Living in the past and moving On
Fundamentally, it’s all mental masturbation. It’s an exercise in self-pity that achieves nothing but soothing yourself with the past, to the detriment of the present and usually the future.
One of life’s lessons is that there is no way to live in the past.
It is a lesson you are told growing up, but as is so often the case, it is simply something you have to learn.
Life is an arrow that points in only one direction. It is the experience of relentless progress, even if you wish it weren’t so.
One day it’s your 18th birthday; the next, it’s your 25th. One day it’s New Year’s Day, then you look up and suddenly it’s the 1st of March.
The pace of life is almost frightening. If you don’t look around and be thankful for what you have, it flies past you in a blur.
Life is a never-ending lesson in moving on.
Bad schools, great jobs, fun experiences, best friends, brief lovers, committed partners.
It is so easy to live in the past—when you were friends with this person, when you were in love with that person, when you were carefree, when you had this job or that.
Fundamentally, it’s all mental masturbation. It’s an exercise in self-pity that achieves nothing but soothing yourself with the past, to the detriment of the present and usually the future.
Yet the mental loops behind it all are so human. You want to relive life when you were young, as life seems so simple looking back; you didn’t have the responsibilities. You want to think about the person you loved because it is so much easier than finding someone new. Ruminating on past situations to find answers in the hope of solving future problems, yet you just end up stuck in the past.
The mind is like a spoilt child, determined to get its way and finding it impossible to let go when something didn’t go as planned. Always wanting to rehash this or that argument because this one zinger of a line is the key to the whole situation; like a movie character who thinks his brilliant comeback will change the fate of the universe, missing the fact that no one cares.
Sigmund Freud called this section of the mind the ego. The ego has the unenviable job of balancing the primal instincts of the id, the moral conscience of the superego, and the brutal facts of reality. And in balancing these competing interests, the ego often finds itself picking at the scabs of old mental wounds to find a solution. As the mind seeks peace with the past in order to make well-educated decisions in the future.
But at some point, you just have to let go of things, as holding on tightly to the past will hurt more than letting go.
One day, you will let go, and something new—whether that is a friend, a lover, a job, or simply a sunrise—will come into your life.
And maybe one day, when you aren’t looking, the past will return in full bloom.
But as Frank Herbert said in his 1981 libertarian classic God Emperor of Dune, “It is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future, and impossible to live in the past.”