First Written: 02-Dec-2022 | Fri 19:00
*All Photos in this article taken by my buddy Albert

The other day I was going down some of the Internet’s beautiful rabbit holes and stumbled upon this quote:

“As you grow up, make sure you have more dreams than memories, more opportunities than chances, and more friends than acquaintances.”

Dude. That’s juicy. Don’t live off your past? Create your own future? Beautiful.

They say to have more dreams than memories. Oh, baby, that is so good.

Oooh Whatchya Say

You ever heard to phrase “the good ole days”? My friend mentioned it last week. He was reminiscing back when we were in college, recounting some of the stories. “Ahh, the good ole days. Back when we had it good” he says.

But then I thought about it for a moment. I took myself back, rewound 6 months earlier, back when we were in college.

Something Didn’t Add Up

I remember living in the dorms and talking to the same friend. At the time I honestly didn’t think much of it. Life just happened. We went on living and nothing was really out of the ordinary. The daily routine just happened. I ate food, went to school, talked to people, worked out, did homework… It wasn’t all that crazy.

Obviously, there were highs and lows, goods and bads, excitements and infuriations, but the “good ole days” that my buddy was talking about felt off.

It made the mundane seem like something it wasn’t. It made something out of nothing. It created an emotion, an experience, an excitement out of thin air.

Because the “good ole days” he talked about were just so… regular.

Yet, fast forward and we reminisce about the past as if it was some other-worldly existence. We hype it up. We glorify it. We make the past out to be more than it was… But when we were actually living it, was it really everything we crack it up to be?

The Memory is a Lie

As humans, we have a habit of glorifying the past. We partake in the intoxication of sweet, sweet nostalgia. We praise the past. We admire our earlier days unrightfully so.

I acknowledge that I’m not immune, but something about the whole thing irks me. When I catch up with old friends, I too notice that I have a tendency to recount the past. It becomes glorified unjustly. The past doesn’t deserve so much of our envy and attention, we’ve got today.

What right do we have to be so infatuated with the past? What right do we have to wish we had those days back?

The past already happened. Why do we obsess over it?

So Never Reminisce? Great Advice

This isn’t to say we should discount old memories, quite the opposite in fact.

Glorifying the past feels like a way to trick ourselves into believing we had it so much better than we actually did. It tricks us into believing that it’s ok to live a subpar life in the here and now because we ‘had it so good before’. How can you compete with the past?

Fuck that. That’s a scapegoat. Telling ourselves ‘how good we had it’ is honestly lazy and complacent. It’s us filling the void of conversation and instead of creating new memories, we’re reliving old ones. That mentality is how we waste our days because we become so accustomed to the present-day grind that instead of doing something different to make our existence more enjoyable, we just roll over and look at ‘how good it used to be’. In small doses, the reminiscent mentality can be fun, but to allow it any more than that is to forego responsibility. We have a responsibility to make the life we currently live, enjoyable.

No, I’m Tired Of Lying to Myself

Let me remember how it used to be without the golden haze of memories. Let me remember the pain and the mundane. I don’t want the gimmicks. I don’t want the tricks of the mind, and I certainly don’t want the nostalgia.

It upsets me because that feeling of nostalgia is what allows us to be so complacent in the present day. It allows us to believe whatever we were doing (or weren’t) doing at the time was a valid use of our time – The memories were so good after all. If they were so good back then, why change anything?

This is in no way a means to discount the memories and the goals in life. For all the genuinely profound experiences, by all means, relive it. Glorify it. Reminisce! Enjoy. Feel the worldly pleasures all over again.

                                                             But to glorify the mundane?

That’s bullshit and a disservice to ourselves. It’s discounting our genuine and favorite memories. It’s discounting the memories that actually did mean the world to us. Getting lost in nostalgia and recounting ‘the good ole days’ (when they weren’t) is lazy and a waste of our time.

We’re selling a lie to ourselves and the nostalgia makes us believe it’s ok to buy.

Fuck that.

Set goals. Have ambitions. Dream. Then recount and relive those moments. Relive the shit that made you feel something. Joke with old friends about the moments that made you feel alive, the moments that lit your soul on fire.

But quit selling yourself these half-hearted nostalgic memories of shit that was entirely mundane and meant absolutely nothing to you at the time. Ask yourself, really ask yourself – Do those memories represent a life you would live again? If the answer is no, you’ve got some serious dreaming to do.

“As you grow up, make sure you have more dreams than memories, more opportunities than chances, and more friends than acquaintances.”

More “dreams than memories”.

Life goes on. It continues to go on. Lie to yourself and live in the past, or grab life by the horns and make this fricking Life your own, the choice is yours.

Start dreaming.

Edit: There’s a specific scientific term denoting this feeling: Rosy Retrospection. It’s in a similar vein as Declinism, which is also talked about in the article.

Edit: All these photos were shot in the mundane. I vividly remember the time at which they were taken (well actually I don’t) and they were all during the monotony. Nothing exciting was happening, but the reminiscent vibe evokes a stronger emotion than what these memories deserve.

Why I Film Photography.