Yes!
But also no.
I think nostalgia can be healthy, as it provides an anchor to a past that is presumably pleasant and nice to reference back to. It can be a big warm fuzzy to embrace on a dull, rainy day, or when you’re feeling down and want a little mental boost.
It becomes bad or even dangerous when you ignore the things that were not so great in the past, or when you embrace those things instead.
For me, nostalgia is childhood memories of family activities like travelling, hanging out at picnics, going to movies and playing in the backyard, or bouncing tennis balls off the back of the high school gym (and occasionally hitting a ball at a bad angle, causing it to skyrocket up and disappear somewhere on the roof. I wonder how many balls ended up there?)
Sometimes my nostalgia goes retro and I think about what technology was like in the early 1990s, how I added a 2X CD-ROM drive to my first PC in 1994 so I could play Myst, or wrote a batch file to present a screen on boot-up that let me launch different DOS games, or boot into Windows 3.1 if I wanted to get my GUI on.
But in all of these warm, fuzzy memories, there is always some darkness. The fights with friends, the ignorance or mean-spirited behaviour of others, or little things like growing up under the existential threat of nuclear annihilation!
Mostly, though, my dives into nostalgia are like easing myself into the cool waters of a lazy river on a warm summer day. I’ll stop here before I start mixing metaphors.
