Do you often feel nostalgic?

It can be really hard to find a group of people you have chemistry with or even one special person. I was watching the show Friends. The show has its moments but it got me thinking that there's probably a group of people out there who I would fit right in with. A group perfect for me with a beautiful dynamic and flowing chemistry. When I watch these shows I think how wonderful it would be to have a group dynamic as strong as that and I want to look back on my life with something to feel nostalgic about. To have loved and lost rather than the void there is now. Why do so many people feel nostalgic about the chemistry between different characters in film and places they've never been to. Are there any others who have this strange feeling? Perhaps you could call it second hand nostalgia, but I don't know. I've come to realize I'm a hopeless romantic and dreamer, but I find it interesting to ask myself these questions.*

I think we all long to belong to something. Maybe not something big, but just a small group of friends, or to have a place to go where everybody knows our name. It's human nature to want to be part of some kind of social group.

I have a phobia of large crowds and even of parties... yet I wish I could just sit down with about 5 or 6 people, share some drinks and talk. For those of us who don't have this as a regular part of our lives, it's hard not to envy those who do.

And nostalgia is important - last year some new neighbors befriended me & another neighbor who is older than I am. The new neighbors are in their early 30's while I'm 59. As much as I cherish new friends, the generation gap is clear. My new, young friends aren't even aware of most of the things that would be common knowledge among my peers, and it's awkward to have to explain everything with a history lesson.

That's an interesting post, VG. There are several thoughts running parallel to the main theme of nostalgia.
For most of us the closest we can get to having a close knit, supportive group of friends like Friends, is to buy this: https://www.amazon.com/Friends-Compl.../dp/B07S86K91M
I don't think any group of real life friends is going to have that 'beautiful dynamic and flowing chemistry', of Friends. That's the magic of fiction, it can be better than real life.

If I hadn't tried as hard as I could to find that special someone then I'd be typing this alone with a pet rock. What I'm saying is TRY to find that special person, if, that's what you want in life. Don't give up.

I feel that warm fuzzy nostalgia almost nightly when I 'live' another life for a couple hours watching a movie. There's something about two people in a movie finding each other, falling in love that sparks those same feelings in us. Like you said it's 'second hand nostalgia'.

I dislike Friends, too

I sometimes feel nostalgia when watching films. Sometimes even for things I never lived.

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One of the defining characteristics of nostalgia is that it is, to some degree, false. It remembers certain things and not others, or, if based in youth, is specifically remembering a time where we were unaware of life's inherent messiness. It's often a desire to take our expanded minds and return them to smaller dimensions, which is obviously impossible.

That's why people are ostensibly "nostalgic" (a misnomer, but whatever) for things that never happened to them, like things in TV shows. They're always limited pictures of reality, and to whatever degree they contain trials and tribulations, they're never as thorny or intractable as the real thing, and you generally know it's going to be fine in the end.

Far from being strange or unusual, this is close to a universal thing, and it's just a part of growing up.

Yeah at this point it's well understood that people's memories are a mix of actual memories and things they've heard describe to them, or things they think they would have thought/done based on their sense of identity now, rather than then. Everybody has childhood memories that contain things which were not possible based on timeline or who was there, or whatever.

Isn't that like the Mandela effect?

There's some similarity, though the key difference is that the Mandela effect is about shared false memories and not personal formative ones. And it's usually incidental changes rather than ones that, say, have to do with your sense of identity and whatever personal life narrative you've been writing.

This is all basically true, and I think it freaks a lot of people out to think that a lot of the life that they think back on might never actually have happened. Or at least far from how they imagined it. Leaves them wondering 'well, if I wasn't any of those things...who the hell am I?"



But I'm personally at ease with all of this, because it still stands that my memories are still very much a representation of who I am, no matter how made up they might be. And maybe because of this, they are even more so mine, especially when you consider how the only place they exist are in my head...all just a result of some primordial need to make sense of 40 some years of totally pointless and arbitrary events happening to me.


At least I figured out a way to make all this empty nonsense matter. At least I have a reason now to look back fondly on it, whether or not there is actually anything back there to see.

Yeah, I think the degree to which people are freaked is largely the degree to which they obsess over fuzzy notions of identity as a thing that just exists in the ether, instead of a simple accounting of their actual choices.

It's often said that recent generations, inundated with media from a young age, fall into the trap of thinking of their life as a movie with themselves as the protagonist, and from that perspective a false formative memory would be a big deal. But if you think of your life as just one person gradually feeling out the world around them and trying to learn from it, it's not as big a deal if a few of your childhood memories are more useful than true.

I think the correct posture towards this stuff is to just use it to realize that we are all capable of deceiving ourselves about anything, great or small, and to exercise more humility as a result.

Is that true? I mean, memory is obviously selective, but there's a difference between reinterpreting memories and having different memories.

I've found that being caring, compassionate, sympathetic and generous tends to attract people into your life who are "takers", ne'er do-wells, moochers, grubbers, grifters, dependents and needy (who are always looking for a favor, or time, or money, but who rarely are able to give any of these things in return - not that you're looking for their time, while they are always looking to suck up yours like an emotional vampire).

With "friends" like these...

We have to hope there is a reward for being good in heaven because, on earth, these qualities make you seem like a wounded sparrow when surrounded by a pack of hungry wolves.

I'm still struggling for that Ground Hog Day-type of epiphany where I decide to be good for it's own sake, not for any reward or recognition. But what makes it more difficult is, as I said, goodness & compassion towards others stands out like a lure or beacon to emotional predators that pretend to be your friends.

I'm confused by this question because it sounds like a response to the other stuff I said, in this post about false memories, but the bit it's quoting is from a different part. Can you clarify?

True, but they know tons of stuff that you don’t. I prefer young people to old people, I must admit. The most fun thing about being friends with people not one’s age is actually how much both groups have in common. I’ve met young people whose favorite movie is The Deer Hunter, just to give one example. How random is this. Or their favorite rock group is The Animals. Equally bizarre.

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Sorry to hear you had this kind of experience. I didn't, mercifully.

I quoted the wrong post, sorry!

I had a friend, and within the group of friends he belonged (including his now wife and brother-in-law) they dubbed him a "history usurper"!

He lived a very sheltered childhood due to his mother who refused to allow him to do very much or go anywhere (I'm assuming this was one cause)... but he would adopt other people's stories and then repeat them (much later on) as his own!

As a kid he was always talking about adventures & travelling (we never went on a single trip together beyond going to the movies or the mall). Yet, decades after I went to Jamaica, he claims HE went to Jamaica and that he did all the things there that I told him I did.

He claimed we worked together at the restaurant where I got my first job at age 16 (he NEVER worked there). I was mugged during my college years - later he claimed he was mugged at that time. Basically, anything interesting or exciting that happened to anyone else became part of his personal past - I guess that's what happens when you spend most of your life after school locked in a house. I guess this was his way of having nostalgia to make up for a childhood that lacked any kind of really fond memories.

Just making sure!

Yes, it is observably true in many anecdotal cases. People remember playing such-and-such game with their family and it hadn't even come out yet, people remember something about a family member when they were out of town, or more often, two people just have totally different memories of some major event as children, meaning at least one of them is wrong.

There's no real way to know exactly how common this is but there've been studies (and I say this as someone who is generally skeptical of phrases like "there have been studies," but the methodology on some of these looks pretty solid) that have shown that people can be primed to "fill in" fuzzy memories based on things they've been told since.

Yep, people will sometimes hear a story and years later act like it happened to them. And it's not always dishonest, sometimes they really think it did. Usually nothing quite that dramatic, of course, that probably speaks to something deeper/more troubling.

There are a few things from my childhood where, even now, I am genuinely not sure if it happened to me, or if I observed one of my siblings saying/doing it. We routinely have different memories about who said some funny line that we all still quote. But then, I have a lot of siblings, so maybe that makes it trickier.

I think this becomes less common over time. I've talked before about how there's a big line of demarcation in life between remembering things and remembering thinking about them at the time, usually sometime around when you hit double digits, if I had to put a range on it, and I think that also doubles as the time when this kind of mis-memory becomes moderately less frequent. Moderately.

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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

This is a great point as I never got the feeling my friend was out to deceive, (impress maybe, along the lines of a tall-tale-teller, but not deceive). It seemed like he actually processed these stories others told him & stored them in his mind as memories.

On several occasions when I called him out and literally proved his claim didn't happen to him, he appeared hurt. Not like someone caught in a lie, but like someone being told that they lacked credibility because their memory is false.

So I never got the impression that he did this on purpose or was intentionally attempting to lie. That's probably why the group who knew about this trait viewed it more as an eccentricity where as if it was thought as compulsive lying, it would have been viewed less favorably.