"All rise," the bailiff shouts to the courtroom.

Judge Worth Knowing takes the bench.

"Be seated, everyone," the bailiff says. "Our next case is Nostalgia v Anger. Parties are sworn in."

The judge looks up from his papers and studies the litigants.

"I see, Miss Nostalgia," Judge Knowing begins, "that you are seeking a restraining order to prevent Mister Anger from intruding upon your everyday thoughts, dreams, and activities. You say that he is a clear and present danger to your placid dwelling in the past. Am I reading this correctly?"

Before the plaintiff can respond, the judge turns to the defendant.

"And Mister Anger, I see that... Lawyers, please restrain your client! Thank you. Now, where was I? Mister Anger, your defense is that Miss Nostalgia only sees what she wants to see. And that you are countersuing for harassment, claiming that Miss Nostalgia is intruding upon your everyday thoughts, grudges, and nightmares. And you also want a restraining order?"

The judge tells the parties to rise.

"I will not have you two taking up the court's valuable time," Judge Knowing says. "Cases dismissed. Work it out."

The bailiff tells the courtroom, "Next case, Solitude v Rambunctious."

I believe that anger is the more powerful, as it is one of the more base emotions that we have-- not a mixture or the product-- but purely rage and purely within each of us from the moment we are born.

Take Inside Out, the most kid-friendly metaphor we have for the development of children. In a given child and adult's control room, Anger, Joy, Fear, Disgust, Sadness, are the primary overseers of a human's interactions. They are base emotions and match up with the psychological concept of primary facial expressions which are universal and visible via our body language.

Anger, in the film and so proven in real life, appears as early as babyhood. When the child will throw tantrums or throw their food, refusing to eat what they judge is unpleasant-- thank you Disgust-- but also when denied immediate pleasures. Of course, many humans grow past the need and fixation toward immediate gratification and on all levels develop a manner of patience for greater rewards. They are able to temper and resist their anger, it does not consume them. That is not where anger's power comes from.

Anger comes from the fact that it is so old, so primal and programmed to be necessary to human survival. Anger is what powers aggressive mating rituals among males, anger is in part what drives a mother to claw and fight to protect her children.

Anger is the programming in all of us that if removed runs the risk of damaging the individual in all things.

Anger, even colors our nostalgia.

Nostalgia, is an odd abstract idea. When defined it is the longing or fondness a person has for the past. Whether the past in chronological sense as the years and its trends or for their own personal past which is a bit more distinct, and much more riddled with emotionally fueled memories that the former does not posses to the same degree.

So you see, nostalgia cannot solely be-- an emotion, or if it is is more accurate to call a mixture of emotions that combines into a wholly new feeling. Perhaps, is what was felt by Riley to remember Minnesota, her childhood so sadly at the beginning and realizing that time has gone and past, where she must make due with San Francisco. Perhaps it is what colored the memory at the end both blue and yellow-- happy and sad as she was finally relieved of and allowed to verbalize what she longed for. What she missed of her home and what she missed. What she... nostalgized about.

And perhaps, that ending to the first film is why nostalgia-- explicitly and exclusively an old woman among definitively younger emotions-- makes appearances in the second film. Since soon after the first she had been born but for a young person would be for the most part displaced. Notably no other adults present even signs of nostalgia or the same type of blended, bittersweet memories that Riley does.

Nostalgia as a concept, is surrounded and associated with memory. Memory and what powers and other emotions those memories hold for us, which is what shapes the experience as we indulge in "nostalgia."

Riley's memories had been colored blue, so as she was fond of them, they nevertheless brought her sadness. And much in the same vein could red color our memories.

A bitter love turned foul or ended abruptly that we were left in bewildered heartbreak, the missed opportunity or failed exams, the toys that turned out to be a scam, or the people throughout sepia colored childhood that should have been our protectors utterly fail in their role.

Coloring our whole lives, the bases of who we are in blood red.

Nostalgia: Is the longing or fondness we have for memories of the past and a desire to return and experience the wonders of our past that have been imprinted in our memory. And simply that, fleeting, impermanent memories.

And yet that fondness doesn't necessarily have to be present, and we still call it nostalgia. Even when our memories are bitter, even when they are tragic, we look back on them. To soothe the ache and the twist of sad or angry blades. Of the twist in our hearts for those lost or those who have forgotten us.

or, the want of what could have been, from those who had never valued us at all. When there was hope, despite the absence and despite the failures when in death or distance we are now all on our own. That hope irreversibly extinguished. Struck dead as the hollows of tree branches in the cold fall season.

Anger, is the emotion.

Nostalgia is the remnants and what we may put into tangible proofs when we feel.

Nostalgia lies in the place within our emotions.

Anger doesn't exist without nostalgia.

I'm angry, that I'm not there anymore. I'm angry at what you did. I'm angry at what I did. I'm nostalgic for the pain I experienced, and caused. I'm nostalgic for the good times that weren't good at all.

Sometimes we go back and forth between euphoric recall and nostalgic anger. They are the same. They don't differentiate. So why should we?

He was no longer seeing his face.

His arms and hands flew up involuntarily to his damp brow, then graying temples. He wasn't gazing passed himself, into the half manifestation in the darkness of the glass. He was peering behind, an invert, and it was nauseatingly painful, looking back like that. It felt like the stab of a migraine, inside.

He hesitated a moment at the sink as if about to vomit, then turned abruptly like an automaton donning shoes and overcoat. He walked out without shutting, never mind locking, the door. He'd be back no doubt.

He'd made this loop before, and there was something about it he couldn't remember. Like a moment of blackout. Grey space. No, a moment red. Red, and it washed over him. He was back, scrubbing his hands raw at the sink, shifting in his quilted housecoat and terry slippers.

The dry towel was gentle to his hands, and he pressed his bifocals back on.

06.30.2024

Nostalgia v Anger... which is more Dangerous? challenge by @dctezcan

Nostalgia can be seen in a positive and negative light. I know everyone likes to reminisce about their past because it takes us back to a happy time where we didn't have a care in the world. At the same time, it can also be negative because you can also be reminded of all the negative events that took place in your life. You can be walking down the street one day and can smell something that triggers a memory from your past whether it be good or bad. Everyone has nostalgia.

Anger is more dangerous. Anger can be caused by multiple things. Being angry can put you in a bad head space and you can lose control. There's no coming back from that once you have made a decision while being angry. Your actions are in the heat of the moment and sometimes that can have deadly consequences. That is my intake on this.

-Mads

Nostalgia and anger, two emotions born from morbid dissatisfaction with the way things are, both bringing with them their own unique dangers.

At the level of the individual, nostalgia's grip spells far more danger than that of anger. Anger burns hot and fast, it drives bad decisions and sows seeds that give rise to eventual regret. It motivates irrational behavior, it brings out a dark side of us, it leads to conflicts to fights to battles to war.

Nostalgia is an insidious danger dressed in a bittersweet facade. It infects the present with an unshakable desire for an unattainable past, it glorifies what was at the expense of what is. Existing becomes dissatisfying and the mind becomes trapped in a beautiful past that never really happened. Maintaining old memories grows more important than creating new ones, and an unshakable sorrow takes residence in the heart.

The dangers of anger are undeniable, but anger is a visible danger, a more tangible threat, while nostalgia hides in the shadows and whispers misery and heartache. Anger is blatant and obvious, while nostalgia is nuanced and pernicious. Anger is aggressive, but nostalgia can be sweet at first; the process of revisiting the positive parts of one's past can be a pleasantly melancholic endeavor, but the danger arises when nostalgia clings, when memories grow strong and unrelenting. The heart yearns for something impossible, a return to the way that things were, only things never really were that way—nostalgia is not a faithful artist, her works are biased and deceptive.

Anger can motivate powerful and necessary change. Righteous anger is the tool of improvement; dissatisfaction with the way that things are is essential for bringing a better world into existence. Nostalgia is quicksand, nostalgia is a spider's web. Rather than serving as a catalyst for change, nostalgia hinders improvement by entrapping the mind in a state of yearning for the past. As far as the human experience goes, time flows in one direction, and nostalgia is the dream of sailing up a waterfall—it cannot be done.

In short, nostalgia interferes with the ability to live life.

Nostalgia and anger, etymologically speaking, are derivatives of pain. Pain is a wrecking force by itself. It's an unguarded monster that eats souls for a living. Nostalgia and anger are the gods that shredded the titan called Pain and scattered his remains in the deepest part of a human being and fought for the position of the wrecking ball. While both of these gods are dangerous, one of them is the god of all the other gods. While, like in 'Inside Out', everyone has a different leader, here is my take.

Nostalgia, derived from the Greek words 'NOSTOS' and 'ALGIA', talks about the yearning or the pain felt from being far from home. Homesickness, if you will. Now, home (by home, in this context I mean the memories we sigh about) is an abstract concept people try to organise and understand. It is a ball of chaos we try to untangle because home, that apple dangled in Tantalus's face, we think is for eternity. Maybe, just maybe, home is a memory you can't revisit in real time. Home is the phantom leg we lost in an accident, we think it's there and then we open our eyes and, really, it's not. Yearning for a home that's not there in the physical world, paining for something you don't understand, every unregulated sigh of 'those were the days' drive a person mad and the only thing that can restore a person's sanity is a poorly recreated material of home that leads to dissatisfaction.

Dissatisfaction is a one way descent to extremities like frustration that, sometimes, go beyond just angrily kicking off the blanket on your bed and then sobbing in your pillow. Sometimes it's losing your mind over a sound piercing through silence, and lose your mind you do. Insanity, often, is one of the worst fate any animal that breathed on this land will endure. Insanity is death before death itself. It's the mother of all chaos and definitely isn't half as fun as your average perception of chaos is. This whole route nostalgia, in unimaginably extreme cases, takes is frankly overdramatic but there will be a bright yellow sign with the word 'caution' highlighted in bold.

Point is, if my phantasmagoric perception my gruesomely imaginative mind conjured is anything to go by (take it with a whole sea of salt), nostalgia is a dominoes of a deteriorating soul waiting to happen. While anger and nostalgia end up in the same sea, the journey it takes, the path it flows through makes nostalgia a tad bit more dangerous and worse, longer.

anger is known for being a very violent dangerous. the definition of anger is "a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure, or hostility". now compare thar to nostalgia, the definition being "a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations". on a surface level you would think anger is more dangerous, but in reality nostalgia can cause way more harm. with nostalgia it could make you idealize something to a toxic extent, holding everything in your life to a pedestal that it will never achieve. keeping you stuck in the past to the point of never growing as a person is not only dangerous but can also not only hurt you but the ones around you for a long period of time, and that's another reason why nostalgia is more dangerous than anger. anger is fleeing, nostalgia stays for how ever the person is willing to hold on to the feeling.

When I think of anger, I think of red hot vomit coming out of my nose, of laying my entire hand on the horn of my car instead of just tapping it. I think of her whipping around in our kitchen, throwing a spoon so hard across the room that it shattered a plate in the sink. I think of looking down into that sink at the age of eight, and cleaning up someone else's rage.

When I think of nostalgia, I think of her getting drunk. Of too much fun. Of selfies and long walks at night and booze coming out of our noses after laughing too hard. I think of the hospital, of how badly things can end. There is no visiting a hospital without a sense of an ending - there are no new beginnings when you're being restrained, when you're being told it's all in your head anyway.

Anger is like a drug. When you raise your fists to hit a wall, and smear it with the innards of yourself, that is blood running too hot. Nostalgia is anything but: at its core, it is a heavy hit of someone else's fist in your gut.

Nostalgia is dangerous. I think it's more dangerous than anger. And to quote some girl's Tumblr from 2012: "Nostalgia is a dirty liar that made things seem better than they were."

A dirty liar. Of puking into dumpsters when there's too much vodka. But it's all in the name of fun, right? I have to physically remind myself, by looking at pictures, that it wasn't like that at all. That people die because of alcohol, that people throw spoons across rooms because they are too hungover to function.

I drink. I drink quite a bit. But never in a million years do I let anger win.

I've learned that.

For me, the dirty liar is the one who ruins moments in the present day because "everything used to be so much easier." I get bitter. In the worst moments, I can convince myself that I used to be happier.

That is dangerous: it is an ice pick in the present, rose colored glasses.

Alcohol and anger are a dangerous combination. But when I get wine drunk and think of my past, I just get sad. And because I have severe depression, that's a dangerous head space to be in. Maybe I've just learned to control my anger. But nostalgia? That son of bitch keeps coming back for seconds.

It's dicey, actually, which one is more dangerous. Learn which one makes you pick up silverware and use it as a weapon. It can be more convoluted than just what grips you in the present moment. There's repercussions to every single one of our actions, mental or physical.

I raise a glass to nostalgia, because becoming friends with your enemies is better than sitting in a room, alone, drinking yourself into oblivion.