December 28, 2025
On the album Funeral by Arcade Fire, the opening track entitled “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” has a beautifully interesting line toward the end of the song:
“Sometimes we remember our bedrooms, and our parents bedrooms and the bedrooms of our friends…”
I’m not exactly sure what the artist’s intentions were when they penned these specific words; but I also feel like the proverbial stone doesn’t need to be uncovered in this case, as the music and the sensations it evokes do well enough to send us, without necessitating explanation or additional aesthetic insight.
I’m also not entirely sure how or why this song and in particular, this line, gets to me; or how/why we do “remember bedrooms”- perhaps it’s because those were the places most personal to us and to those with whom we spent a great deal of our time. The entire album is about loss, but underneath the sadness lies a recognition that we are still here to think, feel and sing about it; and there is so much beauty in that recognition.
Norman F%#@ing Rockwell!
Feelings of nostalgia await us at every unsuspecting turn. These “episodes” are characterized by a sensorial trigger that activates and induces an amalgam of complex feelings, which parallel that period of our life in many ways. Certain smells wafting from the kitchen, standing in our childhood backyard as an adult; even just going for a late afternoon run in the winter time has my hippocampus barfing up all sorts of emotional cocktails.
This is not entirely a good or bad thing, but the formula for how it initially unfolds seems to be pretty consistent: that first flicker of nostalgia is often pleasant because we’ve instantly tapped into a place where we were lighter, more innocent and more free– when we were children. This is often quickly followed by a trickle of longing or even sadness for the loss of that exact emotional vulnerability and freedom, which had slapped us upside the head just a second earlier.
Perhaps this is why people become inexplicably sad around the holiday season. Nevermind the expectations, the increased time spent with people whom we may have a tendency to avoid during all the other months, the financial burden, the closing of another year in which we could have (and why not pile on the should have) done more; when everyone is simply trying to “get through” this time of year.
That is mostly surface level stuff, albeit a very real, tangible set of stimuli and responses that reliably repeat themselves toward the end of every year (which conglomerates count on profiting from); yet, even for those who don’t experience these bouts of externally fueled emotional turbulence, there is often still a lingering melancholy beneath, which may be attributed to this deeper, less tangible notion pertaining to the loss of our innocence.
Familiarity brings its own set of trappings to the table; and, depending on our upbringing, these inadvertent little dives into the dusty spaces of our past don’t always render the merriest of emotions that we’re supposed to feel when we hear “fa-la-la-la-la” on repeat. And sometimes it doesn’t matter whether we’re chasing a manufactured picture of our past or attempting to avoid the madness altogether. It’s out there, on every calendar, in every parking lot, in our very breath and olfaction, just waiting to be picked up by the unforeseen receptors of our auto-biographical memory.
The Drip, Dummy
Given the hits of dopamine we receive through the process of this phenomenon, it might be fun to look at nostalgia as a drug. We get a little bump when we hear a song from our favorite band or take an even bigger dose when we buy tickets to go see them live.
There’s nothing wrong with these moments or events that “take us back” and in fact and it can be quite healthy to engage in such forms of reminiscence; yet, in this analogy, the chaotic holidays or even raising our children precisely the way we were raised, is a perpetual morphine drip. It can soothe us into feeling warm and cozy one minute; and leave us utterly incapacitated the next.
Such negative “side effects” have more or less been ignored by the corporations that drive modern consumerist culture; and that’s a trap that is difficult to circumvent (unless we take ourselves off-grid). We can become savagely independent, conscientious consumers, but there will always remain areas of our psyche that even those data-driven entities can’t crack; so they cram it down our throats.
Like a cocaine dealer, whose interest in their customer’s latest rehab stint rests solely upon whether or not they’re ready to purchase more cocaine, cheer-pushers are simply keeping the tradition alive. This is precisely how one needs to feel: alive- but instead of cultivating traditions that were once predicated on community, love and joy, we have participated in the doubling down of the manipulation and monetization of what should be our most precious, and arguably vital, human experiences.
“Getting clean” is never easy and typically necessitates an atmospheric change; and it’s important to understand that, just like addiction, a melancholic memory or a significant loss, never goes away– it’s managed. As grownups, we manage to put ourselves through a great deal of precarious and vulnerable situations, because “that’s how it’s always been done”, according to patterns of repetition that have shaped our understanding of the world.
Perhaps that proverbial slap upside the head or emotional punch to the gut is our past self, the child within us, who is reminding us that “hey dummy, this is supposed to be fun!”. After all, Arcade Fire didn’t write Funeral as children; they crafted a poetic journey from experiencing multiple phases of life and all that flows within and without it– all just to show us that, maybe sometimes we don’t need to have a reason to cry. Dummy.
Make Some Room
While the line between tension and comfort seems to blur as we age, it is invariably defined by how we choose to receive and process what enters our consciousness. Our actions and behavior, as a result of this processing, provide us with a plethora of feedback that we may further process, over and over again; a realization of the mind-numbing nature of this continuum may conjure further inquiry.
Can we alter the personal effects of nostalgia? In short, no, not completely and not for ourselves (unless we have that part of our brain removed), because that would involve re-shaping our past. But we can begin to re-shape the experiences of our present, so that our elder selves can rest more peacefully upon reflection; and we can absolutely do this for our children, so that when a hereafter aroma or sequence of musical notes evokes a deep feeling that transports them back to their own time of innocence, they can reflect fondly and proceed, peacefully wiser.
When our kids track mud into the house or knock over a lamp while being silly, we should immediately try to put ourselves in their little shoes (after all, we were once children too). If our reaction is some form of “God dammit!” (they can feel it, even if we don’t actually say it), then we may be carving out a future negative sensorial trigger for them; but if compassion is our default, we can relinquish any blame or guilt and sympathize with them, which can provide them with the healthy perspective needed for their future nostalgic episodes to be much warmer, more useful and more reassuring.
Their bedrooms should not be defined solely as a place where they hide from it all, but as a place of imagination, possibility and completeness; a place where they can be who they are and, over time, develop agency over who they will become. And, as their parents, just when we begin to understand that we’re not actually talking about bedrooms here, we realize that eventually, we have to let them go.
In that Arcade Fire song mentioned at the beginning of this essay, the line that immediately follows those above lyrics, and the heartbreaking conclusion to that verse is:
“Then, we remember our parents, Well, whatever happened to them?”
To this I would say, letting go can be painful, but it doesn’t have to be the end.