Why is it that when we reminisce, we often tend to remember the good times and not the bad?

Not me….I remember the bad stuff very well. It can smother the good quite easily. I can filter out the bad but sometimes that filter just won’t work! ;)

What is the fun of dwelling on the bad? Also, it shows us what is important.

Nobody wants to sit around and rehash old problems. Where’s the fun in that?

As for talking about the dead, it might be a “don’t speak ill of the dead” thing that we’ve got going on.

It just feels better.
:)

It feels a lot better than sitting around and crying about the bad in life.

Brings us comfort.

The hippocampus is kind of like the brain’s “record” button. When the brain is in a state of high arousal, as it is when we’re excited or really tuned in, then the “record” button gets pushed. In states of low arousal, like when we’re bored or generally feeling down, memories don’t get passed from short-term to long-term memory. Strongly negative experiences accompanied by powerful emotions would get imprinted just as well as the highly pleasant ones, but not the kinds of “meh” stuff you describe in your details.

Also, whenever we lose someone close to us, I think our natural tendency is to reflect on what has been taken from us that we valued. All of our relationships are mixed bags of harmony and dissonance. We treasure the harmonies we find with others, often enough that they overshadow the dissonances. So when a person that we know well disappears from our life, we’re more conscious of having lost the harmonies than the dissonances. The mind turns to the vacancies left where those treasured harmonies used to be.

As @thorninmud explained, there is actually a physiological component to this behavior. Since it is physiological, one might speculate on why that capability evolved. The question I come up with is how to long term memories of bad situations help us? How do long term memories of good situations help us?

I suspect that if we were to remember the bad stuff more, we’d be under a constant higher level of stress, which would kill us earlier than if we had less stress in our lives. Good memories calm us and make us feel good. Bad memories—not so much.

These days, my memory for anything in the past is for shit. I can remember the general outlines, but very few specifics. But back when I had a memory, it wasn’t that much different. The few specific memories I had tended to be good ones. I just forgot the bad stuff.

Even now, I do it with things that should have been impressed in my hippocampus. A few years ago, I was in the first and only deadly serious depression of my life. This will probably sound weird, but all I really remember is a faint sense of being ready to die. Mostly I remember what the depression gave me, and it gave me enormous gifts.

I am truly grateful that I had that experience. There is so much I can understand now that I couldn’t understand before. I feel my emotions much more deeply than I did before. I can talk to people who have been in great pain from a position of having experienced the same. I do remember the darkness a bit, but mostly now it’s a story I tell. I’m glad the darkness has gone, but if I had a choice to avoid it entirely, I don’t think I would change it.

I do all this without even trying. I’m not trying to forget the bad. If anything, I’m trying to preserve the memory. Even so, it is the good parts that remain. Who even knew good could come out of experiences like that, but if you look at one of my recent questions, you’ll see stories from all kinds of people about what they have learned from their illnesses. I don’t know if any talk about negative learnings.

Our memories are notoriously imperfect. We not only remember the good times over the bad, or vice versa in some cases, but we remember what we want to remember about things, which is not always what actually happened.

It’s a survival skill.

Do you remember your first win? How about your first loss..? When we reminisce, we think about the good times because the bad times isn’t worthy of dwelling on.