but wait! I have a theory;
I did some researching about the meaning and from what I could understand, the message of the song is all about childhood innocence. The fireflies represent children or childhood memories, that are so wondrous and differ from real life (stick with me here). He also says "I got misty eyed as they said farewell" which means missing your innocence and memories as a child. Now here's my theory:
Some people dont have any negative memories regarding the song, but still but become incredibly sad and nostalgic upon hearing the song. My thinking is that, the older you are listening to it, the sadder the songs make you. This is because you now make a personal connection to the memories that you made while you were young and carefree (or whatever you were doing in 2009). This theory mainly has to do with teenagers who first heard this song as a young kid, since that was when they had most of their childlike innocence. When you were a kid, most of you knew nothing about global warming or politics or rape or death r depression and all of the other terrible things in the world. Kids would watch Disney channel and eat ice pops and get away with whatever they wanted to (this doesn't apply to all kids obviously). So, now older and more aware of the lyrics we hear, we think of our young naiive selves and feel a bit sad. Another reason why we get sad listening to the song is because the memories of our carefree cute and young selves get less and less vivid, ad the older we get the more we struggle to remember these times.
This is again just a theory, not claiming its right of anything of the sort.
