Nostalgia is not about how things were

Nostalgia is not about how things were: It’s about how we remember them. I think we like to believe nostalgia is a faithful archive – a clean backup of the past we can mount and browse at will. But it isn’t. It’s more like a compressed snapshot: lossy, selective, and quietly edited over time. What we remember is rarely the full system state. The frustration, delays, the things that didn’t work out – they all get filtered out. What remains are the highlights: the warmth of a familiar routine, the excitement of discovery, the comfort of things that felt simpler […]