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One day I was standing in line at the post office, and a very elderly woman joined her. She found a grateful listener in the person of one of the men and told him a lot of things. But I remember one thing very much: "It used to be good. Everyone was afraid. Obeyed."
It is difficult to share the delight of the time when everyone was afraid, because it is easy to understand what the fears were connected with. However, after the phrase "It used to be better", many questions and different "yes, but" often arise. For example: in the USSR, university graduates were given jobs — yes, but by distribution you could be thrown anywhere.
But the main question is: what makes people go back in time over and over again, think that it was better there, and ignore any arguments that refute it?
One of the most common reasons to look back is disappointment in the present and disbelief in the possibility of changing something.
For example, a person who considers his student years to be the best in his life is most likely pining for his inner state. According to the feeling of freedom that he experienced, if possible, behave the way he really wants. With age, people suppress their emotions, true desires more, lose the lightness and joy of life, try to be too serious. For those who do not find a way to understand themselves, establish contact with their inner child and express themselves the way they want, the only choice is to remember the time when they gave themselves permission to behave freely.
Speaking in the language of vanilla quotes from social networks, people do not like a specific period, but what they were like at that time.
When experiences become unbearable for our psyche, psychological defenses come to the rescue. In this case, the idealization of the past and the devaluation of the present are triggered.
The reality can be quite harsh, and the past years are perceived as cloudless. Here such a cognitive distortion as pink flashback works. And already from the name it is clear what it means: a person perceives the events of his life in a more positive way than when he actually experienced them. Negative thoughts and emotions are erased, leaving positive memories in the memory. A person begins to perceive the past biased and believe that everything was better before.
Human life is quite long, and during its time the world is changing a lot. In addition to global events, there are many small ones that concern only specific people. And not all of them are easy to accept and survive. Someone can't cope with the collapse of the socialist regime, someone ‑ with parting or retirement.
The inability to accept reality as it is, and to experience their feelings about it, make a person merge anxiety into an endless mental gum about the past. At the same time, he shifts the focus to external circumstances and forgets that the responsibility for his life and personal happiness lies with him, and not on the place or time in which he lives.
In general, during changes, people behave like those two frogs from Panteleev's fairy tale. Both of them fall into a pot of sour cream and life difficulties. Only one accepts the conditions of the game, flounders to the last, until she knocks down a lump of oil with her feet and jumps out. And the other is drowning in memories. It is often much easier to do this. For example, why master gadgets and remain competitive in the labor market, if you can lament how wonderful it was without them. The fact that life went wrong is the easiest way to blame the times.
A frequent nostalgia for childhood and youth is associated with the unwillingness to take responsibility for your life. This is a carefree time when there were few problems and others solved them. Maybe life wasn't better at that time, but it was definitely easier.
Most often, a person gets stuck where he sees himself capable of coping with all difficulties, in a resource state, when everything around him is arranged so that he can easily fulfill his needs. And this means that a person does not have this resource in the present. More precisely, he does not feel it.
With his own past, everything is more or less clear. But there are situations when a person idealizes an era with which he simply could not get acquainted due to age. You've probably seen twentysomethings yearning for the Soviet Union. Or people of any age, telling that everything is wrong now, but it used to be like that under the tsar! The men were real knights. And women gave birth to 15 children in the field, and then went to know their place. And there were no divorces solely because of love, and not because it was preceded by a complicated procedure for obtaining permission from the church. And, of course, the sugar was sweeter, the grass was greener, the water was wetter, and the sausage was 2,20.
It is a longing for a world that never existed, for a world of illusions. A person creates his own space in his head and places it in an era or territory that seems suitable to him. But it has little to do with reality. It is often enough to dig deep enough to refute his misconceptions with references to statistics and research. However, this is unlikely to help.
Each of us has a positive self‑image that I am (to some extent) good. If not handsome, then at least smart. If not rich, then at least honest. When a person is faced with disappointment in himself — he could not earn money, does not enjoy success with the opposite sex — his psyche is faced with a dilemma: to recognize himself as not good enough or to consider the world around him as such.
The easiest way to explain your failures is that this world is wrong. And when was it right? And a person begins to idealize a certain period, exaggerate the positive aspects and ignore the negative ones. Or even artificially screw the "facts" he needs to a certain era. He is sincerely mistaken, because his psyche obligingly hides details that contradict idealization from his consciousness.
Sometimes looking back on the past helps to survive some difficult moments. Illusions give a kind of deformed version of the hope that reality can really be better.
When life is full of problems, and the person himself is overworked, unhappy, he does not find a resource in the present. Then the brain pulls out these resource states from past experiences, returning to joyful memories. It is impossible for a person to live in the awareness that everything is bad, always and everywhere. We need a drop of hope that life is still good, it's just a pity not here and not now.
The past is an important part of life, and, of course, you should not give it up. But if a person is fixed in it, it has a bad effect on the future. Because it depends on the efforts that are applied in the present. Filling life with meaning is the task of the person himself, no one will do it for him.
There is one recipe here: grow up as a person. To take responsibility for your life, and not to shift it to time, others and the conspiracy of reptilians. Use the past as a source of experience and resource, not as a way to escape from problems. Feel free to look into the future and make plans for it.
