Each day, rain or shine, in hell or high water, students of UC Santa Barbara trickle onto the bluffs of Devereux Beach for sunset. Often called “the pilgrimage,” many sojourn from on-campus dorms, seniors often clutching to-go cups of chilled wine as they walk down Del Playa Drive — the cool, hip sister of the walk of shame. I don’t go every night, but when I do, I tend to lug along my tattered journal and write.
Welcome to the Sunset Diaries.
LUCY DIXON / DAILY NEXUS
This past spring quarter I developed a debilitating case of future nostalgia. Criminally underdiscussed and not to be confused with the 2020 Dua Lipa album “Future Nostalgia” (although my 15-year-old self was incredibly partial to that particular moment in music history), there isn’t a tried-and-true definition of “future nostalgia.” Psychology Today described it as when someone is “nostalgic for tomorrow.” But as I have become uniquely familiar with my condition, I’ve learned to rebuke this definition and have come up with my own.
Future nostalgia, as I’ve known it, is when one experiences feelings of nostalgia for the present from an imagined point in the future. Every beautiful moment of spring quarter, I caught myself in a far-off place yearning desperately for the life my body currently exists in. Dancing with my friends in their green kitchen, chatting in the dimly lit, slightly smelly Nexus office, making pancakes on a Saturday morning and mountain drives to the tavern.
As I lived them, these moments became trapped in amber — perfectly preserved, golden, sickly sweet. I would imagine myself, 38 and stuck in a dead-end job, aching for the freedom of my college years — aching for the present. It sounds desolate and pessimistic, illogical even. But I’d go to Substack war on the premise that future nostalgia is actually kind of beautiful.
Future nostalgia is essentially just the knowledge that all of this will be gone one day. And as I’m entering my fourth year of college, I know this now more than ever. In my apartment, singing the lyrics to “Green Light” as loud as humanly possible, I can hear the silence of move-out day. Every time I make the “presidential commute” to my neighbor’s front door, I think about the last time my soles will touch that warm pavement. My gratefulness precedes me, always two steps ahead.
There’s an infinite amount of online discourse about what it means to “live in the moment.” Don’t film, don’t take photos, relish this moment, don’t think about anything else. Future nostalgia is a step away from the present, a blip into the future. But it’s managed to make me infinitely more appreciative of “the moment.” It’s the kind of realization that comes after a brush with death, but can develop when watching one of your best friends graduate a year early.
Future nostalgia has turned me into a faithful documentarian. I shove scraps of paper into my pockets for my junk journal, film my friends dancing in the street, snap blurry shots on my digital camera and diary things in painstaking detail. Because I want to remember everything (even if I can’t always remember every single thing). I want the good, the bad, the minutiae of my youth.
And maybe that isn’t “living in the moment.” Maybe I’m thinking too much about my supposed dreary future, and yes, fine, I might take too many pictures. But I know for sure that when it’s all said and done, when I’m decades removed from this little slice of heaven, I can look back and tell you exactly how happy I was in that moment.
Lucy Dixon has three quarters left at UCSB and is already freaking out.
