Nostalgia Always Includes a Temporal Context

Last year, Forrest wrote a long and thoughtful commentary on the mysterium called nostalgia. In a desperate attempt to recreate the experience of playing The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for the first time, he spent $236.74 rebuying original Xbox 360 hardware expecting to be propelled back into his childhood: I spent $236.74 to go back to 2006, to my old room, with the Easy Mac and the Diet Cherry Coke and the perfect lighting. I wanted to boot up the old 360 again, feel the smoothness of that perfectly curved controller in my hands while I navigated that glorious Blades user interface. I wanted to feel that little hit of dopamine whenever that green-and-gray badge popped up for unlocking an achievement or whenever a friend logged in or whatever. It worked. For a while. But then the effect started to wear off. Even more desperate methods were employed to try and relive those golden past moments, but after the 100th time of reliving it, the soft edges disappeared and the best memories got…