I think it is just natural. Part of the progression of aging. We grow into letting go and these are part of it. I followed Kurt Vonnegut starting around my Junior High years. Obsessed with reading him all through high school. His stories and novels seemed to carry hope for humanity even when discussing the darker aspects of it. However, as he aged he seemed to give up on the hope side of things and to see humanity as a doomed enterprise. Toward the end of his life he seemed pretty grouchy and quite honestly filled with melancholy. 

The thing I've noticed about myself and aging, now right in the middle of my 50s, is that I grow less and less tolerant of watching society repeat mistakes. I feel like I am seeing many things with a lot of clarity but clarity is not a characteristic that humanity seems much interested in. If it was, I think it would be far less likely a society would repeat mistakes it has already made. You know, if there was clarity we would make the mistake, learn from it, commit to not making it again, and move on. We don't do that though. 

Certain things we can't get past as humans it seems. We can't overcome our greed, mistrust, and anger. These things totally consume parts of the population, and they just can't be removed. They lead us back down the same paths over and over again. There are better ways and they are right in front of us but they would also go against the greed, mistrust, and anger instincts and so we fight over them.     

Nostalgia is like a soothing massage. Reminding us of things we have experienced and enjoyed. It relaxes us with the familiar and friendly. I actually see it as a requirement of helping us through the aging process. It helps with the chaos of what is going on and allows us a break from it and perhaps the idea that there are/were good things in the world and could be again. It has that window to hope. 

I think with pop culture stuff and music it is a realm of the senses thing. With taste, touch, sound, and smell all triggering positive feelings that sooth us for bit. 

I do feel a more than a little disconnected from the world these days. The melancholy can be like an anchor. Heavy and thick. I do use nostalgia to snap out of it at times and it does help me.

The last few years I've been living though some vast waves of nostalgia. Caused in many ways by suddenly being cast back into a pool of people I went to high school with. People I did not think I would matter to after some 30-35 years of not seeing them. It has been a shock in most cases how excited they have been to see me and how they continue to want to see me again and again. And strange to me how much I have enjoyed their company. Weird how you immediately fall back in with them like you never stopped seeing them. 

This has been combined with going to see bands that I have loved since my youth that somehow are still out there playing. The Who, Jackson Browne, Van Morrison, who are all older than me but still can perform and sound great. In fact Pete Townsend probably looks in better shape now than in his youth.  

It was sort of mind blowing being at a Who concert with people I went to high school with all these years later. I was literally having flashbacks. Nostalgia so thick and heavy I felt like I was losing it. It was as if I had stepped into a time machine. Suddenly, I was in the 1980s and we were at a concert again and Eminence Front surrounds us. I think parts of my brain were twisting and bending trying to discern how this had happened. 

The nostalgia, that suspension of time and space, has been strangely healing for me, particularly during these times of Covid and bizarre politics. 

I do think the nostalgia is meant to do this to/for us though. To ease the burden of what seems chaos around us. Music, food, visuals, people that take you to a different time. It is like a fire in the darkness. Illuminating the space around it and drawing us in. When you are close wandering away from the light and heat is not something you want to do. Out in the dark is the melancholia, waiting, waiting, for the fire to die down to embers. Chill you with cold realities, of time fading and slipping away.