Introduction: The Origin of Nostalgia
It's about time I got my hands on that trickster, Nostalgia!
Oops! Did I call Nostalgia a trickster? How dare I speak that way about something that's supposed to bring people sooo much warmth, comfort, and joy?
Well...because I don't trust it.
I call nostalgia a trickster as a joke, but I do think that the feeling can be deceptive. What nostalgia appears to offer isn’t what it actually gives. Nostalgia can make a past version of your life feel more authentic than the life you’re living now, and that’s where I’m questioning whether nostalgia is actually offering comfort, as people say, or is it strengthening unresolved attachments?
The feeling of nostalgia itself can feel bittersweet, or even joyful, but how you interact with it heavily influences how you interact with your life. Nostalgia can take from you; it can keep you stuck and held hostage under illusions.
I’m willing to give nostalgia some slack and say it isn’t inherently a bad feeling, but I don't think it’s automatically beneficial either; it’s the person experiencing it that has to decide what to do with it. (I guess this could apply to any emotion, but I think nostalgia needs to be stressed because of how harmless and beneficial it’s commonly perceived to be, on both an individual and societal level).
If someone feels nostalgic about a period of their life connected to people who aren’t there anymore, what that nostalgia comes to mean depends on what they make of the memory and how they carry it forward. Nostalgia can bring the memory back, but it can’t tell them what the memory means or how they should live because of it. That responsibility still belongs to the person.
Still, I’ve observed nostalgia quietly organizing people’s lives without them noticing, and at one point, nostalgia was organizing mine without me noticing either. But remember, nostalgia can be a “trickster”, and it has a way of talking to you (not literally). But, it can start influencing what you think you should do, especially when you’re in a situation that requires change or when your life starts feeling uncomfortable or even when life is good and things feel boring.
Memory and Nostalgia
What I keep coming back to is the relationship between nostalgia and memory; nostalgia draws on memory, but memory isn’t always completely reliable. Yes, the emotion of nostalgia can feel convincing, but that doesn’t mean the memory is complete or accurate. Nostalgia feels real sometimes, it carries a very specific energy and vibe that I can’t put into words right now…*ugh*. But, that energy starts becoming “dangerous” when people begin making decisions within it.
Researchers have found that nostalgia can support identity and help people feel connected to who they used to be. However, I still question how much authority we should give that connection when the way someone understands a memory heavily depends on the mindset they had when it happened, the mindset they carry now, and whether they’ve developed the self-awareness to interpret it through a more mature lens. Are they actually able to conceptualize their memory across the full course of their life and use it to build a healthy sense of self-continuity? Have they developed the skills to return to the past, understand what that version of themselves represented, and connect it to who they are now without becoming attached to it? I’m sorry, but I don’t think a lot of people have. Nostalgia is discussed in society as though looking back in the past naturally helps people maintain a stable sense of identity, but that assumes people already know how to reflect on the past in a way that allows for growth. This is a big reason as to why I’m researching this.
A lot of people return to memories with the same mentality they’ve always carried, so instead of building from self-continuity, they reinforce an outdated understanding of who they are. I say this from personal experience, observation of the lives around me, and in the world as it exists today! I understand that people can look back and use the past to make sense of themselves, but I don’t think identity should become a straight line that keeps someone loyal to a former version of who they were. If someone is growing and transforming, they should be able to understand themselves through who they are now without treating the past like it's the most accurate version of themselves. Looking back can help someone recognize what shaped them, but that doesn’t mean the person they were before should determine who they’re supposed to become.
Subconscious Nostalgic Trick
Even when happiness was genuinely real back then and the memories are somewhat accurate, nostalgia could make you want to return to the feeling you experienced during that era, but the deception starts when the person starts believing they need to go back, either to a certain way of being or back to a certain space to feel that way again. It becomes a subconscious trick because even though they’re consciously trying to move forward, maybe from a sad or depressive emotion, their mind is still being subconsciously directed backward. After all, it’s being encouraged by nostalgic remnants. When someone says they want to return to who they were or to a specific era, they’re putting happiness behind them and reinforcing the idea that joy belongs to a past version of themselves. What they’re actually trying to recover is a feeling. But nostalgia attaches that feeling to an old identity, environment, or era of life. It makes it seem like the only way to experience it again is by returning to it. The person could understand what made that time meaningful and genuinely attempt to build from it without literally making the past the destination, but here comes that got damn nostalgia; it can subconsciously keep them stuck through the language they use to describe what they want, and where they believe that feeling of joy can be found.
I don’t think nostalgia is evil, but I also don’t think it should be automatically trusted. Even the comfort it evokes can be deceptive, because it can lead a person to believe the past was safer or better, when in actuality it’s just familiar. Your nervous system recognizes it, and sometimes it wasn’t even better. Nostalgia can function as a form of preservation, and I don’t like that, especially when life should be centered on growth.
So, I’m deciding to study it and see where it goes.
My first discovery on nostalgia shocked me… okay, well, not really because I already knew something fishy was up, but—the nostalgia we talk about today is very different from the nostalgia that was first described hundreds of years ago.
Origin of Nostalgia
The word nostalgia was coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss medical student at the University of Basel. In his medical dissertation, he combined the Greek words nostos, meaning homecoming, and algos, meaning pain. Together, the word described the pain of wanting to return home, or more specifically, the pain of being unable to return home.
At the time, nostalgia wasn't understood as an emotion or a sentimental feeling. It was classified as a medical condition and was most commonly associated with Swiss soldiers and mercenaries serving away from home. Many of them experienced such an intense longing for their homeland that physicians believed it was making them physically ill. The condition was also referred to as mal du pays, meaning homesickness, and mal du Suisse, meaning the Swiss illness. Nostalgia was associated with anxiety, heart palpitations, fever, fatigue, loss of appetite, insomnia, fainting, and physical decline. In some historical accounts, it was even considered fatal. They believed longing for home became so overwhelming that it could slowly consume the body.
The Shift
By the nineteenth century, the meaning of nostalgia began to change. It moved away from being understood as a disease of homesickness and became more closely associated with memory, youth, longing, and emotional life. “Home” no longer referred only to a physical place but also became connected to earlier periods of life, and eventually, to the past itself. So, you no longer had to leave a physical location to experience nostalgia; you could experience it anywhere, at any time, in any place. This does make me wonder how people understood memory before the word nostalgia expanded beyond just meaning homesick. Were people always experiencing a pull towards the past (nostalgia), but didn't have the words to explain what they were feeling?
Some writers have already examined the way nostalgia became tied to capitalism, and I couldn’t agree more! I’ll probably go deeper into that in the next post along with some of my own observations. But this study is my personal exploration of nostalgia. It’s meant to go further into what nostalgia is doing psychologically, and explore the way it affects individuals and shapes collective cultures and societies.
Thank you for reading. Subscribe to the blog to keep up with the series :)
— SIBYL¹¹ ꒷꒦♛❤︎
References
Sedikides C, Wildschut T, Cheung WY, Routledge C, Hepper EG, Arndt J, Vail K, Zhou X, Brackstone K, Vingerhoets AJ. Nostalgia fosters self-continuity: Uncovering the mechanism (social connectedness) and consequence (eudaimonic well-being). Emotion. 2016 Jun;16(4):524-39. doi: 10.1037/emo0000136. Epub 2016 Jan 11. PMID: 26751632.
Suresh, A. (2026). The nostalgia trap. The AIDEM. https://theaidem.com/en-the-nostalgia-trap-capitalism-overconsumption/
Zafarris, J. (2024). The tragic etymology of “nostalgia.” Useless Etymology. https://uselessetymology.com/2024/04/30/the-tragic-etymology-of-nostalgia/