We all have experiences that we hold onto for years after the event. Sometimes these are negative experiences, and sometimes they are positive. When they are positive they are often superlative, that is to say they become seminal moments in our minds that all subsequent experiences of a similar nature are inevitably compared to, and in almost all cases those new experiences never match up with those that we held onto. Perhaps the best example of this that most people will be able to relate to is when it comes to food.
Whatever your favourite food happens to be, you have likely had it from many different places, and made it yourself many times. There will probably be one experience more than any other that stands out. The time you made it perfectly or the best place you ever ordered it from. What will also likely be prevalent in your mind is the fact that the experience isn't consistent when you try to repeat it. Every time you have your favourite food, each new experience does not become the best yet. The best experience you ever had is also likely to have been some time ago thanks to nostalgia and its influence over the accuracy of our memories. Whether that experience really was the best or not isn't something you can prove succinctly, without being able to travel through time and experience it again for comparison - even then one can argue that mental state and emotional state can both influence the experience.
That thought is something that intrigues me, the idea of going back in time and visiting a time period you lived through and have fond memories for - although most of my memories fixate on individual experiences rather than time frames as I said in another post quite some time ago, there isn't a decade in my life where something bad didn't happen, none of those would I want to relive. Individual experiences on the other hand are appealing. Despite that appeal however I do have to wonder if I could go back and experience things again, would the experience be the same? What would it do to the memory if you got to experience it again and it didn't live up to your expectations, would that throw you into doubt or confusion or lead to some other state of mind?
There is a lot to be said about politics, and the rise in populism that is fuelled by the desire to take countries back to the way they were decades before, but in almost all of those cases, the recollection of the past and the romanticism is centred around things people think were good about those time periods but dismiss entirely everything else that was bad. People are eager to relive the golden age of industry but they aren't so eager to accept the pay cut they would have to take to work again in that time and place. Inflation adjustments factored in, wages have grown quite substantially. In the UK for example from 1975 to 2013, wages more than doubled after accounting for inflation to go back to the 1970s in the UK you would be taking in real terms more than a 50% cut in pay to get there. Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it, and might not be what you were expecting.
What I find even more poignant about this whole debate that centres around reliving past experiences, is the fact that you can't forget the life you have lived since then, you will never get to experience it again for the first time. You can see this with experiences that are "lossless" over time. For example a movie, the content never changes, and it is preserved in perfect condition. Each presentation is consistent, yet your experience watching it each time varies. You can never watch that movie again for the first time, you can never experience it without knowing at all what might happen or any of the details of the plot etc. Perhaps one could argue this is the reason why some studios choose to recreate their old movies, to create new experiences from old content allowing you as a viewer to watch it again for the first time, even though you know approximately what will happen unless the remake is substantially different from the original.
All of this does raise another hypothetical question that can be used as a thought experiment. If you could take a pill or a treatment that would make you forget your past experience and allow you to pursue the experience again without the knowledge of what you will experience, would you want to do it? If the memory loss was temporary or if it was permanent, would that affect your choice?
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