my friend is nostalgic over our past

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I recently called my friend of over 20 years up, partially for business reasons as he's working on a project for me and my partner.

Of course my friend also wanted to shoot the breeze and whatnot.

After a lengthy discussion about Doctor Who, we started talking about stuff we used to watch when we were younger, and what we think of it now 15 years later.

He admitted to me that watching stuff now is not the same as it was when we were younger, and he feels a heavy nostalgia for that time in our lives.


The thing is...for me, I admit that I enjoyed spending time with him; but at the same time it's sort of like that experience in your life that keeps you sane during a miserable time in your life.

for the first 20 years of my life, I was generally very unhappy.

I didn't even learn that I was Autistic until around the age of 18/19, and until I was about 26 I didn't know all that much about it.

I had a period of nostalgia in my mid-late teens, and it peaked probably in my early 20s; everything "nostalgia-based" that I love since that time has been because I've found a deeper love for those things long out of the lens of nostalgia.

The thing is....while I enjoyed doing those activities with my friend...I don't miss them the way he does. I'm glad to have moved on with my life, and I enjoy seeing things thru--as he refers to it--an "enhanced" lens from age.

He even says "you've moved on to smarter, more sophisticated things"; and I confess that this is something I really appreciate hearing.

What does everyone else feel about the whole "nostalgic over the past" thing?

I...almost see it as though my friend is not as happy with his adult life, based on the nostalgia lens he claims to put on for the past. Am I missing something here?

I've experienced nostalgia over the past once.

I went to a school where I was generally liked and was studying something I really loved. I thought I was really living my dream. Unfortunately, things weren't all peachy because I developed an eating disorder and ended up having to leave the school and spend all my tuition money on getting treatment.

For about 4 years after this happened, I felt really nostalgic about my time at the school. I wanted nothing more than to just close my eyes and be back in that environment. It hurt, emotionally.

I finally gave up and moved on this year. I'm at another school now, and am quite happy with what I'm accomplishing and am getting involved in. I also finally started transitioning from female to male last year.

I would assume the same thing about your friend that you did - that he is unhappy with where his life is. I only assume that because that was the reason why I was so stuck in nostalgia. I eventually learned how to build a life I liked even better though, because the nostalgia was making me so unhappy that I felt like I needed a way out of it.

I have a friend who's like that and I'm pretty much like you. She wants to reminisce about elementary school and high school and I want to forget about those times. Those were very unhappy times for me. Why she wants me to remind me of the most painful years of my life, I will never understand.

Well, the thing is, I realize that for my friend and yours, those were sadly likely their happiest memories.

The way I view it is more of back then I thought I was in paradise, but it's a case of looking back on it now, not realizing until later how miserable my life was in general back then, and how those times were the more positive elements of generally very negative periods for me. I actually find it quite pitiful that I saw such terrible times in my life as "truly great" at that time, displeased at my then-lack of standards( admittedly not knowing then what I know now).


I can't forget them that easily, and it'll probably take me a long time before I do, but I'm not really the nostalgic type.

Yes, I love the pop culture from my childhood era...but not due to nostalgic reasons; again, I've found a deeper love for it than that. I don't really feel nostalgia so much anymore.

Part of me almost thinks though that he thinks I look back on that time as fondly as he does. Not the case at all.

Maybe because they were happy years in her life, and you were there, and part of them.

I'm nostalgic over my past too - it is so for the last couple of years. I reread the novels, mostly s-f ones, I used to borrow from our local library when I was 13-15, I played NES games I played when I was 11-16 again, I listened to some eurodance songs that were fashionable when I was a teen. I'd love to come back to the time when I was in my early teens again. When I read, listened to and played the stuff I did in my teens, it turmed out that in fact those things weren't even that great as I had thought them to be after all those years - their whole charm had its source in the fact that I used to enjoy them so long ago that my memory started to endow them with some idealised, almost mystical qualities. And I was a teen then, and even not that close to adulthood one (I really enjoyed elementary school I attended then - then, before the reform of education you graduated from it at 15), which in pratice means that I led a great life not forced to take care of myself (now as I'm unemployed and still living at home I was raised in, I don't need to do this either but now I'm an adult which means that now I know I should do this while then no one expected much from me - I was only a teen). If I got a job, I'd earn some money and leave the country.