Recover

We are locked, as Nietzsche notes, in an eternal return, an endless futile struggle to recover the past, and to lay in the present comfort of nostalgia.

Because happiness is a yearning for repetition... the desire to recover what is already lost and dissipated with time. And we are creatures always of regret, of dissatisfaction, of yearning, of retropspection. We desire to be young once more, to return to innocence, to that first kiss, to simpler times, to childhood pleasure, to schoolyard moments. We dwell always in moments not of the present but the past.

And so we spend our lives reminiscing of that which can never be again. We expend with great energy to recreate that which is lost, to find those moments and live them yet again. Yet when we think we've discovered it once more it is all different; it is always already different. We find these new memories defamiliarised, strange and tainted with the scent of nostalgia that has altered the present reality of this (re)new(ed) experience. And so the search goes on ... in a quest for an eternal return.
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Birthdays are moments to recover that which is not meant to be; they celebrate the impossibility of return. For that day which we have lauded as 'special' passes into absent forgetting. Birthdays recover, violently, the memory of that which will never be again.

So what is the celebration for? What is the remembrance for?

We depend on technologies of remembering to direct our gestures of well-wishes and kindness; we rely on circuits and pixels to remind us of uniqueness, of days and things special. And we fall back on its ease to send empty words devoid of any significance apart from the fleeting seconds in which they were composed. Beyond the convenience, there is nothingness. So like the digital images and words devoid of any materiality, so are those greetings of casual thoughts. Nothing comes of nothing.

And so that is social relations in modernity... pixelated greetings, hyperreal gestures, digitised sounds.

Why remember when forgetting would mean more?