Why does Past seem happier?
“When I was young…” and goes on to describe some idyllic aspect of the world free from problems. Most of us tend to look back on the past in a positive way.
Memories of school focus fun and friends, parties, and achievements and not on fights with friends, frustrating homework assignments, and scoldings and the complaints of how bias life was.
Why do we generally focus on positive memories rather than negative ones? As the lines from Macklemore’s Good Old days, Lyrics says
“I wish somebody would have told me, babe
Someday, these will be the good old days
All the love you won’t forget
And all these reckless nights you won’t regret
Someday soon, your whole life’s gonna change
You’ll miss the magic of these good old days”
Life drives you to the present. But so often, we let the present slip away, allowing time to rush past unobserved, and wasting the precious seconds of our lives as we worry about the future and dwelling in the past. When we’re at work, we fantasize about being on vacation; on vacation, we worry about the work piling up on our desks. We need to live more at the moment.
