The past is a very important to our daily lives. We tend to recall our mistakes to not repeat it. In psychology our brain some memory is processed into the long-term memory and some to short term. Long term memory helps us keep knowledge of the world we know today. However, some people use this special detail of the brain to repeat history. Is it good to repeat our past or can it damage the future? Jay Gatsby uses his long-term memory to escape his past and create a new future for himself yet uses the past to try to regain lost love that happened in his past. He does his good in creating a successful man out of a person who had nothing. His goals are to avoid being nothing and going out to chase the American dream. He becomes a self-made man that people that go to his parties admire. Yet, he also tries to regain a past of love with Daisy who is married to another wealthy man named Tom. Gatsby believes that Daisy truly loves him and not Tom. This could be true yet, his chasing of the past leads to chaos that would eventually find him killed when he was innocent. Instead of leaving the past in the past he chose to let the past choose his future. Now the question now stands as a “What if?” What if didn’t chase daisy and instead chose to chase new love and a new future. However, this can no longer be answered because he is gone and it is all because of that past that he so desperately desired that brought him down to having nothing but a friend that could’ve helped him named Nick.