“The Way It Used to Be”: Pet Shop Boys and the Expiry Dates We Place on Life
By Luca Bonafede · May 31, 2026
For years, I thought nostalgia was about people.
A former partner.
A friend.
A stranger I met in a city that no longer feels reachable.
Then I started traveling.
The more countries I crossed, the more apartments I left behind, the more versions of myself I became, the more I realized that I rarely missed people alone.
I missed myself with them.
That is why The Way It Used to Be by the English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys resonates so deeply with me.
Released in 2009 on Yes, the band's ninth studio album, on my playlist since 2019, the song is often described as a reflection on lost love. And it is. But I hear something larger hiding underneath the lyrics.
I hear a song about losing entire worlds.
Because when we say we miss someone, what are we really missing?
The conversations?
The touch?
The gaze?
The shared memories?
Sometimes.
But often we are grieving something far more difficult to recover: the person we were when those memories were being created.
A relationship is never just a relationship.
It is a season.
It is a city.
It is a collection of routines.
It is a particular way of waking up in the morning and imagining the future.
When that relationship ends, all those things disappear together.
The song understands this.
Its sadness is not merely romantic.
It is temporal.
It is mourning a moment in life that can never exist again.
And perhaps that is why it affects me so much.
Travel taught me a lesson that eventually became a philosophy.
Everything has an expiry date.
Every city.
Every friendship.
Every job.
Every apartment.
Every chapter.
Even the best moments eventually become stories.
At first, this realization felt liberating.
The difficult times would pass.
The uncertainty would pass.
The heartbreaks would pass.
Nothing lasted forever.
But as the years went by, I discovered the hidden cost of this mindset.
When you see enough endings, you start seeing them everywhere.
You begin assigning expiry dates to things before they have even begun.
You enter a city already imagining the day you will leave.
You meet someone already imagining the goodbye.
You start a chapter already writing its final paragraph.
The awareness of impermanence is supposed to help you appreciate life.
Instead, it can quietly place a layer of glass between you and the experience itself.
You never fully unpack.
Not physically.
Emotionally.
You become a visitor everywhere.
Even in your own life.
A few weeks ago, I found myself in a beautiful cottage in the Netherlands.
The circumstances almost do not matter.
What matters is how I felt.
For the first time in a long time, I was not thinking about the next destination.
I was not calculating the next move.
I was not imagining the next chapter.
I was simply there.
Peaceful.
Present.
At home.
I had everything prepared for what I often call my second Canadian life.
The plan was waiting.
The future was waiting.
Yet I remember sitting there and thinking something I had not thought in years:
I don't want to leave.
And then another thought followed.
A dangerous thought for someone like me.
A hopeful thought.
If she asks me to stay, I'll stay.
Looking back, I realize how unusual that moment was.
Not because of her.
Not because of the cottage.
But because I wanted to go beyond the expiry date.
For once, I did not want to be the person who leaves.
I did not want to be the traveler collecting another story.
I wanted the story to continue.
I wanted tomorrow to look like today.
I wanted permanence.
Or at least the possibility of it.
Nothing came of it.
The peace eventually disappeared.
Life moved on.
The chapter ended exactly as chapters often do.
But that moment remains important because it revealed something I had forgotten.
Beneath all my acceptance of impermanence, there is still a part of me that longs for continuity.
A part of me that does not want every beautiful thing to become a memory.
And that brings me back to The Way It Used to Be.
The song is often interpreted as a man wishing he could return to a former relationship.
I hear something different.
I hear a man confronting the impossibility of returning to a former self.
The relationship is only the doorway.
The real loss is the world that surrounded it.
The future that once seemed certain.
The dreams that felt inevitable.
The person who inhabited that moment.
That is why the song hurts.
Because we all have places we can revisit but never truly return to.
The café is still there.
The street is still there.
The city is still there.
The person may still be there.
But the version of ourselves that lived those moments has vanished.
And perhaps that is the deepest truth travel has taught me.
The goal is not to make things last forever.
They won't.
The goal is not to avoid endings.
They will come.
The goal is to resist the temptation to leave emotionally before life asks you to.
To remain present even when you know the moment is temporary.
To love a city despite knowing you will leave it.
To love people despite knowing they may disappear from your story.
To embrace peace despite knowing it will eventually dissolve.
Because maybe wisdom is not found in pretending things last forever.
But neither is it found in treating everything as already gone.
For years I have lived by the certainty that everything expires.
The song reminds me of something I am still learning:
Just because something ends does not mean it was only valuable while it lasted.
And just because a chapter will close does not mean we should start saying goodbye before we've finished living it.
The Way It Used To Be - Pet Shop Boys
Thank you, and ciao for now.
Luca Bonafede