I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I’m reminiscing this right now. I can’t go to the bar because I’ve already looked back on it in my memory… and I didn’t have a good time.

- Max, Kicking and Screaming

I think what is appealing about nostalgia is that we know how things turned out and they turned out OK. When I’m nostalgic about snowstorms, it’s not really because I love the snow. I think what I like is that I know the snowstorm turned out to be a small inconvenience, so when I look back on it I remember it without the worries I felt at the time. A snowstorm in my memory isn’t about feeling wet and cold, or being concerned that I didn’t get to the supermarket again before the roads were undriveable, or anything like that. I know those bad things passed and without any lasting bad effect. A snowstorm in my memory is about watching lots of TV with my family, eating what food we did have left, and a general sense that the world is taking a break. Because I’m looking back on it, I know the worries can all be ignored because it all works out in the end. My nostalgia is about remembering the old days without the uncertainty. Whatever happened back then worked out OK, because it all ended up with me as I am today.

Where things get really interesting is when I realized that one day in the future I will almost certainly be nostalgic for right now. Day to day I might worry about how hot it is in Austin in the summer, or how much traffic our website gets, or how hard it is to switch from being a passable web programmer to being a passable iPhone developer. Years from now, when all those things I worry about work themselves out one way or another, I’ll remember these days as the days when I learned all about Tex-Mex, web analytics, and C programming. And it will seem like a time of lost simplicity. All these problems I have today will seem like non-issues, certainly not as serious as whatever will bug me in the future. The problems of the past never seem too serious. We did solve them, after all.

I’m now inclined to not take my current problems too seriously. Sure, they still need to be solved. But these problems aren’t what will stay with me. What I’ve learned from nostalgia is that problems loom large in the present but they also stay there. So, I think I’m going to start treating them as they guests they are. I’ll give them the respect they deserve while they’re here, but I know that soon enough they’ll be on their way. I think that by applying a little bit of the lessons of nostalgia to my life, I can keep my focus on what’s important.

In the case of egoism, the arguments against it typically try to imagine some sort of scenario where failing to follow non-egoist principles results in some sort of morally disgusting result. This type of argument is fairly common in ethical reasoning, as well as any other field where you’re prefer to not reason from first principles. But it’s a type of arguments that, by its design, fails to even notice that there may be some positive argument for the principle in question. In fact, the argument type I mention really just results in begging the question, as the “morally disgusting result” is typically evaluable as morally disgusting from non-egoist principles. One rarely comes across an anti-egoism argument that actually engages the egoist argument on egoist terms. Anti-egoists, like anti-Darwinian, prefer to stay within their own premises and then show that, by golly, you can’t be both a creationist and a Darwinian, so Darwinism must go (you can’t be both an anti-egoist and an egoist, so egoism must go).

As it turns out, there isn’t a coherent alternative to either neo-darwinism or ethical egoism. Additionally, neither evolution or ethical egoism result in morally disgusting situations. Evolution, so far, results in humanity, among other things. Ethical egoism, as I live it, is full of creativity, co-operation, compassion, and love.

I suppose that if it were true that ethical egoism required me to violently subjugate every person I encountered and that I could only feel true happiness when sunbathing by the side of a river of human blood…well, I would probably reconsider ethical egoism. In this vein, if everyone shit ice cream, then restrooms would be restaurants. But, as things actually stand, ethical egoism has made me a decent person and nobody is eating out of their toilet.