What happened to your post?

I sometimes sit for hours listening to music from my childhood, and if I shut my eyes I can almost remember the scent of fresh-cut grass in the summer, the rattling of a skateboard against newly-laid asphalt; the blistering sun-soaked summers more years away from me now than I was years old when the memories were made. Did you know that on YouTube, there are entire channels dedicated to commercials, categorized by network and year? I made a playlist once: July, 1999.

This nostalgia gives me a similar feeling of creativity, of energy, of being alive again. For just the hours I'm dipping myself back down the decades, I'm like the optimistic kid I was back then, not disillusioned, not jaded, and not crushed by disappointments and innumerable small miseries, the afterbirth of the new Millennium.

I also know what it's like to get lost in daydreams and letting your mind wander. It's especially solemn if you have ever experienced virtual reality via those lovely headsets they sell now: the effect is convincing enough to make your stomach lurch if you look over a digital facsimile of the Grand Canyon. Stuck in a lonely apartment, sure, in the middle of a pandemic, yes, but slip on some polycarbonate eyelids and you can watch the world come alive in matrices of light, dance inside a signal, pretend you're anywhere but where you are.

It's not bad when done sparingly, but what you have sounds more like depression. Please, stay safe and healthy.

I love listening to the rain and storms while I work or read. You are correct that the best thoughts come from those times and I also believe that disconnecting from reality is important for mental health. Staying plugged in 24/7 is a death sentence for your mind and is most likely the actual reason that you don't enjoy the things that you once did.

Ditto. Ish.

Except my zoning out takes the form of a perpetual, low-grade stress over waiting for something (not always even sure what..) whilst battling the increasingly sneaking suspicion that the content/details of whatever I'm awaiting will barely rise to the level of a Murphy's Law instantiation of what might have actually been worth waiting for - which makes it "hard to get anything done" for becoming possessed by an underlying, undermining sense of "It's not going to turn out as desired anyway, so why bother?"