during a hideous School Disco party.

This isn’t a generational thing, incidentally. Everyone’s guilty of it. When I was growing up, I distinctly remember having teachers who would reminisce about their wartime evenings in Anderson shelters. Give them a time machine and the first thing they would do is dart back and relive their glory days shivering in a hole next to a bucket of wee, constantly awaiting terrifying death from above. At least you’re only nostalgic about Blind Date.

Stranger Things, Everything Sucks, and other similar shows have captivated and capitalized on an audience that wants the sugar coated past to come back again. We decorate the fragments of our history with beautiful imagery.. often ignoring the darker forces that are always at play regardless of the time frame.

Nostalgia is a dangerous thing.. it is a time

Nostalgia gives you the rush of memory.. the intense beauty of your childhood and your parents, your family.. the local mall that is now shuddered.. the laughter that has gone away with time.. Yes, nostalgia seems almost fixated in destroying your present time and future alike..

But with nostalgia, as the happiness becomes subdued and subsides, your moral compass turns towards the sadness and grief over the passage of time that comes with it.

We are all aging faster than we want to. Some us just don’t realize it until we have aged far too much.

And as you embrace nostalgia, as you welcome it when it comes knocking.. the inevitable dangers come with it.  You will smile at its melancholy colors.. you will laugh along with its stories of past times go by.. and as you give it one last hug, you’ll swell with emotion.

…and that is when it sinks its vampire-style teeth deep into your soul, tearing your very insides out and forcing your body to weep the blood and tears of the past times gone by.