Instead of a New Year’s resolution, my wife, son and I make something called vision boards every Jan. 1. It’s a chance to map out on the tagboard our goals in different parts of our lives for the new year. Once we look to the future, I do what comes far more naturally to me — what feels just as, sometimes more, important.

I visit with ghosts of the year past.

This is similar to Scrooge’s voyeurism, sans the pushy spirits and their agendas. While I rewind to pleasant memories, mostly I linger in the moments that still chafe like a grain of sand in an oyster’s underbelly. So, I watch the moments when my anger burst through the gates at full stride in front of my 13-year-old son, a reaction I regret. I drop in on those moments when my wife said things to me I brushed off because I was anxious and overwhelmed with work and not present. (There are few better teachers about the value of being “present” than the stench of broccoli and milk left in a car all day, during August, because the request to bring them in never made it past my brain’s bouncer.)

Trust me. I don’t revisit these wincing specters because I’m masochistic. I do this because, much as I dislike the chafing in my underbelly, I’ve learned that circling back on my past opens the portal to reflection.

Essayist Joan Didion understood the value of keeping this portal open. In her beloved essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” Didion waxes lyrically about her embarrassing younger self, advising readers to be on “nodding terms,” with our younger selves. Otherwise, she wrote, they show up uninvited and come “hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.” Even this writer who never met a strong emotion or sentiment she liked couldn’t deny the value and pull of nostalgia (when it came to her own past, that is).

Nostalgia leaves many Americans, especially younger ones, cold. It dares to trade irony and snark for bald wistfulness and longing (read: emotional honesty). It flies in the face of the popular charge to live with “no regrets.” And it relishes a past where people paid more attention to their own inner voice than the din of the digital mob. Can anything be more unhip?

The problem with all of these sentiments, ironically, is that they create firewalls from our past selves that distance us from within. They distance us from without, as well. They feed into the loneliness epidemic.

Not so nostalgia.

A 2023 survey of 2,000 adults found that 84% of respondents agreed: Nostalgia acts as a reminder of what is most important in their lives. Some of the reasons include that it reduces anxiety and boosts a positive outlook, self-esteem, gratitude and, in turn, meaning in life. Perhaps most importantly, nostalgia helps people move forward in life, said Dr. Clay Routledge, director of the Human Flourishing Lab.

That is the reason I visit not just ghosts of the past year but of years’ past. The deep past doesn’t just inform my present and future — it acts as an unwavering compass needle, a true north. Never have we needed a true north more than now.

The prevailing culture, which strongarms us into the present and future, scares and shames even the most self-possessed of us against lingering too long in the past.

Yet when I spend time with, say, my father (who passed away 16 years ago) I am reminded of how old, raw wounds festered beneath his abusive flaws and of how much people like him, who are so easy to judge — and to abandon — deserve more context and compassion. When I watch my earlier self push past my considerable anxiety to go to parties, meet a large group of friends for dinner or embrace online dating, I am reminded of the more lasting, meaningful ties I have developed through face-to-face connections. When I visit with old friends, who died too young, and witness how I treated them with the assumption they’d always be around, I am more convinced than ever that regret can be a vital tool for change — to deny it wholly is to stagnate.

Diving into our past, not our present or future, is where we grow the pearls.

Andrew Reiner (areiner@towson.edu) teaches at Towson University and is the author of “Better Boys, Better Men: The New Masculinity That Creates Greater Courage and Emotional Resiliency” (HarperOne, 2020) and the upcoming book “Boys Re-Connected: The Growing Epidemic of Alienation and How To Stop It” (Johns Hopkins University Press).