How do you experience nostalgia?

[ddspada]

A couple of days ago I learned that a friend experiences nostalgia as the sadness of not being indulged in those memories he already knows to be pleasurable, which I found does not quite resonate within me.

I go into Si mode when and if I do feel nostalgia (Usually via a song I attach to a general ambience or mood. When that mood comes up again, and I feel the urge to match the mood of the music I listen to to the mood of the current situation, nostalgia strikes, often in bouts of roughly two and a half to three hours). I brood about the passing of time and the impossibility of existing in this analyzable world without being bound to a temporal body. I end up feeling vaguely bothered by the ponderance of my own inevitable death. I explained so to my friend, who found it slightly amusing yet unsettling.

For me, nostalgia is annoyance at not having eternal life; thus annoyance at being unable to analyze forever (which I'd totally be down with).

It is certainly no sadness about being unable to relive events which are considered (almost a priori) blissful.

How do you experience nostalgia? What triggers it?

 

[Nick]

I experience it very well.

 

[QuickTwist]

Hmmm, Nostalgia. Can't say that I feel this hardly ever. If by nostalgia you mean reliving past events in your head then yeah I get that. Thing is I rarely visit my memories very often. I will, however, think -even meditate- on words spoken to me by people I respect immensely. The way I see it, people who are skilled or gifted at something are like that for a reason and you must grasp what they say fully or you will never get to be as good as they are.

 

[Analyzer]

For me, nostalgia is annoyance at not having eternal life; thus annoyance at being unable to analyze forever (which I'd totally be down with).

Yes or the lack of omniscience you are made aware of when trying to understand history which is also anything related to past experiences.

 

[BrainVessel]

Usually if a smell or sound that has been pushed to the dark corners of my memory and is suddenly relived I get pretty nostalgic. I usually mull over the feeling and try to remember the intricate details of the memory that resurfaces because the idea of nostalgia fascinates me and, of course, the feeling usually is a bit of an emotional release because it takes you somewhere else.