Living in the Past...

[RCMerchant]

  Ok...this may sound a little weird...but I find myself living in the past a lot lately.

 I'm not real old...(I'm 45) but I live in the past. Alot. I have a sweetie whom I love,two kids, a big old farmhouse of my own (well-I'm paying on it...)...but I seem to be on a big time nostalgia thing....;I miss the past.

 I was watching my son Jed running down the street to his friend Donny's house this afternoon to play...and thought-"Man...to run like that again...to be free and uncarung about politics, the past or the future...just to run...to be so ...I dunno ... alive...

 cripes...I sound like a Ray Bradbury excerpt from 'Dandolion Wine'....

well...any way...does anybody else get as misty as me about the past?

[BTM]

well...any way...does anybody else get as misty as me about the past?

Yeah, sometimes... course, mainly because my present kind of sucks in some ways and I'm sometimes worried about the future.

But, besides that, I miss being a kid too sometimes... miss my innocence, miss playing with my two best friends, and having definite dreams of what I wanted to do when I "grew up".

It's funny you should bring it because I did a video about that subject for one of my college classes.  I went back to the town I grew up (was there till late fifth grade), and stopped by my old house and elementary school, filming various things and commenting on them. 

Been MEANING to upload that video to youtube, but I gotta figure out some way to compress a 2 gigabyte MOV file to a 100 Meg video without it looking too much like Legos.  :)

But, yeah, I think we all feel that way sometimes about the past.

[Jack]

I think everybody lives in the past to a certain degree.  My wife and I listen to music from the '80s, dress (in some small degree) like it was still 1982, and love watching movies from that era.  My parents are exactly the same way.  I think everybody's parents are.  When was the last time you saw a 60 year old guy listening to rap?     We see our kids going through exactly the same stuff we went through and it makes us really nostalgic, we'll often sit around and fondly reminisce about that stuff for hours on end. 

I think at our age (mid 40's) it's common to have a bit of a midlife crisis.  Especially when you're constantly reminded by the kids of how exciting and carefree life used to be.  I know I sometimes ask myself "Is this all that I'll ever be?  Twenty years from now virtually nothing will have changed?"  But, I dunno.  It's the same for everybody, it's just life, and I'm pretty happy actually.  Sounds like you are too RC.

[indianasmith]

I know what you mean, I get terribly homesick for the 1980's cometimes.  Back when I was young and handsome and THIN . . .

[CheezeFlixz]

I most assuredly live in the past as I enjoy doing my family history and I think of the hours and hours I spend with my older ancestors when I was young and never asked them about their life when they where young, or to ask them about their parents life and by the time I got old enough to care about that information, they had been long since dead.  When I was young I had relatives still living that were born in the 1870's and when I knew them that were just old people.
Now I have but a very few older relatives left to quiz about the past. But as far as my own past goes, sure there are times I would like to go back and live it again, mainly to make a few different choices in life. I think most of us would like to use the do-over machine at some point or at the very least go back and enjoy a few things that we took for granted at the time.

[Dennis]

I like to think back on what life was like, I can remember when owning a phone was a luxury that we couldn't afford, and when we finally got one it was a big black thing with a rotary dial. TV screens were small, round, and came in a large case that was filled with glowing vacuum tubes, the picture was black and white. I only needed 35 cents to see 2 movies (monsters and westerns), a short, cartoons, and my personal favorite "PREVIEWS OF COMING ATTRACTIONS", these were usually better than the movies themselves. Rock and roll was the devil's music, Chuck Berry was the spawn of Satan, and if you liked his music your brain had probably been destroyed by the demon weed marijuana. We also had polio, smallpox, and a lot of other nasty stuff that's now gone. Back then as a child life wasn't actually carefree, it was just that as a youngster your worries and priorities are different than when you're an adult. It amuses me some times to think about what my daughter will be  calling "The Good Old Days". There is an up side to being an adult with a job, bills, a house, and a mortgage, if I want to on a cold rainy day like today I can turn the heater up to 80, turn on all the lights, open all the doors and windows, go stand on my front porch and shout out "YES, MOM AND DAD, I AM TRYING TO HEAT THE WHOLE D--- NEIGHBORHOOD!!"

[Patient7]

I'm still pretty young but all of my youthful memories are the embarrassing things that I did because I was 6 and didn't know any better, if I could go back in time, I would smack myself.

[Killer Bees]

The only time I live in the past (and make myself depressed in the process) is when I look in the mirror and I see what being a mother has done to my previously smokin hot bod.  I miss the days when men would give me admiring looks and say lame things just to start a conversation 

[clockworkcanary]

I think we all live in the past to some degree - I forget the term but from a Psychological stand point, we usually cling to that which was going on while we were coming of age, which is why I've locked onto the late 80s/early 90s as the best era ever, even though I'm looking at it through rose-tinted, plaid-wearing, grunge-listening glasses :)

But really, it seems like the first decade of the 2000s has been the meta-age; we've become absorbed with retroculture, which is great I think, but doesn't speak well for our current culture, but what do they expect with all these hallow cultural aspects of the current times.  I mean, who's going to pop retro years from now about how cool it was that all these aneorexic bag of bones were so cool for being famous for...well, nothing heh.  Basically, today has not much to offer - no rubics cube, no Pong, no pet rock, no mood rings lol. 

Ok, maybe I'm being a little hard on the times of today but it always seems everyone is so spent on everything that we love old stuff.  Maybe today's age does offer something and I'm just too old to notice those kind of things when I'm more concerned with paying my child's medical expenses, maintaining a secure job, and keeping the food on the table.  Funny how life changes ya over time :)  but I do think we're in a meta-culture decade to some degree.

Maybe culturally, things will start to change and soon.  I guess it's up to us when it all comes down to it.  Ok, I don't know what I'm talking about :)

[Ed, Ego and Superego]

You know, I was never all that happy in the past.  I like life (and myself) a hell of a lot more these days, than even 7-8 years ago.  I didn't have a bad childhood, or anything like that, but I like now more than then.   
I miss small stuff, but nothing that would make me go back. 

Now living in alternate presents, you might have something there.  I'm guilty of "What Iffing" for sure. 
-Ed

[Torgo]

I'm turning 33 on March 7th and I've already noticed that I'm starting to go back espeically with music and listen to stuff that I haven't listened to in years.  I think that it's just a natural thing that happens to everyone eventually. 

[HappyGilmore]

That's happening to me now, and I'm turning 24 in two days.

[Torgo]

That's happening to me now, and I'm turning 24 in two days.

Man, that's not good. You should still being living well in the  "now" at 24.   

[ER]

I don't know if it's the same as living in the past in the way this topic has been discussed here, but I know I am someone who seems to place more value on analyzing my own past, even the recent past, than on enjoying the present as it is unfolding. That's probably not good.

A couple nights ago a friend of mine from Texas brought up how powerfully music brings back sentimental memories, and he was sure right there, because it does.

I mentioned to him how the 1980's, when we were children, were so much more innocent than this decade. That's not only the rosy effect of memory, I believe that. I think he and I were lucky we grew up then instead of now, and I'm finding myself shocked more and more often at some of the material marketed nowadays at the very young . But that's a sign I'm getting old (yuck) and also a subject for another topic someday.

But hey, if ever any of you get too far gone in your pining for our lost yesterdays, remember that old quote that we were all fools three years ago. (Heck, I know I was!)

[HappyGilmore]

That's happening to me now, and I'm turning 24 in two days.

Man, that's not good. You should still being living well in the  "now" at 24.   

But everything today sucks.   

But I have a job I (mostly) enjoy and, have made some friends there.  Granted most of them are like, teenagers, but still.