I am sometimes overwhelmed by feelings of nostalgia. Is this a bad thing? | Leading questions

Is nostalgia a negative emotion? I often feel nostalgic these days. It is a background noise that I am trying to ignore.

It was especially present during the pandemic, when my nostalgia seemed to spread into a species of grief for lost places and activities. I find myself thinking sadly about places I won’t be able to visit for a very long time.

I am nostalgic for odd things, like an old Hovis bread sign on a shop that is now a kebab shop. I feel such longing for my old haunts that I often go on virtual trips using Google Street View.

It is becoming an overwhelming emotion, and I don’t know whether to suppress it or go with it.

Eleanor says: One of the smartest people I know says grief has two parts: one for missing the thing you lost, and one for feeling like you didn’t hold it quite right when you had it. If you’re right that nostalgia is grief for things past, I wonder whether it’s like that too: one part for wanting those things back, and another for wanting to go back, now you know what it’s like to miss them. Once more wandering to the shop to buy a loaf, once more doing nothing for an afternoon at that house, once more hearing those people chatter in a different room. Breathing it all in properly this time.

Some amount of longing to go back is inevitable for mortal creatures like us, who can only travel one way through time. But, as you say, that feeling can become overwhelming. I think the trick is knowing the difference between our sadness that we can’t go back, and sadness that Things Were Better Back Then. Only one really holds up.

The part of nostalgia that’s telling the truth says: you can’t go back. You can’t have time twice. This just is poignant; I don’t know of any philosophy that fully solves how it feels to slowly let go of things we love. The homes you know get washed away; the worlds and people you’d love to see again crossfade to existing in memory alone. It starts to feel very important that they stay alive there, if memory is the only place they live: to hold on to the photographs and re-run the anecdotes. Watching parts of your life leave the physical world makes you want to insist on reminiscence. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily negative about this part of nostalgia. “Going back” in imagination – walking around old haunts, revisiting them on Google Maps – is also warm and comforting contact with the elements of these things that can’t be lost, not completely.

But nostalgia can turn negative and misleading when it feels like things were just better back then. Memory presents a sepia-toned composite of a past. We can mistake that image for a true depiction of the whole. Didn’t things then seem simpler, nicer? Wasn’t I better, stronger? This can yield the profound conservatism of wanting to go back for the past’s own sake, thinking what came before is ipso facto better. This is such a common confusion, it’s a trope: “in my day”. We experience our own feeling of decay and moving too fast through time, and confuse it for evidence that the world itself is in decay and moving too fast. “I wish I could go back” becomes “that was better than this”.

Aside from probably being wrong about the past, that thought will also cost you the present. Someday you will be nostalgic for this time right now too. And then you’ll have the same feeling you do now – not just the wish to go back, but the wish to breathe it in properly while you have it.

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