Nostalgia: Good?

Brothatime!! thinks I'm a bit of a loser because I seem to remember much more of our childhood/high school years than he does. Well, that's prolly not the ONLY reason he thinks I'm a loser, but hey.

Of course I can't help what I happen to be able to remember. It's not like I give a shit about re-living those days, or that those were the best days of my life blah blah blah. But yeah, if I happen to remember something and can get a laugh from it now, I'm quite happy to. - XMASTIME

The New York Times (or as I call it, "The Times") asks what is nostalgia good for?

Nostalgia has been shown to counteract loneliness, boredom and anxiety. It makes people more generous to strangers and more tolerant of outsiders. Couples feel closer and look happier when they’re sharing nostalgic memories. On cold days, or in cold rooms, people use nostalgia to literally feel warmer.

Nostalgia does have its painful side — it’s a bittersweet emotion — but the net effect is to make life seem more meaningful and death less frightening. When people speak wistfully of the past, they typically become more optimistic and inspired about the future. 

You had me at "makes death less frightening."

Of course as I've written many times before, sometimes we're nostalgic for the wrong times:

I've always thought that we feel "nostalgic" for those moments juuuuust before we were fully aware of being able to revel in them. For example, I romanticize the Amerindie/Minneapolis early-mid 80s scene, and harken back for those glory days, but in reality I was JUST too young to really be a part of it, or to enjoy it in real time. Meanwhile, I feel no real longing or nostalgia for the Grunge Era, and yet any cultural historian would point to it as being the defining musical genre of my particular segment of a generation. I think we tend to kind of pooh-pooh the moments we actually live through, and romanticize the ones we've just missed - particularly if you have older brothers/sisters, or friends with older siblings et al.