#indecision 2016

Increasingly throughout the past few months I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of nostalgia, mainly because I feel like it’s at the crux of a lot of the vague feelings of longing I’ve been experiencing during the current chapter of my life. I suspect it’s played a major role in some world events lately as well. A major theme of the whole most recent season of South Park was nostalgia (symbolized by the ‘member berries) and how it influenced the 2016 election. I’m not sure that nostalgia deserves a position in first place among the major causes of the surprising election outcome, but the desire to “make America great again” (in spite of the fact that the America being harked back to probably wasn’t so “great” compared to the current one) definitely played a part. At the same time, in my own personal life, when looking back on the whole year 2016 I can’t help but characterize the emotion of Nostalgia as its overarching theme.

The main part of my nostalgia has been for my grad student days, which is coupled with a deep fear that those days formed the best time of my life and I will never be able to return to that level of happiness. Not that everything went ideally: at times my research was stressful or going badly; one of my closest personal relationships was toxic on a significant level; and I was unable to get into any romantic relationship whatsoever. But many aspects of my life as a grad student turned out to be pretty adequate and some to be really wonderful. I had an idyllically active day-to-day social life for a large part of it (for the only time ever, apart from one summer program I did in college), and for the most part I loved my friends. I did manage to put together a pretty decent dissertation in the end and learned a lot of cool math on the way. My work environment was lively and social. My stress levels and overall health were okay most of the time. I loved the area where I lived and got to know it and the people in it really well, and I got into fun things like community theater and doing small gigs with local musicians. Above all, I still felt young and fairly free and was able to constantly enjoy the company of other young, fairly free people, something I struggle to do now. So naturally, I find myself yearning for those times again, not only for the natural and obvious reason that I missed certain people and places I cared about after moving away, but because most of those positive things have been strikingly absent since. This was especially true throughout last year (especially the thriving social life, lively work environment, and actual success at research were concerned). I’m glad to say that a lot of things have been looking up since the start of 2017, but they still have a ways to go and I’m not too optimistic that I’ll ever be able to regain the sort of lifestyle I had.

In short, I worry that grad school was the best period of my life, although really a better attitude would be just to be grateful for having had overall good experiences and enjoy the happy memories. (I’m reminded of a joke I once heard -- from my dissertation advisor, in fact -- that went something like this: “The optimist believes that this is the best possible world. The pessimist fears that this is indeed the case.”) It’s funny because there’s an old cliche of “Enjoy high school; those are the best years of your life.” Apart from being a misguided or even cruel thing to tell a teenager, for most people I know it seems to have been utterly untrue -- most of us, myself included, feel that our high school years really weren’t great. College is probably a better time for a lot of people, and it was certainly fresher and more exciting and liberating for me, but it also came with a great deal of personal stress and angst and much difficulty with the transition into adulthood. I was very optimistic about grad school being better, and for the most part my hopes turned out to be fulfilled. But as I neared the end of that chapter, a feeling gradually crept over me that circumstances had peaked, and so far my postdoctoral life has confirmed that suspicion. I’m afraid I will always look back and say to my past grad-student self in a sage older-man voice, “Enjoy this period while you can -- these are the best years of your life.”

(Yes, I know that just above, I’m sounding an awful lot like someone whose attitude acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not sure what to say about that, except that the truth is obviously a lot more complicated.)

But what has made the heavy presence of Nostalgia worse is that it hasn’t only been longing for my grad student days, but longing for the earlier two periods of my life: teenagerhood and college. And I know perfectly well that those definitely weren’t the best of times (to be fair, not particularly miserable compared to how they are for a lot of people). In fact, a lot of things were much worse for me back then than they are today or probably ever will be again, particularly when it comes to lack of freedom and independence and my struggle at basic competence at making friends. A few things were better back then, I guess, but even the flashes of memories that dart into my mind of being a high schooler or my transition into adulthood don’t always exemplify them all that well. And yet they come with a similar deep longing to the emotion that comes with memories of more recent and happier times, and I have to wonder why.

I think at least part of the answer comes in examining the nature of nostalgia itself as it’s often experienced. I’ve wound up coming to the conclusion that when people feel nostalgic, either for earlier times in their lives or for earlier times in history that they may not even have experienced, there is a sort of selective bias in favor of the positive aspects of past situations, however few or murky they may be. I’m not sure exactly why this is, but it probably has something to do with our subconscious defense mechanisms against reliving negative things. I remember Scott writing about this in an SSC post that I don’t feel like looking up right now, where he came to a similar conclusion (in fact, he even used the example of having sentimental memories of high school as an adult despite having hated it at the time).

I’m not sure that explains the full depths of the feelings I get when revisiting pre-grad-school times because, as I said, the memories that spontaneously come to me often don’t really involve concrete circumstances that I miss today -- or at least, not at first glance. But eventually I think I’ve put my finger on something less concrete but no less tangible that I do miss from those times. I miss the constant presence, no matter how satisfied or frustrated I was with my circumstances in those times, of the potential for everything to get better, for the best times of my life to be ahead of me. In high school, I knew better than to actually believe that cliche of those years being the best, and even in college I had the sense to realize that despite a lot of conventional wisdom I still hadn’t passed or even reached my prime. Nowadays I can’t shake off a very palpable feeling -- supported not only by most conventional wisdom but the full force of my common sense and just the overall way I feel internally -- that I’ve grown older inside in a natural way that can’t really be reversed and that my peers have grown older as well but are on average much more “settled down” than I am, and that at least a lot of things are going downhill from here. I now actually have the most freedom I (or anyone) can ever really expect to have, and in regard to whatever I find unsatisfactory I can’t just tell myself that it’ll magically get better once I get older and gain more autonomy. Instead of being able to expect more doors to open for me, I only see plain evidence that a lot of doors have closed. To put it briefly and of course way too simplistically, I’ve gone “over the hill”.