I’ve written about The Office several times already on this blog. For me, this is the most meaningful quote of the show:
The problem with the Good Old Days is that their day-to-day reality may have actually been shitty, for some non-negligible portion of the time. Empirically, I’ve found this to be the case. The defining attribute of the Good Old Days, nonetheless, is that you remember them as wholly not shitty.
Can you really say that the Good Old Days were shitty, then? I think it’s all but a truism that the actual content of an event is really nothing other than your perception of it at a particular (later) point in time (see also transcendental idealism.) If you had a bad life experience that, retrospectively, seems entirely like a good one, it was really only a bad life experience insofar as you abstractly remember that it was. (It’s not like you’re going to experience that portion of time again, after all.)
Also, the abstract memory of how shitty these experiences were is something that decays significantly with time. For instance, I’ve caught myself starting to reminisce fondly about my days working on a golf course prior to starting college, days that I found excessively shitty at the time. I’m beginning to wonder if that which we desire from memories and/or experiences isn’t an accurate rendering of their quality, but rather a narrative into which we can splice them. Judged by this metric, the golf course days get two thumbs up, because I started college immediately after and proceeded to have experiences that were decisively less shitty.
For those of us stuck in (potentially shitty) life experiences that will almost certainly be eventually remembered as the Good Old Days — and more of us are in some form of the Good Old Days than I think we would think — this should be a vastly encouraging thought: that it’s empirically true that there’s nothing more ephemeral than the highly mutable actual content of the potentially shitty experiences one is having.
Unfortunately, this insight isn’t very helpful at changing one’s perception of the experiences’ actual content as experienced in that moment. So really the only thing preventing the emotional syllogism of shitty experiences → despair is some abstract faith that, when viewed from ten thousand feet in 25 years, the experiences you found shitty at the time will fit squarely in that period of time known as the Good Old Days. It’s hard to know you’re in them before you’ve actually left them, true – but perhaps there’s some immediate value to be had from trusting that you are indeed in them. Perhaps this blind assumption will even make the likelihood that you’re actually in them one notch higher.