When Nostalgia Forgets The Present
If we believe the vision that Woody Allen gives us in his film Midnight in Paris through the main character, nostalgia consists of a refusal to live the present. This is the Golden Age Complex Syndrome, consisting of the mistaken idea that the past was better than the present. Usually this fallacy of the romantic imagination is found in people who find it difficult to cope with the present.
Midnight in Paris is a cinematographic comedy that presents us with life as something that is not as magical as our dreams, but where we can indeed be the master of our own decisions.
The reality of the main character in his present is not pleasant, since his family as well as the family of the latter ignore and despise him. He feels lonely, whereas in the past, the image he sent was very different: that of a joyful man, respected, surrounded by friends and freshly in love with a woman who leads him to want everything. give up in the present to stay in the past.
His desire to remain anchored in a past era is a way for him to reject his present, a present full of commitments which, far from allowing him to flourish, bores him. Due to his cowardice and lack of determination, rather than facing this present, he flees and takes refuge in a fictitious past where he finds everything he does not have in his present. Eventually, reality sets in and he will have to make a complicated decision.
“Being nostalgic is a romantic way to be sad”
-Mario Quintana-
The Golden Age Complex Syndrome is a cinematic syndrome portrayed by Woody Allden. A toned-down version of this reality-tinged complex is found in melancholy thinking, when one considers that a period of the past was better than the present. Passions, obsessions, behaviors, everything revolves around this period, the ultimate goal being to find this past period.
When memories of our childhood or times past come to mind that we consider better than the present moment and that we feel that change always involves stepping back, in a way, we are close to the syndrome of the complex of the golden age. This complex will also lead us irremediably to live clinging to the past, and therefore, we will never be satisfied with what we have.
Often, these patterns are also found in romantic relationships. This is the case, for example, when we think that a relationship that we have lived in the past is perfect, and that all those that we will experience subsequently in the future will necessarily be below that one. Such a vision of things will lead us irremediably to seek what we already have with a completely different person. In fact, we will then tend to fall into the comparison, and not to judge at their fair value all the things that we will be able to live at the present moment.
“Even the past can change; historians never stop demonstrating it. ”
-Jean paul Sartre-
To be nostalgic is to think, in suffering, of something that we have had or experienced and that we no longer have today, or that has changed. Studies on this subject show that nostalgia makes us more empathetic ; indeed, when one is nostalgic, one remembers a past which is reflected in a combination of a whole series of memories embedded in a process in which negative emotions have infiltrated.
Neurologist and psychiatrist Alan R. Hirsch notes that nostalgia promotes the tendency to forget the negative more easily and to cling to the positive aspects of memories. That’s why we keep in mind the good childhood experiences, friends, playtime, toys, and forget the less pleasant times, the punishments, or even the boring hours spent in class.
Certainly rewarding experiences, proof that our life has a meaning which, most of the time, has marked us. Thus, memory is responsible for telling us who we are, without it straying from or disagreeing with what we have been in the past. Understanding this development is precisely what should make us come back to the past, but without remaining anchored in it.
There is no worse nostalgia than that of regretting what never existed.
