Nostalgia

Nostalgia has psychologically affected me than pretty much more than anything I can make sense of, so I felt what not better way to post it for IndieWeb Carnival's blog topic of Positive Internalization hosted by foreverliketh.is.

These feelings are much deeper than feelings for reproduction. These feelings are much deeper than even the feelings of the heart. The feelings I get for Nostalgia are much deeper and even sweeter than anything I have ever felt in my entire life. And yet, surrounding the sweetness there is often a great sadness and emptiness. The one-two punch is what makes Nostalgia so perplexing. How can I feel so much pleasure from a memory and yet at the same time feel this sense of sorrow? A sort of melancholy feeling.

Nostalgia occurs when you have a positive experience. That positive experience gets saved as a memory. As time passes that memory gets more and more juice around it which leads you to believe that experience was much sweeter than it actually was. But within that juice there is another sort of juice that also surrounds the memory. This juice makes causes you to have an emotional longing and sadness that you can no longer experience the memory. And it's almost like they are directly proportional to each other. In other words, the more pleasurable the experience you felt, the more emotional longing you will have. Regardless once the memory juices are consumed together it will turn into a third juice which will redirect you to take action.

It hits you in 3 waves.

You remember how fun this was? (Sweetness)
It's sad that you'll never experience this again. (Sorrow)
You should try to experience something like this again! (Action)

Regardless of the experience, it's that sweeteness that makes it all worth it in the end. If we could enchance it, and utilize it then perhaps we could end a lot of human suffering. And the juice ages like fine wine. It's almost like the longer the juice has been stored, the sweeter it becomes.

"This is a Doughnut. It is very sweet and very good, but if you've never tasted a Doughnut you wouldn't ever know how sweet and how good a Doughnut is." - David Lynch

But even that sadness that surrounds that sweetness is the good type of sadness. It's the sadness that makes you feel more alive and more real. It's the sadness that keeps you going through hell. When you feel heartbroken and yet you keep moving through it all. If it was all dopamine everyone would just be happy and fake. No, this makes it REAL. It makes you feel ALIVE. I want to feel heartbroken. I want to enjoy the pain of getting rejected. What's the alternative? I mean what do we really want our lives to be? A Disney ride? Some bullshit social media persona? A fake pathetic joke?

Given that our DNA is built for surviving and reproducing, feelings of Nostalgia are what allow us to stay alive in the tribe psychologically. Wanting to relive those feelings and experiences again is what made us come together. It's what ultimately made our tribes survive. It's what gave us meaning to continue to go through all the pain, heartbreak, and hardships that come from living as a human.

By reflecting on these memories they can teach things we weren't aware of and therefore allow us to take action to grow healthy habits to experience a higher quality of life. This is the power of Nostalgia. Utilize it correctly and it can give the energy you need to build something truly incredible.

This blog isn't going to be a critic of Nostalgia and how living in the past is harmful. I've read that essay over and over again, and I am sick and tired of it. I want to leave all the cynicism about people and organizations out in this and just write about some of the best times of my life. Things I want to experience over again. Positive memories that I want to nurture and grow to make myself into a better human being...

*I have experienced a lot more of than this in real life with people and places and so forth, but I am keeping it all purely virtual and highly selective for the privacy and respect of people I know.

Video Games

Even though I haven't played video games in a while some of my fondest memories come from them. There's so much story, art, music, and action jam packed into it. And you can really create any experience you want out of it. I am truly grateful to have played some of the best video games I did while they were in their prime. Even better, I did it with some of my favorite friends at the time. The best part of video games is when you found that one person you really clicked with for some reason and you would learn all these all stories and events and what not through them that you had no idea about. It made you want to get into it even more and discover what you could build and create out of it. I didn't just 'play' video games for the sake of playing them - I built many creations on them and I want to carry that imaginative attitude I have to many other projects I build in the future. I don't want to just work for the sake of working - I want to build, I want to create, I want to experience.

Minecraft

I got into Minecraft around 2010 or 2011. I still remember it as one of the coolest video games I have ever experienced. Everything was a mystery. It had this sense of adventure and awe that few video games could ever replicate. I rode that game all up to 2015 during its golden years. I still remember when the Minecraft YouTuber craze that took over the game. One of my favorites was Sethbling who would create insane Redstone creations. I thought he was one of the coolest YouTubers ever. I wanted to build cool interesting creations that blew people away just like him.

I remember one of my first servers I joined was some Redstone server. You had to fill some application to be accepted. This was around 2012 or 2013. I was a huge fan of rollercoasters, so I would just build rollercoasters on it. I was obsessed. I still remember inviting friends and we would just build rollercoasters all the day. I still remember watching some guy ride one of the things I built. I have no idea if the server is still up or if the creations are still there. I have no idea where to find them even if they are.

Anywho, I ended up making a bunch of friends on that Redstone server and from that I eventually became an admin on a new server. I knew the server owner well and was good friends with him. We ended up building all these different cool creations on it. It was eventually all for not though. The server went down after a couple of months and I lost all the friends I made. It was still really fun while it lasted though. If I could do it all again, I would. There was just something about building a place for people to enjoy that felt amazing.

Roblox

So I saw some kid logging into this game called Roblox probably around 2011 in the public library, and it had that exact home screen.

Does anyone else remember using the public library computers? I remember 13+ years ago I would go there, and literally I would skip all the books just to find the computer.

I still remember playing Roblox. I had an account around 2012, and I would just play with my friends all day. We would spend entire summers just playing video games all day. We used to play on impossible parkour servers I think they were called obbys.

I found this Zombie Survival Game in Roblox that I would play the crap out of it. I think it was called Reason 2 Die. God that was the best. It was like zombie escape where you had to survive a couple waves, and you had a team of people, so everyone had to plan together in order to survive. I don't know why, but it created a sort of awe when you were with a group of people with an objective that was essentially survival. The best was when the group would split up and everyone was essentially out for themselves. That's when you knew who your real friends were. I still remember surviving impossible waves with like at most 2-5 other people and only from being able to correctly make decisions in the crucial of times. It felt so alive.

This was back in the golden years before they censored the crap out of the game. Around this time I became friends with another server creator. He eventually let me become an admin of his server. The server got a little popular and we started get invited to some secret club servers. These were only reserved for higher up roblox players who had servers with thousands of players. It was really werid and wild. People at these clubs would talk like they were professional business adults at some rich party. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I mean these were god damn roblox players.

CS:GO

So sometime around 2014 or 2015 I moved off Roblox I got huge into CS:GO and surfing. I still remember trying to surf and how terrible I was at it. Eventually I got better at it and got passed the easy maps. As I got onto harder and harder maps it became more and more addicting. I was addicted to surfing more than I was to the actual game. I still remember vividly at the start people would try to surf and they would all fall off the first ramp. It was pretty funny. I really liked surfing before I moved from the game in 2016. It was a fun hobby that didn't really hurt anyone. And it felt really good everytime I made it off the ramp. Some maps were so cool to surf on too. I still remember those neon glowing blue surfing maps.

GMOD

And then a couple years later during the pandemic I got back into zombie survival. I was absouletly obessed with it on GMOD. They had this zombie survival on it that was even better than the Roblox Zombie Survival in the sense that it wasn't censored and the people didn't look like little lego bricks. I probably had over 1,000+ hours packed into the thing. They had voice chat and all these little things built into the game that made it all come to life. I made lots of friends on there and I still remember everyone having an important job to do. If one person screwed up the entire group was dead, so it felt like we were all counting on each other. It had this sort of planning and surviving feeling where you felt like you were being useful to a group. Any game with survival where I feel like I am being useful to a group is a game that I love. I feel like that survival motivation attitude is great and I will try to carry that to over to other groups in different areas in my life where I can be more useful.

Internet

I grew up with the Internet and I loved every second with it. I still remember my first google search back in 2007. YouTube felt different back then, hell social media as a whole felt different back then. Maybe that Nostalgia is getting to me. I have pretty much been on every type of Social Media that exists. I went from old YouTube to Instagram to Snapchat to Twitter to Reddit to Discord to 4chan to bits and pieces of the Fediverse to Neocities which lead me to a whole bunch of old alternative forums, imageboards, websites, and the general idea of the personal web. This all happened in less than a decade. I learned a lot from reading millions of virtual comments throughout those years. It was like reading all of humanity's entire conscious. I've seen all the internet drama unfold before my very eyes. It made me become a lot more quite and careful to what I say and how I act in real life. I watched every social platform grow and die during its golden years navigating from each to each like a sailor in the ocean. Not truly sticking to one platform, but trying to experience the best they all have to offer, trying to contribute the best I have to offer. And hell, I'll probably leave Neocities too and stick to self-hosting one day, but I'll never try to forget the memories I have made and will continue to currently make.

One thing I have learned from the internet is how much value you can contribute. You can make something amazing that could have positive impacts on millions of people's lives. Looking back now, my favorite memories of the internet was when either I helped someone else out or they helped me out. Whatever platform I used/whatever I did or what people did it didn't matter. I hope to continue growing those positive memories and continue helping people in anyway I can. It's what truly sticks long-term. Whether that be videos, video games, music, software tools, github projects, various online tutorials - the internet can be a wonderful place full of wonderful people if you know where to look. I want to produce the same kind of wonder and experience that those people gave to me.

Family/Friends

I remember back 7-15 years ago when nobody was really hyper addicted to social media like they are now, and I just did random fun stuff with my friends without a care in the world what people thought. There was this sense of freedom where we were able do anything we wanted and scrape it all without anyone knowing besides us. This was before everyone was recorded and monitored with a smartphone. Looking back, we didn't know how good we had it. I'll never forget the impact it had on me. A lot of those people aren't in my life anymore, but I'm glad I went up to them and talked, conversed, and continued to make an effort to engage in those friendships. Sadly that is something that I lost when the pandemic hit. It also just doesn't feel the same online like it did in real life. Looking ahead, I want to build that sense of freedom back into myself where it once was when I was a kid and utilize it to try to make things better for myself, people, society, and all of humanity.