Our generation seems uniquely, and somewhat prematurely, obsessed with recapturing our younger selves. We abide by the hashtag #throwbackthursday, while Timehop posts saturate our Facebook timelines. As the first children to have played our teenage years out on social media, we are able to scroll through our personal histories and select the pieces we want to re-post, in order to create a narrative about exactly how our past has become our present.

But as we nostalgically varnish the ghostly display pictures of our former selves, we are ignoring the danger of regression. We incriminate ourselves by retrieving these old memories, yet we venerate a nightclub that plays songs older than current freshers. We are beginning to wade into the murky waters of post-irony and, even speaking as someone who has mounted defences of a lot of poor decision-making on irony, there is a crucial distinction to be made.

I am now in my fourth year at Cambridge. As a fourth-year student in Cambridge, it’s often easy to feel that you may have overstayed your welcome. If a year were a day, then the Cambridge degree would have the shelf life of a dairy product. You can enjoy it for three days. But that’s all - by the fourth you can still taste the memory of how good it was, but there’s an undeniably acerbic tinge as it begins to curdle. (It’s been three weeks of Veganuary and this is the most use I have had for dairy, leave me alone).

Three years is enough for most. If one were to attend every Wednesday Cindies - ambitious but not impossible - for the span of their undergraduate career that would be 72 visits. At £5 entry, that is £360. Throw Sunday Life into the equation and that number doubles. A bottle of £4 Sainsbury’s House Soave at pre-drinks before each of these events? The grand total reaches £1296.

I’ll admit now that I did not make it to Cindies 72 times in 3 years. But my example is an illustration of how much we invest in the promise and potential of a good night out, even if the stamp and bruises from last week have barely faded. The vomit, regrettable one night stands and hangovers are less easily quantifiable, but they deserve their recognition, too. Although we love to complain about Cambridge nightlife, we never become jaded enough to renounce it completely.

So, why do we find it so hard to move on? I’m not sure. When I attended my 22nd bop this weekend, muscle memory took hold and I made all the same mistakes I did at the previous 21. Appropriating the reckless abandon and enthusiasm of youth, I danced vigorously to the best of the ‘90s and even had a tactical chunder for good measure. I can’t claim to be proud of myself.

Older, but certainly not wiser, I felt it was time to make a positive change in order to distance today’s Miranda from her previous incarnation. In the interest of self-improvement, I consulted WikiHow for guidance on how to move on. Their advice was specific to romantic relationships but, given that my love life has been filled with almost as much regret and awkward eye contact as brunch the day after the bop, the leap didn’t seem insurmountable. It was, in the end, a fruitless endeavour: one of the steps recommended by WikiHow was ‘Be Sad’, which I’d already managed without the help of the Internet.

One important lesson I have learnt in my protracted undergraduate years is that in place of improvement must come acceptance. I accepted that I wasn’t going to be able to ‘move on’ from bop-based binge drinking, and texted friends asking for suggestions on which of my shortcomings I could work on instead. Quite soon after hitting ‘send’ it dawned on me that being blind to one’s own flaws might be a flaw in itself. That realisation seemed like an important enough step in my self-actualisation that I no longer felt the need for self-improvement.

The reconnection website FriendsReunited closed down this week, presumably because all of the information you would have been able to hide on this site was published on Facebook all along. The lesson here is that there is no hiding your past. You simply have to scroll through, recognise your past, and finally – whether you want to or not – repeat it.