Reminiscing About a Time That Didn't Exist
Sometimes I just let YouTube shuffle through an automatically generated playlist, presumably based on my typical listening habits and playlists.
Following on from yesterday's post, some music is just evocative and sinks me into the world of memories... something I believe happens to us more and more, as we age.
Anyways, a song came into rotation and it reminded me of my University days in the early 1980s. I remembered... oddly enough, what I "remembered" was a slice of life I didn't actually get to live, like I was an outsider, looking in.
There's actually a name for it: Anemoia.
The longing for a time that didn't actually happen.
We have an expression in Danish — strøtanker — which loosely translates as "random thoughts" although that definition misses the vast majority of the deeper nuance, which often includes shades of sadness and ennui.
I arrived late for my own adulthood...
It's not something easily explained, but it is often experienced by kids who were forced to become adults early and missed part of the allegedly "normal" parts of being a teenager and young adult, but subsequently ended up "backfilling," years later.
For example, I was "pretty much an adult" by the time I was 15 and didn't arrive at University until age 20.5... and then started backfilling... slowly.
It's one of the reasons why I'm chronologically part of the Boomer generation, but philosophically feel far more like I belong to the leading edge of Gen-X, for example.
I identify with "the music I grew up with" as being mostly the 1980s, even though it "should" be the late 1960s and 1970s... but we never listened to music, so I have nothing but a void to relate to, there. As I listen to music nowadays, I don't even like the music of my actual childhood and youth.
Without a doubt, the rose-colored glasses of passing time are "misinforming" me about my experience of the mid-1980s... it was actually a really difficult time, and there was very little that was "golden" about it.
Besides, I was living in Texas, not California, the latter being a place I just visited many times and a place where it seemed like most of my friends were originally from.
Maybe some of these memories — that aren't actual memories — are actually shades of regret about never having experienced what we hoped life would be. But does life ever live up to people's hopes and dreams?
Thanks for stopping by and have a great Memorial Day!
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2026.05.25 00:53 PDT
1565/2830
M y favorite songs are the 1980's, its old but gold for me. I am glad my daughters like them too that way we would not argue.