Fun fact: I’ve spent more money on Pokémon cards in the last 3 years than I did when I was growing up.

Why do you care? Well, it’s because Pokémon is just one outlet of how I chase recreating my childhood, among other things, which I am sure a lot of us do in our own ways. For me, I can now buy cards & collectibles that were completely unattainable to me growing up. There’s something extremely satisfying about holding an item I remember obsessing about when I was younger and finally giving that version of myself something he wanted but couldn’t have.

It doesn’t end with trading cards. I do the same thing with playing old video games, rewatching classic movies, listening to my favourite music from high school, and occasionally visiting places I used to love going to. All of these things immediately transport me back to a specific room or time period of my life, and for a few minutes… the time between then and now feels removed. Lately, I’ve been chasing that feeling a lot more.

Honestly, most of the time it isn’t a conscious decision either. It’s not like I sit down and decide that day that I’m going to attempt to recreate 1999 or reenact a specific summer from 2013. It’s a little more subtle than that. I tend to reach for familiar things because I know they once made me happy, and some part of me hopes that they will make me feel exactly the same way I did back then. And sometimes they do, briefly.

I won’t lie that the flash of excitement from ripping cards from my childhood comes back every time I open up a pack of Pokémon cards. I can go back to an old game (Final Fantasy VII anyone?) and immediately recognize the music, the menus, and know where to go on the map. If I hear a song from back in the day, I instantly remember the people I may have been with, what I was feeling in the moment, or the future I thought would unfold after that time period. The problem is, these moments pass as quickly as they come.

Nowadays, the cards I pull get added to a collection app that tracks their value. The video games compete with responsibilities and time I need to spend on other things. The song ends, and I’m back to my current life (including its current anxiety). Those things may not have changed, but I have. That is the part of nostalgia that I’ve been thinking about lately; that I think I may miss a certain game, friend, trip, or thing from my old life, but really I am missing who I was while experiencing it.

Maybe I Miss the Person Inside the Memory

Based on what I’ve written so far, have you felt the same way? Well, I don’t know about you, but when I think about growing up, I remember how exciting the small things felt back then compared to now. A new video game occupied my thoughts (and time) for weeks. Getting out of the house to see a movie or go to the mall was an exciting adventure. Summer was an event that never ended. Friendships happened pretty easily because we were around each other constantly and had very little competing for our time other than whose house we wanted to hang out at.

Compared to now, I don’t remember wondering whether I was using my time wisely, and I definitely wasn’t tracking the value of my cards. I also wasn’t comparing my career to other people’s careers, had almost no awareness of money, physical & mental health, everyone aging around me, work instability, or the slightest notion of what could potentially go wrong in my life. When I reflect back on different stages of my life, they all seem easier than life currently.

By no means does that mean I’ve had an easy life though; it’s been quite the opposite.

I had my share of family problems, financial limitations, uncertainty about my future, loneliness, and aspects of life I was forced to take responsibility for much earlier than my peers. The thing is, nostalgia has a funny way of editing those parts out or softening how they impacted me back then. For a lot of us, it takes a complicated period and reduces it to the things that helped us get through that period like Saturday morning cartoons, video games, cards, friends, and the feeling that the future was entirely ahead of me. I guess that’s what I miss the most.

When we’re younger, the future feels limitless. There are countless possible life paths in front of us that we can take, and relatively little evidence about which ones may or may not work. We can imagine becoming anything we want without immediately realizing the cost, risk, timing, or probability of success associated with that path. The problem is, as we get older, our life becomes a lot more real. Some of those possibilities become accomplishments, but others become regrets. Many of them become paths we just didn’t take. Our future may still be open, but it definitely doesn’t feel unlimited in the same way anymore.

Given all of this, I’ve come to the realization that maybe when we chase nostalgia, we’re not exactly trying to return to that happier time but rather, we’re trying to return to a time when a hopeful future required a lot less evidence of being a possibility.

Memory Is Not a Fair Comparison

I also think that nostalgia has an unfair advantage over the present in that the past has already been edited to our liking; time now is currently being processed, meaning that the good and the bad infiltrate our brains.

When we remember past trips, friends, or just a period of our lives, we’re selectively remembering the highlights. I’m not saying there aren’t times we remember the negative aspects of those things, but we’re much less likely to purposely remember being tired, anxious, irritated, or worried about whatever was happening at the time. When we live out the present, we don’t have a chance to edit these things out.

We experience every quiet hour, disappointment, awkward conversation, unfinished tasks that linger for weeks, and moments when nothing memorable is happening. We know all of the negative aspects of our current life well, because we’re living them out in real-time. I don’t know which day will eventually become important, or which people & places I’ll eventually miss until later in life. That’s the issue with nostalgia: it compares the highlight reel of our past with the unedited footage of today, and that means that most times, the past wins.

Want to test my theory? This becomes especially noticeable when you try to recreate old experiences. Go ahead, return to a restaurant, city, or event that you fondly remember and expect the same feeling from; I guarantee it won’t be the same. The people there may be different. The place might be a little more crowded, a little more expensive, or gone entirely. Even if the thing looks familiar, your current expectations are now doing the work that the original experience never had to do. The first experience happened naturally. Every return visit has a job: proving the magic is still there.

This kind of pressure makes it nearly impossible to enjoy what is actually happening in front of you. Instead of experiencing the moment, you are probably measuring it against your memories. Do you feel the same? Are you as happy as you were the first time? Was this the right choice to come back? Is it living up to what you hoped it would be? The more desperately you try to recover past feelings, the more aware you might become that they’re gone.

The Past Is Safe Because It Cannot Change

I actually could have ended the post there, but writing this out led me to another realization of why I think a lot of us chase the good old days, so why not continue to dive deeper? We can pretend we’re in therapy right now.

So why is nostalgia so strong, especially during uncertain periods in our lives? Well it’s simple: the past is safe. A memory can’t surprise me with rejection, layoffs, arguments, illnesses, or bills. I already know how the story ends, and even painful memories can oddly become comforting due to that familiarity and finality. Our current lives are much less cooperative in doing this.

New memories require effort, and without any guarantee that the effort is going to reward you with anything meaningful. New friendships could fade. New jobs end badly. New traditions might not catch on. The risk is that the next phase of life may not feel as exciting or important as the previous one, and because of that, we feel like revisiting something we love removes much of that risk. We already know what to expect, so it’s easier to revisit an old source of happiness than it is to create new ones from scratch. The problem is, there’s an underlying cost that comes with this safety that we rarely think about.

That cost is applied to new experiences, and it happens when we compare that new experience to something that’s already survived years of emotional editing. Why this is a problem is that very little is going to feel good enough if we do that. The present becomes a waiting room between memories rather than a place where they’re actually made. Chasing these nostalgic feelings set too high of a standard that everything else needs to match, and that’s a losing game.

The thing is, maybe some periods really were special. We don’t need to pretend that every year of our life is going to be equally joyful or provide the level of impact that others did. The problem lies in deciding too early that the best moments in life have already happened.

I’ll end here for this week, but for the next essay, I plan on diving deeper into how we can reframe our past to help lay the groundwork for our future. Appreciate you reading.