Decoding Nostalgia

 "I'd trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday."

                                                                     - Kris Kristofferson

Disclaimer:  I am no Psychologist, nor do I claim to be one. My JD is closer to that of a ‘Research Analyst’, which in itself is quite funny...Ah!  Well, at least in my case. ‘Research’ is generally what I do to restrict my boss from shouting at me (unless you want to really categorize my daily routine of looking for some random pictures/profiles/videos as ‘Reserach’....sssshh!). On the contrary, ‘Analyst’ is something that is more characteristic of my personality. The analogy drawn to the subject in this article is purely symbolic in nature and is not meant to spark off a mathematical debate. Please pardon me for my limited wisdom. This is one of those abstract  posts where I aim to put forth a simple argument around an emotion I encounter consistently, without attempting to ‘Research’ on the topic beforehand.

It is a moment of reflection.  I am high on a heavy dosage of nostalgia, an emotion which Merriam-Webster defines as the pleasure and sadness that is caused by remembering something from the past and wishing that you could experience it again. Now I have never been a literary scholar in my life, so let me draw an analogy to the discipline I am more comfortable with.

I prefer to call it the Fuzzy Syndrome – the inability of my brain to logically select a binary state of either of the contrasting extreme emotions. To come to think of it – there are possibly other use cases of the Fuzzy Syndrome, and nostalgia could be viewed as just a subset of the phenomenon. One moment you just chuckle as you remember an old prank, a joke, a funny experience; the next moment reality hits hard and you realize that the moment is now a thing of the past, and it ignites the yearning to experience it the one more time.

It could be while moving into a new house, city or country; it could be graduating college or changing a job; it could be bidding farewell to a friend or simply the end of your favourite sitcom. The feeling is always there – the degrees of contrasting moods (fuzzy states) keep changing, but never reach either extreme. Say for example when graduating college, one moment you are happy for the achievement and the excitement of taking on the world makes you happier in general, and the next moment you are sad because of the friends you would miss. The continuum of these fuzzy states is what sums up the Fuzzy Syndrome or Nostalgia you witness while reflecting back.

Here is where the catch is – you would have attended college with probably 150 other folks, but made good friends with a handful, say 5 of them. You would still meet these 5 folks regularly. Then what is it that we miss? In my opinion, it is the affect of the other factors that have a strong role in creating any of such memories. Let us take an example to dissect this further – right now reflecting back on those college days, you are missing the golden memories created while playing basketball with your five best buddies. I categorize these fuzzy variables into four distinct sets:

• Event – This is the actual action itself, and hence is the most important factor that forms the experience. For example, the 6 friends (including you) playing basketball is one such event. If you just string together multiple such occurrences of the 6 friends playing basketball, what you get is an experience, or a memory unit.
• Actors – These are the key members of the event, in our case, the six players playing basketball.
• Setting Variables – These are the background variables - psychological externalities, which during the time of the actual event might be perceived as dormant. It could include THAT PARTICULAR basketball court, THAT PARTICULAR basketball, the cheerleaders, the other classes being disturbed in the vicinity, the ire of professors being irked, the class being bunked, the time of the day, the hairdo the actors had, etc.......I hope you get the point. At the time of the actual action these merely served a simple purpose – they were just the means to a few hours of fun with your folks. At that point, it is only the ‘folks’ that is important to us. But the brilliance of the argument is that the purpose that these ‘means’ serve changes significantly after you graduate. You would still hang out with your folks; you would still play at basketball courts (and probably at better ones!).....The setting variables would change. You could at best simulate similar setting variables in order to travel down memory lane, but rationally speaking, how often would you be returning to the same basketball court with the same set of friends, set aside the same setting variables?
• Time – All of us want the clock to remain still during the happy hours, and to be ticking 10x during the bad times. The truth is that time is one thing we mortals never have a command over. Even if you are able to replicate the above three factors to a tee, unfortunately time is one thing which can never be recreated.

In the end, I would geekily want to summarize the argument by symbolizing these 4 factors in a mathematical jargon (purely to satiate my urge of complicating things). The fuzzy state that you experience is the outcome of a 4-dimensional equation that would have all of these variables:

 Fuzzy State, f (a,e,s,t) = ∑a_n + e + ∑s_n + ∑t_n

You do a summation (eh..club all) of these Fuzzy States (i.e. in our example, all such episodes in college) and Eureka – you get that Nostalgia experience.

 Where,

a → the set of actors that are integral parts of the event

e → the event itself

s → the setting / psychological externalities / background

t → a timeslot

T→ a block of timeslots representing a memory snapshot

What is even more fascinating is how little do we realize while experiencing the event itself. I mean, how often while reflecting back do you find yourself saying – “Oh! I wish I had more time.” This is the reason memories are so special and why we are asked to treasure these all our lives.

Anyway, this is where I sign off and grab a coffee to cherish some golden moments of the past. 

                      “How sad and bad and mad it was - but then, how it was sweet” 

                                                                                                        - Robert Browning

Do you also suffer regularly from the Fuzzy Syndrome?