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Has anyone here found themselves reflecting on the "good old days" when the present has seemed lame/uneventful/disappointing by comparison?
I realize life is what we make of it, and living in the present is the key to a happier life.
But does reminiscing about the past -- whether your days as a teen, college student, or 40-something year old -- actually made you feel better, if temporarily? Has it ever backfired?
Has anyone here found themselves reflecting on the "good old days" when the present has seemed lame/uneventful/disappointing by comparison?
I realize life is what we make of it, and living in the present is the key to a happier life.
But does reminiscing about the past -- whether your days as a teen, college student, or 40-something year old -- actually made you feel better, if temporarily? Has it ever backfired?
I'm 80 yrs young and I reflect and go to my fond memories of my life every day..>Even My dreams reflect that. I don't have much of the "fun" now but glad to be alive and have a memory. I work at keeping that memory and that's a great job and it's working.
I never thought about this until a couple yrs ago, seems for me most went more south with recent arthritic issues and advanced aging. I wonder how old the OP is to be talking like this.
I have noticed a slant on this, observed in a person I know. In her case, it has backfired and has resulted in mental illness.
She is turning 54, she has no children and she lives in the house she grew up in. She spent her youth ( Southern California )
chasing rock stars, hung out in bars and entered some bikini contests. She desperately wants to be pretty. She has an unusually short and thick neck, as she has aged it has become more pronounced. She never tried to better herself with education, sadly.
She married a wonderful guy almost 20 yrs. ago and he was the breadwinner. She lived with her brother in the house they grew up in, her brother died suddenly almost a year ago. Her father died well over 20 yrs. ago and her mom died in 2008.
I mention this because it all encompasses her viewpoint.
She is very open with her beliefs and ideals and is a true attention seeking narcissist. According to her, her mother encouraged her to do anything she wants. I doubt this is true, but if anyone ever calls her out on her questionable behavior, she insists that her mother would have encouraged it. She has complained for years about how depressed and sad she is over her mother's death. Granted, her mother was born in the early 1930's and was in obvious declining health for a very long time until she passed. So it is not like she never got a chance to adjust. All these years later, she claims that she cries every day and she constantly posts everyday that she misses her "Mommy" and her "Daddy". She also includes her brother in the complaining, as his death was sudden and unexpected. She ended up checking herself into a mental facility a few times. She is also a major hypochondriac and just seems to relish attention. If she gets shunned, told off or unfriended on Face Book, she goes into a rage or videotapes herself in the midst of an anxiety attack of extreme tears and completely unrealistic depressive meltdown. Her husband bought her an emotional therapy dog. She is on SSDI for disability for the depressive episodes.
I always wondered about her husband. He lived with her and her brother in the house. He has a very different personality, very subdued and shy. A couple of years ago, she started going out and getting tattoos. She now has a lot of tattoos. I think it was because she could lie there while getting them done and have a captive audience in the tattoo artist who had to listen to her drone on and on about missing her parents. She loves to shop and she loves to get her hair styled and her nails manicured/pedicured. One of her tattoos on her wrist is very large and says "Daddy". She also loves to buy herself photo beauty sets, where she goes out with a professional photographer and poses suggestively in lingerie. She even posted the photos on Face Book, keep in mind she is now 54 and she is not as hot as she thinks she is. Her life revolves around taking her emotional support dog out shopping with her, and posting every single time she feels depressed and hopeless, which is daily.
Her husband could not take anymore and finally left. I was so happy that he made that huge step, even thought he is older than her and will probably have to pay alimony. I could not imagine what is was like to endure living with someone like that. I think he was close to her brother, and that may have helped. Now that brother died, he probably realized he had to save himself. I know he was concerned about her spending habits and I know he was frustrated with her taking advantage of his generosity and stoic nature. He took excellent care of her, but she never really seemed to appreciate him for it. She definitely likes to be served, so they ate out all of the time. She literally would post photos of the meals they ate out, along with a constant stream of endless selfies. I notice she has lots of followers, like me they find the psychological example utterly fascinating to watch. So, now he has ignored all of her posts where she begs him to return. She posted several scary "I hate my life and I want to die" posts and now the acceptance stage for her is to belittle and insult him. As far as I am concerned, she now has an entirely new reason to be depressed, and she is going to milk it for all that it is worth.
She refuses to live in the now. She posts photos of her taken back in the 1980's. Very sad and very wasteful of the here and now. She is trapped in the house she grew up in, and she always posted before all this happened how alone she felt and how lonely she was. It is almost as if she willed it to be, and now the universe is making being alone her reality.
This woman had issues to begin with. Self image issues. They were never addressed. Now she has to live with it.
Has anyone here found themselves reflecting on the "good old days" when the present has seemed lame/uneventful/disappointing by comparison?
I realize life is what we make of it, and living in the present is the key to a happier life.
But does reminiscing about the past -- whether your days as a teen, college student, or 40-something year old -- actually made you feel better, if temporarily? Has it ever backfired?
Given that you start a variation of this topic every couple of months, I'd say it's backfiring.
Given that you start a variation of this topic every couple of months, I'd say it's backfiring.
Yeah, OP, if you find your present to be lackluster, work on improving your present. If you feel that your job is drudgery, either find an activity outside of work that is meaningful and rewarding for you, or see if there's some kind of effort you could find, or organize on your own, that relates to your job, but could be undertaken on your own initiative. Either volunteer for, or create on your own, a project that enhances your work.
As you say, "life is what you make it". You could also consider looking for a different job in an arena that's more rewarding for you.
I think there are some people who are designed for the burst of youth to be their time in the sun and some people who don't get into that and prefer the more mature stage of life. I appreciated the heck out of my youth, I had had a long illness as a teen and knew health and vitality could be fleeting so was not going to waste it sitting around. Also, it was a good time and place to be young and free. I definitely met people who were different, and seemed more like they were forty years old when they were twenty. So they would not have much to reminisce about.
Given that you start a variation of this topic every couple of months, I'd say it's backfiring.
Amen.
Exact same threads.
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