Cry all you want: Future Nostalgia
The millennial mantra of living in the now has let many of us down recently. Yolo my ass. One more Zoom and we might just collectively snap. Why fullon wallowing in nostalgia might be exactly what we need right now. About looking back towards a brighter future…
Nostalgia gets a bad rep. The French being the French (so dramatic beyond reason), have been known to accuse the nostalgic among us of spending their lifetime dying – les nostalgiques passent leur vie á mourir – and they are hardly alone with this sentiment. Often linked to depression, Johannes Hoffer, the Swiss doctor who coined the term nostalgia back in 1688 even defined it as “(…) a neurological disease of essentially demonic cause”. While that sounds pretty dark, nostalgia has its place and yes, you getting all teary-eyed when
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thinking back to your first love does not make you a nut job. It’s normal, healing even. Let me explain… Times change. With the world grinding to a halt at the onset of the pandemic, we have been slapped in the face with a lot of (hopefully temporary) change. Some might have lost loved ones, or on the lighter side had to cancel trips and have not had the opportunity to hug their relatives in almost a year. Some might simply miss the twentysomething ritual of getting shit-faced to party with a bunch of attractive strangers. Whatever the scope of change you are experiencing right now might be – this cocktail of upheaval and uncertainty equals one thing only: a whole lot of stress. This is where nostalgia comes in. In times like these, looking back on good times can be comforting. Every time we ponder our past and ask ourselves how we handled tough situations back then, we strengthen our sense of self. Who were we back then? What and who gave us joy? Nostalgia is the invisible string connecting past versions of ourselves to the person we
are in this very moment. Like a neat bow tying together all the experiences that make up who we are today. Times past. A friend put it well when I asked her to define nostalgia for me: “I would define nostalgia as an ode to the deliberately unforgotten. An emotion, an intense feeling of reliving times gone by. Often bittersweet, usually untimely and unprompted, provoked by the subconscious reminding us of how things once were”. Virtually anything can trigger feelings of nostalgia: an old photograph, a familiar scent or, in my case a detailed record of how embarrassing a person I have been throughout my life. Let me explain. During what constitutes a summer vacation in a world paralyzed by a pandemic – so a whole lot of quality time spent with family – I stumbled upon a box I had carefully taped shut before I moved out. And for good reason I might add. Filled to the brim with old journals, a rollercoaster of messy teenage thoughts awaited me. Flicking through the pages, I found myself sucked into a nostalgia spiral of epic proportions (My Tamagotchi! My first kiss! My first solo trip! The day we picked up our dog!), as I cringed my way through one recurring
