Regular readers (both of them) know that I roll my eyes when someone starts talking about what they think are the "good old days". Like I've mentioned before, the good old days were terrible for many of us, and they probably didn't exist for you either.
What people fail to comprehend about nostalgia is that the good times they wished for never happened. We over romanticize the past and we lose our ability to be objective about what really happened then. You remember the times that you were happy, but you forget about the times when you were miserable. I might look back with nostalgia to the 1970's (I wasn't born then, so I'm not speaking for me personally) as a simpler and less complicated time, but I forget how I really felt at that time. Maybe I really did like it, but more often than not I'm just forgetting how I really felt back then and choosing to remember something that didn't really exist in the first place.
The other odd thing about living in the past is that you are wishing for something that simply can't happen again. You are a different person than you were even three years ago (if you aren't, you are wasting your life to some degree), much less 20 years ago. The world doesn't move backwards and neither should you.
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