How I Stopped Wallowing In Nostalgia

Nostalgia Is Weakness And Is Unproductive

The company I work for is moving offices after seven plus years.  We’ve been in a pretty cool historic building downtown.  Early 20th century renovated warehouse, exposed brick, big wood beams.  But the company has grown and so has the number of employees.  So it’s time to move.  We’re not going far, and that’s not really the point.  The point is that I used to feel nostalgic for everything.  Even things that weren’t altogether pleasant or happy.  But as I left that building for the last time today, I noticed that I didn’t have any nostalgia.  Zero.  As I noticed my new and unusual lack of nostalgia it got me to thinking about why.  And how nostalgia is weakness.  Like having our feet stuck in concrete.

I’m not sure why changes in life phases used to cause these feelings in me.  Instead of just being able to see things for what they are and stay objective.  The anticipation of change leading up to something new.  And projecting a deep longing for something before it’s even gone.

Granted, some changes are much larger than others.  Moving offices isn’t really a true life change of any sort.  Yet I still had a lot of experiences in that physical space.  Good and bad.  And forged a lot of relationships, skills, and knowledge there.  I was there pretty much every weekday for almost a fifth of my life.  Normally digging up those kinds of roots would make me nostalgic.  But why?

Losing Touch With The Present Moment

It’s a bit cliche, but nostalgia really comes down to not being present.  It’s a mixture of fixating on the past and projecting a future feeling onto letting go of something that has been part of our life.

Even a fucking office building.  Like I said, nostalgia is weakness.

And I remember losing a bike once that I’d ridden for years, and being legitimately upset that I’d never ride it again.  An inanimate object!

Nostalgia is an inability to accept WHAT IS without inner conflict.  And sometimes it feels like being stuck as things around us move forward.

I digress, but I was pleasantly surprised at how stoic I felt leaving the office today.  No looking around one more time.  No trying to absorb the moment.  It seemed like a sign of a positive internal switch of some sort.  Evidence that I’m able to be more present.  And I think it comes down to a few things.

Health Creates a Balanced And Stable Mind

My health has been optimized to the point where my mental state is very steady.  I just don’t have the ups and downs in my mood any more.  And I believe it’s been long enough since I got my silver amalgam dental fillings removed that my body has finally purged a decent amount of mercury from my body.  Mercury is known to amplify emotions.

My entire being, mental and physical, was out of balance for years.  It’s no wonder that my mind overreacted to certain situations in my life.  And that I had a hard time moving from one phase to another seamlessly.  It always seemed like way too big a deal.  Having to find the internal resources to move into the unknown felt daunting.

Now that I’ve been eating a super low carbohydrate, high healthy fat diet, I’ve watched my mind settle down significantly.  I can observe my thoughts and rein them in with ease when they used to spin out of control.  It’s clear to me now that even if I was relatively high functioning, I lived the first forty-one years of my life in a state of metabolic imbalance (not to mention insidious heavy metal toxicity).  I was just never meant to be eating a lot of sugar and carbohydrates.

This newfound control over my mind and emotional states became very obvious to me today.  It made me realize that a decidedly flimsy emotion like nostalgia is weakness.  Especially over little things.

Having the energy, mental clarity, and cognitive strength to easily take on new situations, and adapt smoothly, causes a feeling of lightness.  No more heavy weight to drag around.

A Deep Sense Of Direction And Meaning

I’ve also found a sense of purpose lately.  For years I’ve known I don’t want to be doing the work I do, but I never knew what else to do instead.  I always had ideas but they would never stick and there was always some aspect to them that was a deal breaker.  Something that wasn’t in alignment with my personal goals.  Something that derailed me from making the change.

But through writing this blog and doing some honest reflection it occurred to me that my unique combination of experiences, skills, and challenges I’ve overcome blend together into a body of knowledge and a way of looking at the world that I want to share.  So I have projects in mind, and specific things I want to accomplish.  I plan to present them here in time.

Regardless of what comes of it all, the simple fact of seeing a path in front of me and a way to contribute to the world in a meaningful way makes me feel far more resilient than in the past.

It’s not just a change at work that brought this to my attention either.  I realized that I also had no sadness at the end of a recent to trip to Florida.  Historically when a vacation would end and I knew I was going back to the grind I’d get an extreme case of the blues.  Not to mention that same feeling used to creep in every Sunday evening.

Now I literally don’t care, and never get those feelings.  I feel stable and unemotional about these silly things.  And it’s because I feel strong as an ox, full of energy, sharp mentally, and on a mission.  Even just knowing that tomorrow is another day to feed myself well and get stronger is enough of a mission itself to keep my focus on the things are truly important.  No matter what else is going on in my life, I get excited to work on the things and projects that are in my control.  That drowns out any unpleasant mental noise.

A Few Other Factors

I’ve also been thinking today about how outside influences can trigger the ego to feel pain.  Certain societal, cultural, and environmental factors.

The ego prefers drama and unpleasant feelings over being stable and un-phased.  So my ego no doubt played a part in my past struggles to let go of certain things in my life, big or small.  If that isn’t proof that nostalgia is weakness I’m not sure what is.  An unhelpful, pre-programmed disposition to get stuck in the past and future simultaneously.  I used to indulge in music and movies that triggered those feelings as well.  I loved it every time American Pie came on the jukebox while I was drinking at bars in college.  A song about longing for the past mixed with alcohol fueling a deep angst.  For some reason I wallowed in it like a pig in shit.  “A long, long time ago…I can still remember…”  Never again.

I know other people in my life who get very nostalgic.  And they tend to love sad songs and sad movies.  The entertainment industry knows this and they know it sells.  Deep emotions, even sad ones, are highly addictive to the ego and it’s hard for people to overcome.  Assuming they even see it in themselves in the first place.

But I’ve pretty much stopped watching movies altogether the past couple of years.  And sad songs irritate me now so I simply don’t listen to them.

This illustrates a point.  That by not indulging in artificially induced feelings of nostalgia on a regular basis, we forget how to feel that way on some level.  I seem to have forgotten.  It’s a learned pattern of behavior.  Some patterns can be good, but I really don’t think that’s the case for nostalgia.  Nostalgia is weakness as far as I’m concerned.  It’s much better to build patterns of mental stability, resilience, and persistent forward motion based on action in the present.  To learn how to flow like a river, and not get pent up behind a dam.

Nostalgia Is Unproductive

Ultimately I’m just glad that I seem to have shed the tendency for nostalgia.  It’s a terribly unproductive emotion.  It feels awful to me now because nostalgia is weakness and I don’t like feeling weak.  As a man it doesn’t feel masculine to do too much longing.  And no, I don’t believe masculinity and being a bit stoic are toxic.  They’re useful states of being for men in a world that’s dog eat dog whether we like it or not.

Nostalgia  seems to make life’s times and events appear more profound and important.  And it might seem worthy to honor the things we’ve been through.  I’m not suggesting there is never a place for missing people and experiences from our past.  But too much attachment to those things also keeps people stuck.  Even in ways they might not see.  Like the friend who just can’t move on from high school.

So I now see that nostalgia is weakness.  Physical, emotional, mental, or all of the above.  By learning how to shed nostalgic tendencies, we learn how to shed other unproductive thought patterns as well.  I think that opens up a lot more room to feel excited about other things.  And that just seems like a better use of time and energy.