There's a version of my childhood that lives in my head, and it is — without question — a lie. Not a big lie. Not the kind where I invented trauma or rewrote my origin story. More like the kind where every afternoon was golden hour, every summer lasted forever, and nothing bad happened between September and June because my brain decided to edit those parts out.
I know it's not real. I know that version of my life never existed in the specific way I remember it. And I chase it anyway — in music, in food, in the way certain light hits a street at 5 PM and something in my chest tightens for a reason I can't explain.
That's nostalgia. The most dishonest emotion we have. And I'm completely addicted to it.
The Saturday That Never Ends.
Here's what I remember about Saturdays: waking up early — not because I had to, because I wanted to. Cartoons. A bowl of cereal that probably had more sugar in it than a gas station energy drink. No schedule. No obligations. No phone in my pocket vibrating with things that needed my attention.
Just a couch, a remote control the size of a shoe, and the absolute certainty that nothing bad was going to happen before Monday.
I'm aware that this is a fantasy. Saturdays had chores. Saturdays had arguments. Saturdays had all the mundane friction that comes with being alive in a house with other people. But my brain — helpful as always — decided to keep the cartoons and delete the rest. And now I'm sitting here in my forties, running companies and answering emails at 6 AM, missing a version of Saturday that was never as good as I've convinced myself it was.
That's nostalgia. The most dishonest emotion we have. And I'm completely addicted to it.
Everything Smelled Better.
This sounds insane but I swear it's true: the past smelled different. Or at least my memory of it does. Fresh-cut grass on a weekday afternoon hits different when you don't have a mortgage. The inside of a video rental store — that specific combination of plastic cases and carpet cleaner — is a scent I would bottle and wear if I could do it without getting institutionalized.
My grandmother's kitchen. The inside of my dad's car. The chlorine at the public pool. These aren't just memories — they're sensory ghosts. They show up uninvited, triggered by the most random things, and for about three seconds I'm not in Los Angeles in 2026. I'm somewhere else entirely. Somewhere that doesn't exist anymore.
And then I'm back. Standing in a parking lot, holding a coffee, wondering why I'm emotional about a swimming pool I haven't seen in thirty years.
seconds. That's how long a scent can pull you thirty years into the past — and then drop you right back where you started.
I Curate the Past Like a Museum.
Here's what I've figured out about nostalgia: it's not memory. It's curation. My brain isn't recording the past — it's editing it. Cutting the boring parts, adding a filter, adjusting the soundtrack until what's left feels like a movie I'd actually want to watch again.
The bad stuff? Gone. The boring afternoons where nothing happened? Deleted. The fights, the awkwardness, the long stretches of time where I was probably just sitting on the floor bored out of my mind? Edited out. What remains is a highlight reel that never existed as a continuous experience but feels more real than anything that actually happened.
I do this with music especially. I hear a song from 1987 and I'm not just hearing the song — I'm hearing the entire year. The version of 1987 where everything was warm and safe and I didn't know enough about the world to be worried about it. That's not what 1987 was. That's what my brain turned it into because raw footage is boring and nostalgia is a better editor than reality deserves.
The Lie I Keep Telling Myself.
There's a specific lie at the center of all this, and it goes like this: things were simpler then.
They weren't. They were exactly as complicated as any other time in human history — I just didn't know it because I was a kid and nobody tells kids the truth about anything. The economy was a mess. People were worried about the same things they're worried about now, just with different names. The world was not simpler. I was simpler. I didn't have context. I didn't have bills. I didn't have responsibilities that could keep me up at 2 AM staring at the ceiling wondering if I made the right call on something that won't matter in six months.
That's what I'm actually nostalgic for. Not the past — the ignorance. The bliss of not knowing how any of this works. Of walking through a day without a single thought about interest rates or health insurance or the slow decay of democratic institutions. Just existing. Just being a person in a room, doing nothing, needing nothing, worried about nothing.
That's not a time period. That's a state of mind. And you can't go back to it.
I Try Anyway.
I buy things that remind me of being a kid. Specific things — not expensive things. A box of cereal I haven't eaten in twenty years. A movie I watched so many times the VHS wore out. An album on vinyl that I originally heard on a cassette tape in a car that doesn't exist anymore.
None of it works the way I want it to. The cereal tastes different — or maybe my taste buds just don't cooperate with memory the way my brain does. The movie is shorter than I remember. The album is perfect, but listening to it in a modern apartment with smart lighting and a $200 turntable isn't the same as hearing it through one blown speaker while sitting in the backseat watching strip malls go by.
The container changes everything. You can't separate the experience from the context it happened in, and the context is gone. Every attempt to recreate it just proves how irreplaceable the original was — which makes me want to try harder, which makes it worse.
It's a loop. A beautiful, stupid, self-defeating loop. And I'm fully committed to it.
The container changes everything. You can't separate the experience from the context it happened in, and the context is gone.
I'm Not Sorry About Any of This.
People talk about nostalgia like it's a weakness. Like looking backward means you're not paying attention to what's in front of you. I reject that entirely. I can run a company, raise kids, build websites at midnight, and still get sentimental about the specific shade of orange the sky turned over my neighborhood in 1989. Those things aren't in conflict. They coexist. They have to.
Because here's the thing nobody says out loud: the present is exhausting. It's relentless. It demands your attention every second of every day and it never lets up. Nostalgia isn't an escape from that — it's a breather. A three-second vacation to a place that doesn't exist, just long enough to remember that you were a person before you became a productivity machine.
I'm going to keep doing it. I'm going to keep hearing songs that make me feel eleven years old. I'm going to keep buying cereal that disappoints me. I'm going to keep romanticizing a version of my life that never happened the way I remember it — because the alternative is accepting that everything good is behind me, and I refuse to believe that.
The past wasn't better. But the way I remember it? That's the best story I've ever told myself.
And I'm sticking with it.