Jaiganesh Nagarajan - Week 15 - Memory in Nostalgia
Honestly when it comes to nostalgia I can think of hundreds of things that give me it. Revisiting my old house in Sunnyvale, Creating my first Minecraft World, or even my first day of high school. The idea of experiencing something for the first time is always fun and will always be a large part of anyone's lives. According to the Washington post, “Psychologists are finding that nostalgia is not only universal, but also associated with better mental well-being.”
However the more I thought about it the more I realized that it was never about the actual event that creates nostalgia, it is the point of life that you were in that made that moment special.
When I made my first world, I was at a point where I had a carefree life and the only thing that I had to worry about was if I was going to the park that day. The time where my grades never mattered. People get nostalgia because they want something from the past they can’t have now. Bringing up past memories with friends helps us realize how we shouldn’t take the small things for granted. Many of my friends I've met off a random zoom meeting in middle school and we are still close to this day. Other people I met were random but I am grateful for having that luck. Those memories bring our friendships closer and bond us. Especially when it's just a group of people all together and just talking, those moments are key to our development as humans.
The nostalgia we feel “helps us find more meaning in life.”
ReplyDeleteHi Jaiganesh! I really related to your blog on nostalgia because I also share the same sentiments. I found your idea on specific memories in time to be very interesting because I had never thought about memories and nostalgia in that way before. I also realize how some events occur at the right point in our life, and some events come at the wrong time. I have also heard of a similar phrase in the past, about being at the right place at the wrong time. I think this relates to your ideas on memories at a specific time because sometimes events are not effective because of the timing. Because everyone’s life is always at very different stages at different points in time, it’s hard to identify when two people or two events will interact effectively. However, I agree with your idea about being able to appreciate the friendships and memories that we make when we are in the right place at the right time. Although I do not often think about this, these ideas will allow me to be more grateful when meeting new people and participating in novel events and situations in my life.
Hi Jaiganesh, I love how you wrote about nostalgia. I had no idea that nostalgia wasn't actually the event that occurred but when and how it impacted you. Now that I think about it, it makes sense. I relate to you about your experience with Minecraft. The first time I made a world, I spent hours of my time to make a house, it had a swimming pool, hundreds of bunnies, horses with stables, lots of tamed dogs, it was a few stories tall, and it even had a rollercoaster. I spent hours even days, I can remember myself bringing my iPad every where with me so I could continue adding on to the house. Now I barley have time to build a small little hut. At the moment in my life, just like you, I could be as careless as I wanted to be. I could spend hours of my time "wasting" it away on Minecraft. Now I don't even have the time to wait for it to download.
ReplyDeleteHey Jaiganesh, I love your blog because nostalgia is also something I've been spending a lot of time thinking about recently too. To me nostalgia is also associated with my childhood house in San Ramon where I spent eleven years of my life before moving to Fremont. In Freshmen year of High School we moved to Fremont and recently my dad sold our house in San Ramon. I took that house for granted until it was taken away from us. My mom and I went to look at the house before it was sold and we went inside the kitchen pantry where, behind the door, my brother and I had marked out heights. I couldn't stop crying after I realized that the markings of our growth had been thoughtlessly painted over. Sometimes we drive by the house and in my head I still think "home". Nostalgia to me is rereading the Percy Jackson series and watching him grow up only to realize that now I have outgrown him.
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