nostalgia is a mind’s trick
I am not a very sentimental person. Ask anyone who I’m close to. I got rid of most of my stuffed animals, of which there were quite a few, before I’d even finished elementary school. I rarely save birthday cards or greeting cards or thank you cards. And it’s no secret that I love to unfollow people on social media platforms. Sure I have my sentimentalities like everyone, but I’m definitely no hoarder of “memories”-aka stuff that might remind me of something- preferring to journal or rely on my own memory during reminiscent moments. I think nostalgia and sentimentality are very closely linked if not nearly identical, but I often find myself wishing for past moments. So, am I more sentimental than I thought myself to be (possibly something that comes with age), or is nostalgia a mind’s trick?
Nostalgia, as it’s defined now, is a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past. This is the common understanding of the word, but a recent article I read said nostalgia doesn't require real memories which is a very compelling theory. Sometimes I’ll catch myself wishing for things that have never happened to me. That’s called imagination, you might say. Is my imagination getting too wild when I reminisce about a time I never lived through, but was very real? Like the Roaring 20’s, the very epitome of the American Dream. Or the first arrival of Europeans on American soil. Occasionally I catch myself not only wondering what day-to-day life was like at that time but wishing for them. A more simplistic time, I seem to believe.
I know that I’d never actually want to live in the 20’s or the beginning of our country. Most people had no rights, there was no plumbing, no AC, and no Internet. Nostalgia colors the past in the tint of rose-colored glasses. Especially so when I have no real memories to remind myself it wasn’t a good time.
My musing of past lives and longings for different existences are explicitly nostalgic, but I am also someone who has said multiple times that I feel like I belong here. Here being this time; The twenty-first century is full of food and book TikToks, twenty different coffee flavors, fashion magazines, and online communities built around book and movie fandoms. I was made to live in this generation! What I do wish for sometimes is a time when I didn’t have a phone. When kids played outside and went to drive-in movie theaters spontaneously. When traveling still held some revere in conversation. When there weren’t so many options for the future. When expectations were lower.
Even those musings are short-lived though because I’m grateful for this life. My mind is playing tricks on me, making me wish for a different life. It goes back to the idea that the grass is always greener or how Taylor Swift sings of going to secret gardens in her mind to escape her current situation. We dream up scenarios that seem better when we are unhappy with life at the moment.
There is another form of nostalgia though- one I’m more commonly prone to where one becomes nostalgic for moments actually lived. This type of nostalgia can be wished for in two ways. The first is when “what the individual desires is for her current self to travel back in time to where things were better than they currently are. This is painful because time travel is impossible.” The second is when “She doesn’t wish to travel back in time to a past situation, but rather that the past situation could somehow replace the current one.”
I’ll often wish I was in sixth grade again. I had little homework and a surprisingly large amount of freedom. I rode the bus to swim practice each day after school. I spent my weekends laying in trees and making up games on the trampoline. I forget that each day was a blistering sticky kind of heat. That though I had freedom it was because there was almost nowhere for me to go beyond the park down the street. I spent hours laying in trees because there was nothing better to do.
Wishing to time travel back so I could relive my rosey memories of sixth grade would mean having to relive the absolute horrors of middle school all over again. Who genuinely wants to relive their cringe years? It would mean all of my hard work in the pool would be reversed. I don’t know the rules of time travel (because it doesn’t exist) but if I had to remember how far I’ve come while being sent backward I don’t think I’d want to. Replacing my life with the rosy memories of a younger self would be like erasing a life well lived.
So yes, I think nostalgia is a mind trick. Nostalgia once thought to be a medical condition that came from homesickness comes on only when unpleasant feelings of recollection, loneliness, or longing hit. The order of causation was what I think most people don’t understand. You don't become sad by longing for the past. Longing for the past comes from sadness, loneliness, or boredom that existed previously. It is not as though I actually wish to be a cringey twelve-year-old again or live in a time without central AC, but the mind will readily come up with excuses to combat fleeting moments of loneliness.
xx Ciara
Further reading:
https://aeon.co/essays/nostalgia-is-the-rocket-fuel-that-powers-hope-and-change