There Are No Glory Days

Before I begin, I’ll point out that a great deal of my writings in this letter have been critiques. I hope these don’t come across as negative or cynical, but if so, feel free to reply directly via email and give me a piece of your mind. Constructive criticism is my second favorite food behind mangos.

In that vein, I have yet another critique: I believe it’d be helpful if we abandon the notion of “glory days.” What are glory days, really? The days when you felt actualized? When you felt you had everything you wanted? When things were “simpler”? Let’s paint a scenario…

“I had a wonderful day at a cookout with friends.” So, we’ve established that it was a positive experience. Now, let’s apply a glory days reframe to it. After all, how good could it really have been if it didn’t take place in your glory days? It often goes something like this: you may have spent that day when you were 83, and you spent it wishing you were 65, when you had a bit more pep in your step. Or perhaps you did spend it when you were 65, but you wished you were 44, when your kids were still living with you, and life seemed more lively. Or maybe you spent it when you were 44, and you wished you were still 26, before you had a mortgage, a family, and all the stresses of the mid-life. Or, you wished you spent that day not as a 26-year-old, but as a carefree 12-year-old, who doesn’t have to pay the bills yet, and who still gets to engage with life as a child. And yet, maybe that child wishes to be a confident, independent 26-year-old, unaware of the glory days they’re wishing away.

You begin to see where I’m going with this. Ask any one of these versions of you when the glory days are, and they’ll probably come up with a well-thought-out answer that, noticeably, isn’t the present. At a certain point, we seem to retroactively deem a particular period as the golden one, the days where everything was damn near perfect.

I fear that you, dearest reader, will close this tab having read nothing more than “Live in the present! Appreciate what you have!” and that is not my sole intention. I want to challenge the well-accepted notion that part of your life is the “good” part, and the rest is the monotonous part in which you reminisce on that “good” part. At its core, applying a “glory days” mindset to one’s life is binary and past-oriented.

It’s binary, in that it applies a higher status to one small period. To some degree or another, it’s discounting a significant portion of your life as lesser. And it’s past-oriented. It’s well-known that one does not know they’re in their “glory days” until well after they’ve ended. Therefore, the glory days are seen through glasses whose lens are rose and whose frames are nostalgia. In other words, glory days exist in memory only, and thus, don’t really exist at all. The past isn’t as perfect as you remember, and the present isn’t as mundane as you think.

It’s comforting and joyful to look back on one’s life with fondness, but pedestalizing one era only serves to dim the present. And yes, the rumors are true: the present is all there is. So do what you can not to dim it. If the past is always seen through rose-colored glasses, you might as well admit that your current present will one day be your distant past, and will likewise be seen in that same technicolor view. So, why not enjoy it while you’re still in it? Why wait for the drunkenness of nostalgia to paint it more beautifully for you? Pick up the brush and paint it yourself. That cookout is just as beautiful while you’re in it as it will be when looked back on, but only if you notice… only if you do the act of painting.

Don’t rely on nostalgia to tell you that you’ve lived a good life. Tell yourself in the present, and life will be all the more colorful.

There are no glory days.