Nostalgia makes me sad

[imSatanhonest]

Over the past few years I have found that, at times, feeling nostalgic about the past makes me feel really sad. Especially so when watching music videos. The channel that shows Top of The Pops from a selected year (it's the early to mid 80s ones I can't watch). I have to turn it off and now purposely won't watch it because I'll know I'll just feel sad. It's always music that makes me feel this way. Anything from about '85 onwards I can watch (I was 11/12) then.

I've tried to unpick WHY it makes me sad. I guess it's the mixture of how I felt at the time - young (I would have been 8/9/10 then) care-free, excited for the future, - mixed with a sadness that I'll never feel that way again and feeling sad for the naivety of the innocence, of not knowing what a shitshow some of my teenage years would turn out to be. That's the only way I can think to describe it, in its most basic form.

I have a happy life, 3DCs, single mum and a good job and, despite describing some of my teenage years as a shit show, if I had my time over again, I wouldn't change a thing or do anything differently as it's made me who I am today.

Is it just me, is it an age thing? Do other people feel sad when looking back on a happy time in their young life?

Me too, it reminds me of a time where my family were all still here, we have had so many losses since the 80's.

Blue Remembered Hills

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

A.E. Housman

I also have no problem listening to music from the bad times in my life because I don't want to go back there.

But the good times I would do anything to go back. I also can't look back at pictures of when my children were small without crying, because I'd love to be back there

I’m a similar age to all of you and feel the same. I long to go back. My late dad was the same too. He was very sentimental and used to cry at films and songs from his youth (1940s-60s before he married and had kids). When he was 70ish, he drove to look at his boyhood home and actually knocked on the door. The young couple living there invited him in and he was able to look around it again which must have been lovely for him. He hadn’t been inside for 45 years.

I am like this with music.

I don't listen to my favourite music because I end up in a mini depression.

I joke with friends that I don't listen to music because I really love music and they think I'm strange but it's because I get so nostalgic.

I think for me, hearing the music of my past brings back so many good memories but that's not what makes me sad. I think what makes me sad is remembering how I felt then, how innocent I was and how hopeful I was for the future. Looking back at that time from the future (now) makes me want to go back and do it all differently. It makes me think about who and what I have lost in the mean time and about how short and cruel life can be.

I am the same on New Year's Eve but I think that's quite common?

As well as looking back at the good things, I also spend a lot of time reflecting about lost opportunities and times I didn’t push myself forward. How I didn’t have a proper teenage life because I was too shy. Listening to music of the 80s evokes all of that and what could have been.

zen1 Some time ago a man knocked on our door and told us he had lived in our house as a child. We invited him in and he had a good look around and told us many stories of our house during his childhood. It was a really happy thing to happen and we learned so much from him. We're in Bristol. I wonder if it was your dad?
It would be lovely if more people could do this I think.

Because you wouldn’t want the sad times back but you would the happy times

I think these feeling are particularly strong in the run up to Christmas when we miss the old Christmases :(
Old songs make me smile but I can't bear looking at old photos. Every so often I think I must start getting rid of them as noone to pass them on to.

I am glad my parents haven't lived long enough to see how my life is now.

I'm early thirties and get this often. About childhood. My teens. My 20s. God knows what I'll be like in my later years if God grants them!

I absolutely get this. I'm early 40s and it all started during lockdown for me.

I'm grieving someone right now the experience isn't dissimilar, really.

I first got this feeling at the grand old age of 12, believe it or not. I was looking at photographs of myself at the age of seven, on a term time holiday in Spain with my dad and grandparents. And it hit me for the first time in my life, like the proverbial ton of bricks, that I wouldn’t have that time again, that you can’t swim in the same river water twice.

Nobody ever talks about that part of adolescence, understanding unwelcome truths about time. It didn’t help that I was reading poetry along the lines of the Housman quoted upthread - think Thomas Hood, ‘I remember, I remember’, and Longfellow ‘A boy’s will is the wind’s will/And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.’ Perhaps there’s something hormonal underlying these feelings, given that they happen at the other end of your reproductive life as well?

@SammyScrounge Housman says it perfectly doesn’t he.

He does, I agree. The poem always gets me right in a tender place. "Where I cannot come again" devastates me!
But that's poetry for you.

Nostalgia really hurts sometimes. I guess making your now as happy as you can is the only real cure.

I try to tell myself not to be like my grandmother, who I loved dearly and who loved us, but in her last years stopped being able to know us in the present, because she was so occupied with telling us about the past. It was all she thought about. It put up a barrier between her and us. My grandfather didn’t live long enough to do that and our relationship with him was different.
I can see it happening sometimes with my parents now and I want to help them to live in the present where I can. Maybe towards the end of your life it’s an necessary and important emotional comfort to dwell in your happier (past) years, but for now I will try to make things as interesting or useful as possible, since happiness isn’t always going to be possible.

nostalgia really hurts so times, I really felt that currenthun. This captures it perfectly for me x

*sometimes

@YogaLite agree Christmas brings back all sorts of nostalgic memories for Christmas past. We have lost my sister and mum in the last six years and they were such a massive part of it for me, it's just not the same.

Yes to all of this.

Hireth is the Cornish version.

I believe, as we become older we do get more emotional about the past as we become more and more aware of our own mortality and the intrinsic, inescapable nature of loss to our existence. Anything we love will one day die. Including us.

But there's a beauty to be had in embracing that bitter sweet knowledge. The present will also be lost one day too so I take time to appreciate it.

I find myself more likely, these days, to be deeply aware of the transient nature of now (I'm early 50s). And sometimes feel that same sense of longing/loss for the moments I'm experiencing today. I'm grateful for that.

@BobbyBobbyBobby
Just went down a rabbit hole with them vids. I have recently looking at the city I live in, 50/100 years ago and wondered about the people in them but never looked at portraits before.
It's interesting seeing the fashion of those times too.

I’m also a very nostalgic person and can identify with all the posters on here!
I’d also do anything to be able to go back in time, even for just a day, to relive my past and be with my lost family, friends and pets.

I too miss the Christmases we used to have, with the crepe paper decorations strewn all around the ceilings, the tree with the old fashioned fairy lights (where the bulbs were hot to touch) and going to midnight mass with my family. Whenever I hear the Johnny Mathis (I think it is) song ‘when a child is born’ it makes me sad for those times.

This is me. I grew up in the eighties in a big house full of books, plants, musical instruments, everything in shades of brown, second hand or home made, always wholemeal. Kids everywhere, random friends of my parents breezing through. My brother was in a band, my sister was friends with every person and animal in the street, and it was literally never quiet.

I live with DP and DS and like most people, we're on separate screens of an evening. DS has everything he could possibly want, so he isn't overly bothered by Christmas. I used to obsess over Christmas from the end of the summer holidays.

DS wouldn't change a thing but sometimes I just ache.

@MorrisZapp oh your childhood home sounds wonderful.

That really is a time that doesn't seem to exist anymore though, and I would love so much for a lot of it to come back.

Big, comfortable houses - big enough that they aren't a total mess all the time as there is enough space to put everything, and comfortable but not insta-worthy fashionably decorated with the latest trends.

A lot of families back then had a stay at home mum, which is harder now as for many families both parents need to work. Time just seems to be a much more precious commodity these days. Much more hustle and bustle, less just spontaneous, relaxed playing with kids out on the street etc.

I miss the anonymity. When my parents were my age and raising kids they were just cracking on as they see fit. They weren't being constantly bombarded with baby led weaning advice, the new essential piece of baby equipment, best way to do this, best way to do that.

They did what they thought best and they got on with it. And nobody knew what other people were doing anyway. I just feel everything is so incredibly visible now due to social media etc and it's just exhausting.

I would love to recreate the type of home / childhood that you had. I would say my biggest hurdle to that is time - husband and myself both work relatively long hours. We also don't live near family so don't have the casual family visits / drop ins.

I think, begone such sad thoughts!

I think I am now the place that my children will circle back to when they think of where they 'Cannot go again'.

And that's ok, I'm happy that I am now providing future nostalgia for my children.

As a postscript to mu contributions to this thread, I recently discovered a whole load of my old diaries, from my teens right up to my mid twenties (albeit patchy in coverage; huge gaps, and writing obviously interrupted midway through and never returned to). Oddly enough it’s the best cure for nostalgia. I realised how lost and uncertain I felt in my late teens, and how frustratingly stuck I was, unable to find work and move away in the early 90s recession.

In other ways it’s a depth charge of emotion and feels weird in the same way that dreaming about your childhood home does. It looks different from this viewpoint, and not necessarily nicer.