Nostalgia-bait, or Why I Learned to Stop Revisiting and Love Reverse-Engineering

Something I’ve been thinking about more recently has to deal with nostalgia and why we, as humans, revisit nostalgic experiences as we age. The old books we read, the old films we watched, the old games we played.

The simple answer, looking at my own history and that of the people around me, is that we as humans crave and seek out the familiar… somtimes to our detriment. I believe that nostalgia can be a dangerous thing; it prevents us from living in the here and now, and cements our past as superior and preferable to current events. On the other hand, though, I do believe that it can remind us that there is something left there at that particular point in time, something with which we can retrace our steps and learn from.

But why do we stop at simply revisiting the events, taking the time to memorize all of the lines, plot beats, and scene triggers like the back of our hands? It kind of seems a bit pointless to simply do something that you’ve already done many times before, again. Yes, you get to “re-live” the experience, but you’re not gaining any new insight into how the experience touched you in the first place.

“The unexamined life is not worth living”

– Socrates

Recently, I’ve been thinking about adopting a stance of breaking down everything that I like to its base components, so that I may better understand the experience.

I think that, too often, people are too afraid to really dig deep and discover more about the things that they like. They have this initial impression about the thing that they like, and they don’t expand very far beyond that initial impression. They hold those experiences close to their hearts, and guard them fiercely, as a dragon might horde treasure. I postulate that they might be scared of really examining those things that they like, in fear that in examining the parts, they might ruin the whole.

I don’t share this feeling, though, as of late. I’m actually incredibly interested in the inner workings of my likes and dislikes.

I relate this back to my philosophy when it comes to technology and computing: you learn more when you have a good understanding of how something was put together, and more importantly, why. To recreate the problems the original developers ran into while creating this product, and think about how they might have come to a solution in order to resolve that particular issue.

It’s about getting into different peoeple’s heads (including your own) in order to gain perspective and to figure out what might be important. And I think this is what nostalgia misses: the lessons that accompany an important event.