While browsing through some old hard drives, I recently came across a collection of old home videos that my parents had filmed in the mid-2000s. Hours of footage that I thought were lost to the past decade; faint memories that I now realize made me into who I am now. Most of them depicted a candid window into my child self enjoying the simplicities of life, unburdened by studies or trying to find an independent way of life that I am sure we are all too familiar with now.

Despite all the years that have passed since I was actually present in these videos, they seem weirdly timeless, and I found myself subconsciously asking why that was. Why do these past videos still seem all so … present? Of all the videos, one oddly stood out to me in particular, where I was playing with my friends outside a cafe while my parents, sipping coffee, took videos of us. Maybe it was because I was now the one enjoying a hot drink outside while watching these memories play, but I was filled with a bittersweet feeling that I couldn’t exactly pinpoint. I knew deep down that I could never go back, but I was still content that I had such a fortunate childhood that I could now reminisce on. 

Following this experience, I dove deeper into the concept of nostalgia, which, by definition, is an individual’s sentimental affection towards their past. I started looking for experiences that could re-evoke these feelings. I coincidentally came across some American b-roll footage from the 1980s online, filmed with a camcorder, showing a typical family enjoying a Christmas morning. Even though I was not even born back when the video was recorded, it still brought back that feeling of nostalgia, as though I had personally been there. This wasn’t the only one either; hundreds of other home videos online gave me the same exact feeling of longing. There seemed to be an overarching theme to all these artifacts, a desire to go back and cherish a part of me that I neither remember nor have experienced. But what I found strange was that this optimistic longing was almost exclusively reserved for a cherry-picked — some fabricated entirely —  past, rather than my hope towards the future. Asking around, it seemed like many others seemed to agree with what I was feeling. It appears almost cynical that, though time only moves forwards, most of us just want to return to a past, when we were happier; a feeling that only seems to amplify as we grow up. As we outgrow the protective shell of our youth, and as life continues to throw its challenges at us, nostalgia gives us an escape, even if it is only temporary.

In retrospect, it also feels as though our view of the future was always better in the past too. As kids, we wanted to become adults, while as adults now, we want to go back to being kids. Despite knowing that later in life, I will look upon my university days with the same fondness that I do now with my childhood self, I can’t help but think of nostalgia as a coping mechanism, cushioning my sad realities with my happy memories, dealing with my problems with escapism rather than head on. 

However, it’s important to realize that time doesn’t wait for us; we eventually have to move on, whether we like it or not. Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” This quote resoundingly strikes home, that our current experiences will inevitably become our future selves’ nostalgia; outwardly, it seems like some tragic circular joke that we have to live happily now so that we can dampen the harsh realities of what’s to come, but it is a reality we must learn to embrace nonetheless. Especially now, in the digital age that we live in where everything around us moves at an increasingly accelerated rate, it is more important than ever that we, as unwilling travelers to tomorrow’s world, cherish our current selves while we still can in hopes for a brighter future.