WHAT’SNEXT?

WRITES KATE O’FLANAGAN | DEPUTY FEATURES EDITOR

The flowers are back on campus I always look forward to this time of year, to the pockets of yellow and purple lining the quad I looked forward to it this year The flowers still brighten my day on my walks to and from the Hub But, this time, the feeling is coloured with the particular kind of sadness that only comes with an awareness that time is running out

Preemptive nostalgia is a funny thing I’m in my fourth, and final, year at UCC Most of my friends are finishing up this year too, and it feels like we’re all walking around with the same spectre hanging over us Going through the steps of our daily routines while in the back of our minds we know that what is mundane now will someday, probably soon, be something that we miss.

Originally described as a “neurological disease of essentially demonic cause”, nostalgia was coined as a term in 1866 by Swiss doctor Johannes Hoffer The phenomenon was observed in Swiss mercenaries abroad, and military physicians speculated that it was caused by earlier damage to the soldiers’ ear drums and brain cells by the unabating clanging of cowbells in the Alps In the decades following its first recorded wide scale occurrence, nostalgia was considered a potentially debilitating and sometimes fatal medical condition - homesickness brought to a lethal extreme It was pathologised under various names throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, from “immigrant psychosis” to “mentally repressive compulsive disorder”

It was not until Dr Constantine Sedikides at the University of Southampton began to investigate nostalgia in the early 2000s that its historical reputation was challenged, and a shift occurred in how we talk about and conceptualise the emotion. Sedikides found nostalgia to be a universal phenomenon, with a study exhibiting the commonality of the experience and its effects in eighteen countries across five continents Assumed to uniquely affect adults, the work of Sedikides and his contemporaries showed that children as young as seven also experience nostalgia, looking back fondly on birthdays and family holidays (Interestingly, a 1995 study found that younger people felt greater nostalgia for pets, toys, and holidays than older people, who felt greater nostalgia for music.)

Not only was the experience of nostalgia universal, so were the topics of reminiscences - friends and family, holidays, songs, sunsets, lakes However, nostalgia is not a simple exercise in cheeriness As anyone can attest, it is bittersweet The central paradox of nostalgia is that it is most often triggered by negative events and feelings of loneliness, it does not exacerbate the feelings Instead, it galvanises people, acting as a slave for negative moods and a defence mechanism for unhappiness A

2006 study found that provoking nostalgia not only improved people's mood, but also strengthened their social bonds and boosted their positive feelings about themselves Similar research throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s has shown that feeling nostalgic can strengthen the sense of life's meaning, increase spirituality and optimism, and even lower an existential reaction to the idea of death

Even with all its positive impacts, there can always be too much of a good thing An overindulgence in nostalgia, a mythologising of the past into an unreachable and untrue version of the 'glory days' has contributed to the society-enforced narrative that university consists of the best years of your life Or, perhaps, you've heard it said about other predetermined periods of time Certain secondary school teachers were fond of reminding my year group that the best years of our lives were currently happening to us as we sat through eighty minutes of Higher Level Maths Or, maybe, it'll be your thirties The thirties are the new twenties are the secret, real best years of your life

Any response to the deification of time spent at university that simply seeks to move the goalposts, positing that the narrative is simply mistaken and it's a different period that is the best, is missing the point The idea that any rite of passage, any arbitrarily chosen chunk of time, is the best that you will ever be isn't just inaccurate It's depressing And demoralising It's not about what any one person did or didn't do; whether they preferred university to secondary school, their twenties to their thirties, or any other comparison No singular chapter of your life has any greater inherent worth than any other chapter Your life is your life, no matter what age you are or what you're going through

As my final few weeks on campus wind to a close, I reflect on the memories I've made here And call to mind a verbal mantra, a talisman of sorts, that's steered me since I was a teenager

The year I was sixteen, I watched all one hundred and fifty-six episodes of The West Wing Aaron Sorkin’s depiction of the fictitious Bartlet administration rewired my brain in a way no other piece of media has Like most people who watched, and loved, the show, it made me politically minded in a way I hadn’t been before It lit a fire under my desire to write more, and to write better (A special mention to the sticker of Toby Ziegler, the administration’s communications director, that lives next to the touchpad on my laptop ) But, the most important thing I took from the show, what I consider to be one of the central ideas underscoring the whole thing, is this: what’s next?

The phrase is frequently used throughout the show’s seven season run “When I say, ‘what’s next’ it means I’m ready to move on to other things,” President Bartlet says in the season two opener, “So, what’s next?”

The question isn’t a dismissal or indictment of what’s come before It doesn't raise expectations of what's around the corner It’s an k l d t th t thi ti thi i i It ill