What I Have Learnt

Be careful about nostalgia. Nostalgia, in some lights, is nothing more than a big fat lie. You can go ahead and lie to yourself and talk about the Golden Age ‘back then’ – but you’re leaving out enormous swaths of experience and life in order to see that time ‘back then’ as simple. Nostalgia can be a force for good, it can help us maintain our collective cultural memory, it can help us remember that things are not always complex and dreary – like it seems to be now.

An unhealthy nostalgia thinks everything was better in the past, and impedes cultural progress with constant hand wringing about the modern age. Healthy nostalgia is grateful for the modern advances that have made life better, but misses some things from the past and works to bring them back.

For the last few decades, every generation has wanted to reinvent the wheel, wiping the slate clean to make society new from scratch. But just as dangerous as hyper-nostalgia is hyper-presentism. This postmodern world sees only the current moment with no sense of history and of what came before. We’ve thrown out all the old rules but failed to make any new ones.

Scrapping the project every decade in favor of building on the latest societal fads and winds of change only results in a ramshackle shell of a culture, one which shivers in the wind until the next generation knocks it down and gets to work on its own shaky edifice.

Ideally, what should happen is that each generation should take what was best from the generation before it and add it as a brick in the foundation of the culture, discarding the dross and ever stacking together the lessons we’ve learned, the things that have really worked best. This way the culture becomes stronger and stronger over time.

 nostalgia can blind us to the truth, the factuality, the actual thingness of a thing in favor of our frail perception of how much fun we used to have with that thing. But it’s only human to look back in longing to a time that seems less complicated (and more fun) than the present. It’s especially understandable now, in this cruel modern era, when our country has had to weather a decade of terrorism, war, psychotically divisive politics, and the slow-but-steady of the global economy. By comparison, the 1990s can’t help but look like a glowing wonderland of peace and prosperity: 

Within the psychiatric framework, nostalgia may be considered a yearning to return home to the past -- more than this, it is a yearning for an idealized past -- a longing for a sanitized impression of the past, what in psychoanalysis is referred to as a screen memory -- not a true recreation of the past, but rather a combination of many different memories, all integrated together, and in the process all negative emotions filtered out. For a personal example of screen memory think of your first ever vivid memory. Although to you it seems a realistic recall of an early childhood event, it in fact is a compilation of memories all integrated into one. This can be demonstrated in psychoanalysis: during the analysis of the transference neurosis, the patient's earliest memory undergoes changes and divides into multiple components that are separate, definable childhood memories.

If one defines nostalgia as a yearning for an idealized past, the bittersweet nature of it becomes clearer. One can never return to this past, it never truly existed. And the present reality, no matter how good, can never be as good as an ideal -- which nostalgia has created. Thus the saying "you can't go home again."

Another important function of nostalgia may be in providing a link between our past and present selves—that is, nostalgia may provide us with a positive view of the past and this could help to give us a greater sense of continuity and meaning to our lives. The researchers surmise that nostalgia may also acquire greater significance in old age—elderly adults are especially vulnerable to social isolation and nostalgia may help them overcome feelings of loneliness.

The authors note that "nostalgia is now emerging as a fundamental human strength". They conclude that "nostalgia is uniquely positioned to offer integrative insights across such areas of psychology as memory, emotion, the self and relationships. Nostalgia has a long past and an exciting future.