What Is Nostalgia? Why the Past Feels Warmer Than It Was
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The word was coined in 1688 by a Swiss medical student to name a disease: Swiss mercenaries serving abroad were sickening and sometimes dying of longing for home, and Johannes Hofer joined the Greek for return and pain to describe it. For two centuries it was treated as a disorder, blamed on the sound of cowbells and the thin air of the Alps, and diagnosed in Napoleon's armies and the Union's. Today it is a feeling that almost everyone reports at least once a week, the psychologists who study it find it does more good than harm, and the industries that sell it have learned exactly which years to reissue.
From illness to emotion
Hofer's nostalgia was homesickness with a medical gloss, and its symptoms, weeping, loss of appetite, fever and a fixed gaze, were treated with leeches, purges and, when possible, a trip home. Military doctors through the nineteenth century regarded it as a threat to armies, and the American Civil War recorded thousands of cases. In the twentieth century the meaning shifted from place to time: nostalgia stopped being a longing for a home one could go back to and became a longing for a past one could not, and psychiatry lost interest in it as a disease. Its rehabilitation as an emotion worth studying came in the 2000s, from a group at the University of Southampton led by Constantine Sedikides, who found that it was universal, frequent and, against the expectation of a century of medicine, useful.
What it is like
When people are asked to describe a nostalgic memory, the accounts share a shape. The memory is of a personal event rather than a period, most often from childhood, adolescence or early adulthood, the years psychologists call the reminiscence bump because memories from them are recalled far more than from any other; it involves close others, family, friends, a first love; it is set in a scene, a house, a school, a summer; and it is mixed, warm at the core with a sadness at the edges for what has passed. The triggers are the senses and the seasons: smell above all, since the nose is wired to the memory centres before it reaches the parts of the brain that name things, then music, food, photographs, the cold weather and the end of the year. The feeling is bittersweet by definition, and the sweetness usually wins.
What it does
The experiments, in which people are induced to recall a nostalgic memory and then measured, have found a consistent set of effects:
- •Mood rises, and the sense that life has meaning rises with it
- •Loneliness falls, because the memories are of being loved, and people who feel socially excluded turn to nostalgia and come out of it more willing to connect
- •The self feels continuous, joined to the person one was, which steadies people in periods of change
- •Optimism increases, since a past in which things turned out well suggests a future that might
- •People feel physically warmer, and reach for nostalgic memories more on cold days and in cold rooms, an odd finding that has replicated
- •Generosity and tolerance increase in the short term, and people who have been made nostalgic give more to charity
The dangers
The feeling is not all benefit. Nostalgia edits: the memories it selects are the good ones, and the past it constructs did not exist as remembered, so that a person who lives in it is comparing the present with a fiction and finding the present wanting. A disposition to constant nostalgia is associated with rumination and depression in some studies, and the distinction the research draws is between nostalgia used as a resource, a visit that restores, and nostalgia used as a residence. At the collective level the same editing produces the politics of a golden age, in which a nation is promised a return to a past that was never as described, and the historians who point out what the 1950s were actually like for most people are not thanked.
How it is sold
The reminiscence bump has a commercial address. The music people love most is the music of their teens, and the reissues, reunion tours and anniversary editions are timed to the decade when the buyers were sixteen; the films of the 1980s are remade for the people who were children then and now have the money; the fonts, the cars and the sweets are revived on a twenty- to thirty-year cycle that tracks the ageing of each cohort into its spending years. Marketers found, in the 2010s, that a nostalgic mood makes people value money less and spend more, which is why the advertisement for the new car shows the customer's childhood. The Swiss doctors would have called it a relapse; the psychologists call it a resource; and the people humming a song from the summer they were seventeen are, on the evidence, doing themselves some good.
The takeaway
Nostalgia began as a diagnosis of fatal homesickness in seventeenth-century Swiss soldiers and became, in the twentieth century, the bittersweet longing for a personal past, most often the years between childhood and early adulthood, triggered by smell, music and cold. Experiments find that it lifts mood and meaning, eases loneliness, steadies the sense of self and even warms the body, that it harms only when it becomes a residence rather than a visit, and that its edited version of the past is what politicians and marketers sell.