For many, today was the first day of spring. I spent a better part of the afternoon strolling around the Village and the NYU campus, retracing my steps from the college days.
My brain romanticizes those days in college with fondness and nostalgia, even though a part of me knows I would not enjoy reliving my experience as a struggling college student working 3 part-time campus jobs, perpetually worried about budgeting every dollar and wondering if I would be able to make it to the next semester.
I suppose nostalgia works its way through the remembering self, regardless of what the experiencing self encoded from reality. This may explain why veterans look back at those grueling days in combat with a smile, despite all the misery and the pain of the moment. I wonder if this overwriting mechanism has anything to do with Stockholm’s Syndrome.
On the flip side, this mechanism could be leveraged for passing the marshmallow test. You can find reassurance that in pursuing hard and painful sacrifices, you may very well see those very sacrifices with fondness retrospectively. A win win.