We deduce that because we remember the feeling of happiness at the park, our childhood must have been better than right now. We put an emotional state within an era, or a specific frame, and choose to idealize that specific time. As Hirsh points out, nostalgia does not relate to a specific memory, but rather an emotional state. However, as it turns out, nostalgia isn't about remembering memories at all. You only remember what your biased mind has chosen to recall. You don’t remember the pain and anguish of the hours after. You do not remember the seconds of sadness and hurt before it. You remember fleeting feelings, emotions and moments of glee. Hirsch in his report, “Nostalgia: A Neuropsychiatric Understanding,” nostalgia is a yearning for an idealized past - “a longing for a sanitized impression of the past, what in psychoanalysis is referred to as a screen memory - not a true recreation of the past, but rather a combination of many different memories, all integrated together, and in the process all negative emotions filtered out.” This yearning, this distorted idea of better days and times we wish were again is known as the common infliction of nostalgia.Īccording to Alan R. By recalling a memory of the past, you are remembering it as your brain has chosen to distort it, not by the actuality of its events.īecause of its distorted and pleasant qualities, people spend days wrapped up in the fantasy of it, longing for it the way some do lovers. The way we remember memories is constantly distorted. However, like the unforeseeable future, the past itself is an idealized version of something we want it to be, not what we know as reality. It’s seen as something beautiful, something irrevocable and somewhere that will always be better than where we are now. It keeps us from the truth of the present and the pain of reality. Always distorted, always yearned for, and always seen as better days. The past is as elusive a dream as the future. Those perfect days followed by perfect nights when nothing went wrong and we were always happy. Those perfect moments of carnival rides and Disney movies, absorbing only the purest and most joyous moments of life. Those days of Pre-K with worries only of ice cream at snack time and after-school television. Snuggling down into the abyss of better days and easy living? The comfort of childhood and zero responsibility. Bury yourself in its warmth, the glowing days of pure joy and limited worries. This is why you have to make the most of your freshman give outs and try to save up for when you’ll really be needing it.Don’t you wish you could just live in the past? Curl up in it like a warm blanket, covering all the cold unknowns and unexposed realities of tomorrow. But after a year, they’re used to having you away from home and are getting tired of giving away money. When you’re a freshman, your parents miss you and are happy that you still need them. After a year of that, my mom isn’t so enthused about shelling out money to me. If I even hinted that I was pressed on cash, she would send me money in a hot second. Last year, my mother would answer the phone enthusiastically, so happy that her loving daughter decided to phone home. My phone calls home last year were a lot different than they are now. Something I noticed is that my parents were much more eager to give me money during my freshman year than they are my sophomore year. Everyone knows the struggle and no one will judge you for eating Ramen for every meal for a week straight. The four years you spend as an undergraduate student is probably the only time in your life it will be socially acceptable to be dirt poor.
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