When I look back on this past fall, the memories I have are chock-full of moments that I can only describe as angst-ridden, indie-film quality: scenes that could easily be put to music or scoured for motifs. Think about sitting in a high-school parking lot, looking at the stars as a football game surges in the background. Think about the customary “I can’t wait to get out of this town” dialogue that goes along with that. Imagine wandering through a graveyard, crying for someone who is very much alive. Those kinds of sentimental excerpts; I drowned in them.
More often than not, these memories aren’t happy. They reflect a time in my life rife with uncertainty and anxiety. Snapshots like those I’ve described above are cliche beyond belief, some laughably so. Rationally speaking, this isn’t a place in my life that I’d want to return to if I had the choice. And yet, there’s something there that never fails to draw me in.
That something is nostalgia, the driving force behind Buzzfeed’s endless stream of articles about “90s kids” and the allure that triggers us to long for experiences we’ve never had, in decades we’ve never lived. The widely known “I-was-born-in-the-wrong-century” phenomenon falls into the same category as many of my own memories, that of what I call “disjointed nostalgia,” or the idea that we’re wistful for the “wrong things”—things that perhaps we don’t entirely understand.
Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus often pairs nostalgia with ignorance in his writings, perhaps implying that to be nostalgic is to lack clarity; to not see the full picture when looking back on memories. Although I’ve certainly found this to be true, it seems to me that this view itself is missing something. People who seek solace in the past often do so to remind themselves of the feeling, not the moment itself, that they wish to relive. And that feeling is, overwhelmingly, naivety.
I don’t mean that dismissively. We’re all naive in some way or another. As people moving through life, we’re constantly learning and changing, absorbing new information and embracing new experiences. Positive, negative, or somewhere in between, everything we encounter teaches us something that can’t be unlearned. Even if the experience itself is thrown aside and becomes forgotten, its impact remains. No one can be the same person that they were ten years, a year, or even a few months before. Whether we’ve changed for better or for worse, there is always a part of us that misses the old version of ourselves and wants to hold onto those simpler times. We want to reimagine that naivety—that’s what we see in these “incomplete” memories.
Nostalgia is an inherently ignorant phenomenon, and that’s okay. If The Great Gatsby (okay, fine, SparkNotes) taught me anything, it’s that you cannot repeat the past. To entertain the idea that you can is to momentarily step away from reality. But every once in awhile, it’s necessary to take that step. No, you shouldn’t try to rebuild the past when imagining the future, but yes, it is okay to remind yourself of your past in a way that speaks to you.