37. These Are The Days

Game Boy Colours, Pokemon, watching The Witches at our pal’s Halloween party (which, side note, I’m adamant is the cause of my underlying anxiety issues), those bright inflatable chairs, Pogs, and Biff & Chip.

Ah, those were the days.

I love the feeling of nostalgia. I find it oddly comforting. There’s nothing like reminiscing about the safety and simplicity of childhood to escape the challenges of day-to-day life (especially when brutally hungover).

And although our youth obviously wasn’t just constant sweets, watching Rugrats and cruising about in those red cars with the yellow roofs, we do have a tendency to look back disproportionately favourably on the past.

More generally, when reminiscing about the past, as things like boredom, fall-outs, tantrums and the often mundane nature of life don’t really stick out, they don't tend to lodge themselves in our memories.

Nope, the bigger and funner things do. It’s fairly common to look back with our rose-tinted glasses on and remember stuff like being a kid being a constant laugh, Uni being a constant sesh, and hangovers not existing in our 20s.

We often see the past as an idealised version of what we want it to be, not necessarily an accurate representation of what it was.

This makes sense really. It’s probably not the most comforting thing to look back at our lives and think “Jeez, that was bloody awful”. As Clay Routledge of North Dakota State University states, “Nostalgia serves a crucial existential function. It brings to mind cherished experiences that assure us we are valued people who have meaningful lives”.

Basically, reassurance that our lives aren’t totally pointless.

So although down days, boredom, frustration and the general weight of existence can very much feel like a present problem, we often have a tendency to look back at the past, or ‘those days’ in a more positive light.

And not only can it be pretty common to look back at the past with those rose-tinted glasses, it can also be tempting to look overly favourably towards the future.

It’s funny how this can happen. For example, we can get incredibly excited about the weekend, as the glimmer of light to see us through the struggle of the Monday to Friday grind. However, when we get there, it can occasionally be a bit anticlimactic. Sometimes we’re a bit bored, or a bit irritable, or a bit hungover, or just generally feeling a bit meh, and the weekend ends up not being as good as we’d built up in our heads.

So, we often like the past, and we often like the future. The present on the other hand is a bit more challenging. Things like overthinking, worrying, regretting, stressing out, and catastrophizing aren’t really past or future issues, they’re now issues. The present is where all our problems lie.

And when faced with this particular realisation, there's an idea from Freud that I like to try and keep in mind; “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful”.

The way I interpret this (admittedly, possibly wrongly) is that often, one day, the shite moments that we go through are the ones that we eventually end up being the most grateful for.

Let’s take anything in our lives that we’re proud of. Whether that’s a graduation, a promotion, some physical feat, some creative accomplishment, or whatever it may be. There’s usually a fairly significant amount of work, commitment, dedication, sacrifice, dealing with setbacks, and general struggle that goes into it.

As it tends to be because of those things (not despite them) that we're proud of whatever it is that we achieved, we often, in hindsight, have a degree of appreciation for the adversity.

To Freud’s point, we see the beauty in the struggle.

So, as we have a tendency to look back favourably on the past, then regardless of how challenging the present moment is, then at some point it's likely that we’ll look back on it in a positive light.

These challenging days will eventually be seen as ‘those good old days’.

Naturally, this outlook is hardly going to remove all anxiety, sadness, and general negative feeling from the present moment. However, I have found that this forward-looking reframing of a challenging situation or a general aggy mood can help us feel slightly more positively about it.

And who knows, at a push, it may even allow us to think that our current lives are as good as our social media accounts seem to suggest they are 🙂

Maybe, just maybe, these are the days.