Recently I’ve been thinking about the happiest periods of my life, and what I might be able to do to replicate some of those experiences in my life today. So far, the three best years of my life have been: my freshman year of college the year I studied abroad my first year of marriage By highlighting those years in particular, I mean to take nothing away from the really good childhood I had or the unique, indescribable joy of raising children myself. Those 3 years, all bunched into a 5 year window, just happened to be a very formative period of my life. They are nostalgic to me in many ways. In Defence of Nostalgia Some people think you should ignore nostalgia. Or they accuse it of being an overly-sentimental longing for an idealized version of the past. There’s truth to that. We tend to form a golden-age in our minds …