Who has not made the experience of meeting good friends again after a longer while and all seems like just a few minutes (or maybe hours/days) ago? Happened to me when I met Trevor and Elin again. The interesting part of this observation was that in the beginning all was exactly the same as the last time we met. We even had the same clothes as 2 years ago. Nothing changed, neither they or I. Mystically the two years of experience (yes, a lot of stuff had happened in the meanwhile to me) suddenly had disappeared – I was myself in late 2004 again. But then, after a while we all started to slowly morph back towards our current personalities. I don’t think that we arrived at our current state until they left but at least we were more like everyday than at the beginning of the meeting.
Which leads me to Hypothesis 1: Meeting old friends after a while winds back the hands of time to the state of the last meeting. Then the catching up begins and the lost time is caught up slowly when we realise how the people had matured in the meanwhile.
Most people also know the analogous example that when visiting one’s parents one always is the child, no matter how old one is. Same here, but even worse I realised that returning to different places also turns back time. When I came back to Zurich I returned to my behaviour pattern of when I was in Zurich (in brief “think big, living on the fast lane” – more details in the next post), when I then came back to my parent’s place all got returned to when I left home (“being the younger child”). Similarily being in Gothenburg made me behave differently (“meeting tons of friends, being mature for my age”) and returning to Oslo will also have an effect on me (“thinking small, saving money”). The contrast between Zurich and Oslo was striking, even though both are rather high in the list of the world’s priciest cities. When being in Zurich, spending 70 EUR a day is normal, no big thing while in Oslo using 25 EUR a day is already a lot. This difference mostly comes from my background with the different incomes that result in different spending frames. Still, avoiding returning to old habits is a difficult task and is not only based on behaviour but on the whole mindset.
Which leads me to Hypothesis 2: By context, people and habits we even return to an older mindset when we return to a place we formerly spent a substantial amount of time.
Of course are these effects limited by various factors. The major limitation is that the other party (places or people) have not changed radically. So can the presence of a person in an unusual context already distort thi effect.
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