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Nostalgia, or why lost bliss doesn’t make you unhappy
Psychology
Nostalgia, currently ‘in fashion’, makes us connect with our experiences and learn from the experience
In a chapter of the dystopian ‘Black Mirror’ its protagonists live an eternal eighties party, in which everyone enjoys as if there were no tomorrow. And then you discover what actually happens (sorry for the gutting): those who are there are people who decide to connect and live in a virtual world, ‘San Junipero’, a city created through the nostalgia for his youth.
We live in a time when nostalgia is on the rise, as if it were a fashion. The short and straight skirts of the 90s, the cassettes and vinyls, the series of children who solve mysteries in the 80s armed with caps and bikes are back, and even the mullets are back! If before it was the romantics who cried out to the heavens that the past was better, now the missing is based on recreating in times that many have not even lived and have only experienced through movies and books. At a time when we even feel longing to be able to have a few dances without worrying about the mask or social distance, the nostalgia, a feeling, but also in part a universal experience, shapes our present.
The current phenomenon is such that there are those who say that we live in a ‘retro-modernity’. Diego S. Garrocho, philosopher, professor of Ethics at the Autonomous University of Madrid and author of ‘Sobre la nostalgia’ (Alianza Ensayo), assures that there is an explicit nostalgia industry in which rhythms, images, stories and designs are recovered ancient that seem to want to protect us from a threatening future.
Although the term ‘nostalgia’ was coined in 1688, we are talking about a feeling that, Garrocho maintains, “does not respond to a cultural construction but is inscribed in the human heart from our origin.” He argues that, if out of nostalgia we assume something as a unclear loss awareness, like a missing something that was, “there are sufficient cultural records to be able to consider it a universal feeling.”
When we speak of nostalgia, we speak of a feeling of longing that, although traditionally associated with sadness or grief, currently goes beyond. Bárbara Lucendo, a psychologist at Centro TAP, says that nostalgia is useful as a resource to connect with people, emotions or situations from the past that gave us happiness and that, by remembering them, helps us learn from them, grow and mature with respect to what we experienced.
Sure, there are people more nostalgic than others. Although it is complex to define what makes someone have more or less tendency to longing, the psychologist explains that, according to numerous studies throughout history, “people who are more likely to have nostalgic thoughts have fewer negative thoughts towards the meaning of life, as well as are more likely to reinforce their social ties and value past experiences as a resource to face the present ». However, he says that less nostalgic people present a greater number of negative thoughts both with the meaning of life and with that of death, and, consequently, they do not give as much value to the past moments and the usefulness that these can bring for the actuality.
Diego S. Garrocho maintains that it is “undeniable that nostalgia is a character trait” that helps define us. «Aristotle maintained that the melancholic people were melancholic because of an excess of black bile. Today, obviously, we are far from that humoral description of the character but I think that there are traits and experiences that determine our nostalgic condition“, He says.
Avoid nostalgia
Nostalgia, in a way, is to recreate ourselves in the past, but unlike those who find a taste for those memories, there are those who live with the weight of not being able to forget anything, whether they like it or not. «Forgetfulness is a very unique experience since it cannot be induced. We can make an effort to remember, but no one has yet been able to invent a strategy that enables us to forget at will, ”explains Garrocho. In the same way that memory can be trained, the philosopher says that “he would love for an academy of oblivion to exist.”
Being nostalgic people makes us perceive the present through a specific perspective. Bárbara Lucendo points out two aspects of how that longing can build our relationship with today. On the one hand, he explains that being a nostalgic person «can mean longing for that past finding ourselves between feelings of loneliness, disconnection from the current moment and of the people around us ». But, on the other, there are times when nostalgia has the totally opposite effect and carries positive implications, since it can improve our mood and provide greater emotional security. “This makes us see the past as a useful source of learning for the present moment,” he says.
Nostalgia can have ‘benefits’ for us because it doesn’t necessarily have to have a negative side. “Plato already told us that there were forms of healthy pain and, since then, not a few have considered that there is a form of lucidity that only occurs in sadness or melancholy,” explains Diego S. Garrocho. Although he warns that he does not want to “grant pessimism any intellectual prestige”, he does assure that, in the case of nostalgia, the most hopeful note is the possibility of return: “The nostalgic longs for a time that happened but that memory can serve as an emotional motor to try to return to that place to which, in some way or another, we belong.
Melancholy or longing
Melancholy is often used as a synonym for longing. The psychologist Bárbara Lucendo comments that although these two feelings share many similarities, they also have many other nuances that make them different. One of the main differences is the effect they have on the person who experiences them. “While melancholy causes in the individual a feeling of dissatisfaction with his personal life, nostalgia does not have this effect, “says the professional, who adds that the experience of nostalgia is linked to a specific memory while melancholy, and its consequences, occurs more widely over time. On the other hand, melancholy is born from sad thoughts and is associated with experiences of unpleasant emotions, making the person feel down and without enthusiasm, while nostalgia can be connected with both unpleasant and pleasant emotions due to the memory of what has been lived.
Nostalgia, says Diego S. Garrocho, is an exercise in fiction: he considers memory to be an ego-defensive faculty, since it protects us from our own mediocrity and aspires to recreate the days gone by with an epic and with a dignity that they probably do not deserve. However, he argues that people sometimes have the need to recreate our experiences precisely to place the past up to our expectations. “I think this exercise can be, I don’t know if it is healthy, but it is at least legitimate as long as it does not exceed certain limits,” he says.