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[INFJ] INFJs and Nostalgia

Synarch

Once Was
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You're assuming that masochism is a bad thing. It can have potential benefits. For example, meditating on loss in a felt way can realign values and emotions. I think self-inflicted suffering, not taken to an extreme, can create depth and humility as well as empathy for others.
 

Z Buck McFate

Pepperidge Farm remembers.
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You're assuming that masochism is a bad thing. It can have potential benefits. For example, meditating on loss in a felt way can realign values and emotions. I think self-inflicted suffering, not taken to an extreme, can create depth and humility as well as empathy for others.

How is nostalgia necessarily suffering per se, though? The association I personally have with the word 'nostalgia' is more a positive one that one involving some sort of loss.


I don't know why this popped into my head, but when I was a kid, there was this cool petting zoo/park my grandparents used to take my brother and I to. I really loved going there probably past an age when I should have.

A couple of years ago, I was helping a friend move and drove by the place, which was by then defunct and looked like a scene out of a bad trailer park only more rural. I wish I could remove the memory of seeing it like that. I could have lived without it.

This might sound funny, but I find myself feeling nostalgic for the present time knowing it is about to be lost to the past.

There is always a background ache of a nameless nostalgia that is comprised of everything I have ever lost and a knowledge of future loss.

i am more nostalgic for the multitude of imagined futures that have at one time been significant to me.

I've noticed my own sense of nostalgia is rather fragmented and more abstract than most people. I think we probably get nostalgic over things (places, movies, events) that serve as symbols for some ideal that existed in our mind more than feeling nostalgic over an isolated event: because even while those isolated events were taking place, we weren't exactly 100% present for them in the first place. Memories of places, movies, events, etc are all loaded with all the extra connections going on in our heads while we experienced them.

With Cafe's example of the zoo: the same thing happens to me when I see something like that (in constrast to a grander version I'd stored in my memory) - and I don't purport to say I know this is exactly her experience as well- but for me it isn't about missing the childhood event (or the specific people involved) so much that dilapitated version of the place instantly becoming a symbol of the many disappointments that happen as a result of getting older, or about everything in life that turns out to be less enduring than I thought it would be, or the passage of time, or whatever else occurs to me. It evokes connections to some bigger and vaguer ideal. It's definitely nostalgia and I do feel it rather strongly at times- it's just rarely attached to single experiences or individuals.
 

cascadeco

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This might sound funny, but I find myself feeling nostalgic for the present time knowing it is about to be lost to the past.

I find myself musing fairly often that the present is almost non-existant, just because it instantaneously becomes the past. I guess, tied to this, I can become nostalgic regarding the notion of mortality, the passage of time, and the passage of MY life - my growing older and my past accumulating and the window of my future becoming smaller. And, I guess I can be nostalgic when it comes to Youth - in general - not even in the sense that I particularly enjoyed my youth, at the time, but rather I can get nostalgic for the time and the opportunities of the past that are no longer the present, so no longer possible. It's not really a negative thing; more contemplative. A touch of bittersweetness sometimes, but in general I can really take pleasure in going down memory lane. Any element of my past that was once powerful and wonderful can serve as fodder for memory lane! The past was once the present and that present may have been totally amazing: so I enjoy revisiting those amazing moments every now and then. :) And I'm confident there will be more in the future, which is why nostalgia, for me, doesn't involve wishing for things past.
 

Vasilisa

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when you go far enough away, you're on your way back

This might sound funny, but I find myself feeling nostalgic for the present time knowing it is about to be lost to the past.

There is always a background ache of a nameless nostalgia that is comprised of everything I have ever lost and a knowledge of future loss.

I feel this, too. In the midst of my time with certain people and experiences, I recognize that I have to appreciate them now because in the future they will be gone. I'm anticipating the loss, but it is not because they're meaningless, or its easy to imagine it over. It is precisely because I find them so meaningful, its enough to break through whatever facile pleasure I'm feeling about it to put the thought in my mind that the time right now is worth treasuring because it will soon pass. I feel acutely aware of the transitory nature of all things. Unfortunately, I have let people fall out of my life too easily, and maybe this weird resignation is part of why I do that. I think nostalgia is technically defined as the bittersweet ache of the longing for home. Having a gypsy upbringing might also affect why I feel this way.

I find myself musing fairly often that the present is almost non-existant, just because it instantaneously becomes the past. I guess, tied to this, I can become nostalgic regarding the notion of mortality, the passage of time, and the passage of MY life - my growing older and my past accumulating and the window of my future becoming smaller.
I remember reading about a prisoner of war who while imprisoned had to keep his mind active to keep his sanity and spirit alive and endure the torture. He would contemplate space and time. It helped him endure his imprisonment by recognizing that time as we think of it doesn't exist. Because when we see a constellation we are seeing hundreds of thousands of years into the past. And from that far off in space one would see back into time on earth. That plus all those other awesome mind-bending facts of physics can help bring home that time is something of an illusion. I know its weirdly random, but this meditation speaks to me.
 
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