It’s the feeling you get when you hear the song you had on replay throughout high school, or perhaps when you pass by the neighborhood you used to live in as a child. It’s the sudden current of warmth and deep longing for the past that you can’t seem to explain. Ah yes, the good old days.
This is nostalgia. It is the sentimental yearning for the past—the experiences, people, places, or even the life we once had, or at least a version of it. Oftentimes, this version of the past that we form a strong attachment with can become heavily romanticized. But why is it that we do this—unknowingly filtering out the bad parts of our memory and only retaining the parts we’d like to remember? Why are we left with the version where we know all the answers to our problems, the one without the flaws, and the one without worries about the future, instead of the one where we’re struggling to make decisions, the one with never-ending bothers, and the one with so much uncertainty about the future?
Although not identical to nostalgia, a cognitive bias called “Rosy Retrospection” can give us an insight into this phenomenon. Rosy retrospection is the tendency in which we remember experiences from the past in a more positive light than we initially evaluated them to be at that time. Another effect we can observe is the “Fading Affect Bias.” This is the idea that we are more likely to forget memories that are associated with negative notes than positive ones. These explain that we can in fact be biased towards what we choose to remember. Our memory can already be quite unreliable, but these have shown that it can become especially fragile when it comes to remembering the bad bits of our life.
A lot of times, it can feel like our past wasn’t as bad as we remember. As we reconstruct our stories, memories begin to filter out certain things, leaving feelings of nostalgia about a version of our past that was curated to perfection. It can explain why we keep craving the familiar, no matter how linear or toxic it can be.
Johannes Hofer, a 17th-century medical student, first coined the term nostalgia and for a long time, it was classified as a medical disorder. However, this word slowly lost its negative reputation, at least medically. Because as much as it brings us comfort and a sense of connection to our loved ones, it can easily make us worried that the good old days are long gone and can never be experienced again.
A lot of the emotions we feel are a result of external forces. We get sad when we watch a tear-jerker film, we get frustrated when things don’t seem to be going our way, and we get excited about the thought of seeing our friends after more than a year into lockdown. Clay Routledge, a psychological scientist, explains that nostalgic memories tend to check three boxes: they have to involve loved ones, have personal meaning to the memory holder, and must have occurred fairly in the past. As such, a lot of times, we can’t exactly pinpoint the trigger when it comes to nostalgia. It can be anything—a sight, a smell, a sound, or even a mix of these unknown somethings that temporarily bring us back to the past.
The feeling of nostalgia could be captured by a line Abraham Lincoln wrote after seeing his childhood home ruined. “My childhood home I see again and am saddened with the view, and still as memory clouds my brain, there’s pleasure in it too,” he said. Such pleasure associated with nostalgia can help in regulating stress signals. It can serve as fuel to motivate you to do things so you could recreate that amazing feeling you once had into potentially something better in the future. Additionally, research suggests that nostalgia can increase social connectedness and emotional capacity. Realizing the value of relationships can motivate us to connect with loved ones and rekindle old friendships.
However, as easily as nostalgia can make you hopeful about the future, it can also bring you down a rabbit hole of emotional distress and discontent about your present life. Nostalgia diverts us from the present and for a moment, brings us back to the seemingly simpler and perfect past. On our worst days, it can make us feel worried and scared that we might never get to feel those things again. But as humans, we continuously evolve and our problems naturally grow more complex. And although it may have seemed huge in the past, these problems will always be smaller in comparison to the ones we have today and more so in the future. In that sense, our current lives will always seem worse. Because after all, reality will never reach the perfection of our polished past. Nostalgia will always remain unmatched.
So, where does Gen Z play into this picture of nostalgia? Growing up on and with the Internet, we are infamously known for our short attention span. However, it seems as though nostalgia has caught our attention, perhaps in a greater wave than any generation has ever experienced before. Something quite intriguing about this obsession is that it goes beyond what is unique to our experiences, but rather extends to music, films, fashion, and trends that happened way before any of us were born or could actually remember. We’re stuck between this cycle of longing for the past and trying to define the future.
The Internet and social media probably have a lot to do with this. It has influenced our hobbies and consumption patterns more than we probably give it credit for. But why are we so fascinated by this past that we never got to experience? What is it about the ’90s and Y2k that resonate with Gen Z so profoundly? It seems that it is only natural that we romanticize times before ours as perfect as they are portrayed to be. In such a fast-paced world like today’s society, the past is refreshing. The seemingly simpler past let’s take a break from the constant problem that is our world and all the eyes that we have on us to solve them. But one can only speculate as to why this is happening. After all, there are probably hundreds of more elements that weren’t factored into this equation.
Nostalgia is a powerful tool. It launches political campaigns, controls fashion trends, and is at the center of billions of dollars involved in advertising. Nostalgia now goes beyond watching home videos from your old camcorder. It is what’s causing people to stray away from the highest resolutions and go out of their way to purchase decades-old film cameras. It is what spiked the sales of vinyl, one that initially thought was forever dead with the introduction of music platforms. From the sound of the vintage projector to colorful font styles. Companies have nostalgia plastered all over their branding. Nevertheless, consumers keep buying into them. Nostalgia sells and companies know it. And they’re not being secretive about it.
That’s why you have Disney remaking their best cartoons into real-life action movies. It’s why Friends keep renewing their contract with Netflix despite it ending nearly 20 years ago. It’s why our favorite shows are finding their back onto our screens through reboots after reboots. It’s why the ’90s and Y2k aesthetics are trending. It’s why people are going back to wearing yoga pants and low-rise jeans all over again. Brands are trying to target previous generations by recapturing old memories, while at the same time allowing younger generations to vicariously live a life that they never did.
Nostalgia can be tricky, especially when tried to be artificially manufactured by huge companies. It’s hard to recreate the bests of someone’s life, especially when everyone’s is so different. We can all grow up watching the same show but can associate a million different things with it. For some, it may be the smell of breakfast, but for others, it may be the sound of the radio playing in the background. That, at least is my theory, as to why reboots can be such a miss, despite the massive nostalgia surrounding it.
They say that nostalgia often happens when there’s a major life transition. And there is surely nothing more major than a worldwide pandemic. In each of our own ways, we probably observed feelings of nostalgia in our daily lives. You probably found yourself revisiting your phone gallery or reminiscing the sight of humans during rush hour. Because we’re unable to create new experiences, our memories are constantly being replayed, delivering us the comfort that we’re missing right now. For a lot of us, we translated this into our online presence, often in the form of sharing Snapchat and Facebook memories with our friends. In this day and age, it no longer has to be #tbt to see a throwback photo. With constant hints of nostalgia finding a way back into our minds and our screens, it is only natural that we’re feeling nostalgic about the past more than ever. And although these memories were enveloped with stress and unexplainable emotions, for some, they also turned out to be quite hope-inducing as the in-person meet-ups will surely be worth it after more than a year of not seeing each other.
Nostalgia, while is not the answer to all our existential problems, can certainly remind us of who we are. These memories of the past can remind you of the continuous being that you are—an evolution of the past and all the possibilities of the future. Nostalgia can be calming in times of doubt and aimlessness, reminding us of the value that we bring to the world as the good student, the obedient daughter, the resilient worker, or whatever image we see reflected in our memories. It provides us with the comfort that no matter what, we will ultimately have loving relationships, experiences, or at least wonderful memories to cling onto.
Nostalgia is an ambiguous, yet very complex emotion. And despite its melancholic nature, we all crave it. Even our happiest memories will be tinged with sadness after all. In our darkest days, nostalgia has the power to bring us hope about potential good old days to look forward to. It seems as though the past will always find a way into our lives, and nostalgia will always be there all along the way.
by Eunso Im (SAPERE AUDE)
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