The Search for Reasons
Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?
I spend the bulk of my time in the past, both on this blog and away from it. There are a few reasons for this and this post is an opportunity to look at them in an attempt to organise my thoughts on this matter.
First of all, I don’t look at the past simply because it was a time that I enjoyed. Often, at Secondary school especially, I had a miserable time. However, as I get older I want to understand how and why my experience there, and during other times, have impacted my personality and approach to life for better and for worse.
Second, as I get older I find myself not only wanting to return to things I enjoyed when I was younger but also to gauge the effect those things have on me now. I tend to remember events in my childhood with more clarity than most people in any case so the anecdotes and events are seen with far more accurate recall than the majority of people. However, there is one of the interesting aspects of Memory. Someone else with the same level of recall could either have forgotten the event or they remember it in an entirely different way. So that recall is only accurate for me and as such is heavily edited by my mind over the years.
Third, I love enveloping myself in old music, movies and TV because it makes me feel younger when I am doing it. There is a lot of evidence that people with dementia can access old memories and also evidence that people who have aged, even without dementia, can reverse the physical effects of age by being immersed in the past. I remember watching a documentary where a group of older and infirm men were given a physical test before entering a house, then taken back to the 1950s and completely immersed in the decade. When the physical tests were repeated at the end of the experiment they had all reversed many of their previous signs of ageing.
Finally, as I will never be asked to write my autobiography this is a way of capturing my life in all its aspects and maybe leave something of myself for my loved ones to read so that they might understand me more.
Discover more from David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 
Absolutely fascinating to think of this experiment. Perhaps there’s something about youth and feeling more energetic. Suggests that this can transfer to what we can actually do, rather than just how we feel. It makes me thing how much we can control with the right attitude.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Life is so fractured now. There are very few shared experiences now due to streaming and catch up services, everyone is doing their own thing in their own time. My feelings about looking back and feeling nostalgic aren’t always driven by “things being better” – i had a bad time at school from 11 onwards, and was quite lonely and single for a good chunk of my twenties and thirties – but the knowledge that you were watching, listening and participating at the same time as thousands, millions of others made me part of something. And of course, life was often much simpler: less choice, yes, but that’s not a bad thing; and before the internet took over as a dominant force in our lives we had to physically engage with the world.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s really difficult to find shared experiences. The Women’s Euros saw 20 million tuning in, but too many men online were queuing up to make appalling comments to make it a shared experience unfortunately. Celebrity Traitors last year was very close to it, but even that was about 12 to 15 million viewers which would have been an average audience 40 years ago.
LikeLiked by 1 person