The Longing for Yesterday

Rose-colored-glasses and the double-edged sword of nostalgia

Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live the “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.

This month we’re exploring the theme of the sublime.

Built within each of us is a longing for the past.

It isn’t always there, and often does not appear in life until we’ve experienced enough loss and transitioned through enough turmoil that we long for what is no more.

This pull for a past time is often referred to as nostalgia, the emotional drive to seek things from the past, an attachment to a certain moment in time.

Most often, nostalgia is brought forth during moments of loss, when we’re pushed back on our heels during times of frief and turn inward to reflect upon life and its transitory nature.

This longing for yesterday plays a vital part in our lives and is incredibly important to how we function on a day-to-day basis.

But it also holds a dark side if we’re not careful.

The Good of Nostalgia

Clay Routledge, one of the leading researchers for the emotion of nostalgia, points out that while nostalgia is rooted in the past, it is actually an emotion to help drive progress.

“Most people don't want to live exactly like their ancestors did; they want to use the past as inspiration for improving their lives. They are borrowing from the past to build a better future.”

This is the power of nostalgia according to Routledge. Coined in the 1680s by the Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer, nostalgia was originally thought of as a condition wherein one longed to return home. Since then, however, nostalgia has been shown to be more representative of our “yearning for the past” when life becomes chaotic and out of control.

Nostalgia also plays crucial roles in our daily lives and how we view ourselves. Because nostalgia is rooted in the past, it assists us in keeping our narrative self, or the “self-story” we hold, in tact.

It is through reflection of the self and our lives that nostalgia is allowed to flourish. While we often experience the emotion from loss, “it ultimately makes people feel happier, more authentic and self-confident, more loved and supported, and more likely to perceive life as meaningful.”

It is from this that we actually take action. So while nostalgia and a longing for the past and rosier times often seems distant, the emotion drives us forward, pushing us to improve our future.

“Nostalgia starts with people self-reflecting on cherished memories, but it also drives people to look outside of themselves, help others, create, and innovate.”

Ultimately, nostalgia is heavily linked to our memories with others—our friends, family, and loved ones. It is through the losses of these individuals that nostalgia helps transform us, looking at life with an eye on its transitory nature and a turning our attention on building stronger relations while people are still alive.

“Often our nostalgic longing for people who have died inspires us to better appreciate loved ones who are still alive. We're reminded that life is transient and that the most meaningful experiences are usually the ones we share with family and friends.”

The Dark Side of Nostalgia

While nostalgia helps to “lift our spirits and offers stability and guidance when life becomes chaotic and the future becomes uncertain,” it also has some severe downsides.

Ironically enough, because nostalgia is an emotion that brings us to the past, it is easy for us to manipulate our own memories, changing what was into what we think happened.

This is due to the fact that when we recall a memory, we’re not going to a drawer in our mind, opening it, grabbing a folder with the memory and retrieving it. Instead, as we go to the file drawer for the memory, our mind is frantically working to recreate that memory from the bits and pieces it recalls. This often results in an inconsistent memory that we then can more easily alter.

When this occurs, it often means that we build a past that was more pleasant than it was and as such, has the warm glow that nostalgia loves to place on our memories. In other words, our memories move from reality to a rose-tinted remembrance of what once was.

An easy example is how we’re nostalgic about music and listening to it on vinyl records. We gush about how we stood in line waiting to buy our favorite band’s new music but we neglect the fact that it was freezing outside, we lost the feeling in our toes, and held our bladder for three hours.

This is due in part because we tend to remember the highs of our experiences more than the lows according to Chip and Dan Heath.

Today, we can listen to a near infinite selection of music with a few clicks on our phones and yet we build in our minds the joy and glory of the good old days when music had to be bought in the store and on multiple records.

This pull for the past and lack of consistent historical narrative also makes us susceptible to the stories others try and tell. Politicians for example, will often look to nostalgia as a key in their quest to rewrite the past and create a ‘mythic story’¹ that best aligns to the narrative they are pushing in the present.

This mythic past often builds upon the narrative of a great time and how the current issues are due to whoever is in power. They then wield these false stories to try and align mass amounts of people to their cause.

By being discontent in the present, by  allowing ignorance of our fallibility to the past, we easily corrupt ourselves to the whims of these individuals and fall victim to their deceits and narratives.

As Eric Hoffer once pointed out, “though a mass movement first turns its back on the past, it eventually develops a vivid awareness, often specious, of a distant glorious past.”

The Nostalgic Sublime

While nostalgia is about the past and a desire for it, the sublime is our desire for the better—to be greater than even imaginable.

This is not to say we do not aspire today for greatness. Looking around, we see tremendous achievements that several hundreds years ago would never have been imagined whether it be the way we live, the medical treatment and eradication of diseases, or the ability to travel faster than ever before.

Rather, we’re living in a time unlike any other and with such have seen massive change and disruption.

Rates of belief in God are down, as are our faith in the institutions that have held us up. Cynicism, denial, and anarchism have begun to instead fill some of these gaps. At other times, we’ve looked to science as a path forward to answer some of our biggest questions.

But with all this knowledge also comes a somewhat paradoxical longing for simpler times. Was it not simpler to work for the same company your entire career? Was it not complete knowledge to be told God was the answer to all things? Was it not better for us to live in communities versus the individualized image-driven nature of today?

Built within all of this is a pull for the “good old days,” yet the good old days are hard to define from memory as they never existed for many of us.

And still this desire for more, for better, for greatness continues to evade us.

We were told it would be found in consumer products such as the houses we bought and the cars we drove, the toothpaste we used or the beer we drank. But these were empty promises, at least until a new product was made that “fixed” the hole that was perpetually empty.

We long for something but can’t quite put our finger on it.

I would argue what we’re look for, and what is lacking, is virtue.

Not virtue in the virtue-signaling sense, what we see politicians continually try and use to sway public opinion. Rather, what we’re missing is the desire to be the best versions of ourselves, the ones that worked to hold a virtuous character and to uphold the lofty ideals laid down before us.

We’ve become complacent expecting others to fill our needs when in reality what we need and how we fulfill it is within ourselves.

The greatest empire is not outside us, Seneca once said, but within us.  “That no one is fit to rule who is not first master of themselves.”

Instead of continuing in the tradition of those who came before us we outsourced our happiness, our flourishment, our virtue, to those who promised to give it and never did.

Instead, as we feel this longing for better lives, we must turn inward. Rather than pointing the finger at others, we must look in the mirror at ourselves and ask, what am I doing today to build my empire?

Building one’s character is not about virtue-signaling. It is not about fame or fortune. It is about putting in the work to be the best version of ourselves. To allow ourselves to flourish.

And once we do that, we help all around us flourish as well.

Rather than longing for some mythic past that never existed, we should long for the best version of ourselves and take the appropriate steps to accomplish such.

Until next time,

D.A. DiGerolamo

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1. See Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, and Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works