What Is Nostalgia, And Is It Good For Us?

The word “nostalgia” is defined as being “a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time”. In recent years I have found myself in a state of nostalgia quite a lot in a variety of ways but I have recently come to think of nostalgia as just being focused on the past, which is usually just another form of resistance to change.

A Nostalgic Example

I got my first computer aged 11 (25 years ago now!) and it was a little 8-bit Commodore 64. Computers have remained a big part of my life since then, dominating both my work life and a large chunk of my personal life too. In 2002 I discovered eBay and found that there was a huge market for retro computers. To cut a long story short over the next year or so I spent thousands of dollars amassing a huge collection of retro Commodore 64 gear - hardware, games, books, and magazines. I filled up an entire room of my house!

A Harmless Hobby or a Dangerous Obsession?

At first it was fun to be able to play the games that I played as a 11 year old kid. I even managed to find some of the very same magazines and books that I owned - I even remembered typing in some of those old games listings! However, this continued for some time and it started to dominate my life. The money and time I was spending grew and grew and I started to get a nagging feeling that it was becoming an unhealthy obsession. I knew that I had certainly got to the point where I was collecting purely for the sake of collecting and not for the enjoyment of the items themselves. I had collected more magazines (over 1000!) than I would have time to read in my lifetime!

What Is Nostalgia Exactly?

Nostalgia is nothing more than remembering something from our past. Of course, there are many ways of strengthening that nostalgia in the way that I did by collecting items from the past, researching the past, looking for people from the past and so on.

The question is, how do we know if this is a good or bad thing? Aaron from Today Is That Day recently wrote about change and he said that no matter how good the nostalgia feels that because it is in the past, staying there will hold us back so we should let it go and move on. Now I don’t necessarily think it’s quite that simple. I believe that It all comes down to the way we feel.

When I first started collecting my old computer gear it was fun and it made me feel good but over time as it became more consuming that inner feeling changed. I can label it in a variety of ways - guilt, worry, concern etc but whatever the name, it started to feel bad.

Past, Present & Future

I’ve mentioned Eckhart Tolle a few times on this blog and one of the major lessons in his teachings as that our true happiness is always found in the present moment. The past is gone and can never be changed and the future does not exist. If we cannot be happy right now then we can never be happy because now is all there is.

However, the past and the future still have their place in the present. It’s all about our feelings. Another topic close to my heart is the Law of Attraction and one of the most important messages is that our emotions tell us whether what we are focusing on is taking us in the right direction or not. If we are remembering something from the past  and we are able to re-live that happy memory and we feel good about it then we’re on the right track. But if we remember something and it makes us feel as we should be back there, as if we want our present to be more like things used to be, that feels bad and that is not a good place to be focusing.

This works with the future too. If we can envision what we want for our future and thinking about it makes us feel excited and happy then that is good. But of course what often happens is that we think about what we want for the future and we notice that we’re nowhere near that and it makes us feel bad - that is the subject for another blog post!

Conclusion

Nostalgia is just a way for us to focus our thinking towards our past. Nostalgia itself is not either a good or a bad thing - it is how that nostalgia makes us feel that is important. If we are feeling good then we should keep doing that but if it makes us feel bad then perhaps its time to come back to the present moment.

Stumble it!