Nostalgia Can Help Us Deal With Disillusionment

For many of us, it begins with Santa Claus. We spend a portion of our childhood believing that one night each year, a jolly old elf comes down our chimney and generously distributes toys and treats around our Christmas tree. And then, one sad, inevitable day, we discover the truth. Whether the result of a conversation with a worldly-wise kid at school or the chance discovery of brand-new toys in a seldom-used closet, our cherished belief in Santa evaporates in an instant under the harsh, cold glare of quotidian reality, and the world is forever a less magical place as a result.

Source: S. Hermann & F. Richter/Pixabay

Sadder but wiser

Whether the catalyst happens to be Santa Claus or some other childhood ideal, there comes a time in every person’s life when we discover that some cherished belief we have always held is not true, and following this first discovery is a long train of other such discoveries, the cumulative effect of which is to convince us that the world is not as grand a place as we thought it was. In a word, we become disillusioned.

To the extent that our childish illusions are false or flawed in some way, a certain degree of disillusionment is an inevitable and necessary part of growing up. It would not be emotionally healthy (not to mention socially advantageous) to continue believing in Saint Nick into our teens and 20s, after all. The challenge, of course, is to abandon or at least qualify our illusions about the world without at the same time losing the sense of meaning that those illusions helped to maintain (to become “wiser” without becoming “sadder” to reverse the cliché).

Recent research from the University of Limerick, Ireland, suggests that one potential hedge against the sadness that wisdom can bring is nostalgia. Exploring the effect that “thoughts of past fondness and glory” have upon the loss of meaning that frequently attends disillusionment, the researchers hypothesized that nostalgia could provide “a refuge of meaningfulness” in the face of disillusionment.

Disillusionment reduces meaning

To test their hypothesis, they conducted a series of three studies. In the first study, designed to test whether disillusionment did, indeed, lower people’s sense of meaning, participants were assigned either to a disillusionment or control group. Those in the disillusionment group were provided with a definition of disillusionment (“being dissatisfied or defeated in expectation or hope”) and then instructed to “think of a disillusioning issue that affects the world we live in,” bringing the disillusioning experience to mind in such a way as to immerse themselves in it, and then to describe in detail how the issue made them feel. The control group was instructed to think of an “ordinary event” in their lives and describe how mentally immersing themselves in that event made them feel.

After the writing task, participants in both groups completed a manipulation check by reporting, on a scale from 1-7, how disillusioned they felt, and then responded to five items measuring perceived meaning. As expected, participants in the disillusionment group felt a higher degree of disillusionment and experienced a lower sense of meaning than those in the control group, supporting the hypothesis that “disillusionment reduces an overall sense of meaning.”

Nostalgia mitigates the loss of meaning

In the second study, designed to test whether “nostalgia suppresses the impact of disillusionment on meaning,” participants were presented with the same writing task for disillusionment manipulation as in Study 1, and then completed an “epistemic meaning search scale” in which they rated their agreement with three statements: “After the writing I did on a previous page, I have a desire to make better sense of the world”; “The writing gives me a need to understand the world better”; and “After the writing, I am motivated to find more meaning.” Next, participants were asked to “bring to mind a memory from the past” and briefly describe it, reporting four keywords relevant to the memory before describing it in more detail.

Following this memory recall task, the researchers measured the participants’ nostalgia levels by having them rate their responses to two questions (“Right now, I am feeling quite nostalgic,” and “Right now, I am having nostalgic feelings”) and then complete a “Meaning in Life” Questionnaire. An analysis of the data revealed that “the disillusionment induction caused more nostalgia… which in turn predicted higher meaning in life,” supporting their hypothesis that “disillusioned individuals engage in nostalgic reflection, and that this instills life with meaning; hence preventing the meaning loss otherwise associated with disillusionment.”

To more directly observe the role of nostalgia as a resource in preventing the meaning loss associated with disillusionment, a third study was conducted in which both disillusionment and nostalgia were manipulated. Specifically, among participants in the disillusionment condition, the researchers induced nostalgia in some (by asking them to describe a nostalgic event) and prevented nostalgia in others (assigning them a cognitive load manipulation that involved counting backward). As predicted, disillusioned participants who engaged in nostalgic reflection reported higher meaning in life than the disillusioned participants who counted backward. In other words, “disillusionment reduced sense of meaning when nostalgia was prevented but not when it was facilitated,” demonstrating that “'by virtue' of nostalgia, disillusionment does not reduce meaning in life as much as it otherwise would.”

Memory Essential Reads

How to Change Your Outlook by Shaping Your Negative Memories

How to Hold On to Your Best Memories

The comedian George Carlin once observed that “if you scratch a cynic, you’ll find a disappointed idealist.” While there is a good deal of truth in this observation—many cynics do start out as idealists—it doesn’t necessarily follow that every disappointed idealist ends up as a cynic. The real world is undeniably hard on idealists, chipping away one ideal after another and replacing it with cold, hard facts until the idealistic youth becomes the thoroughly disillusioned adult.

The inevitable disillusionment of life need not make us sad and cynical, however, so long as we don’t allow it to erode our sense of life’s fundamental meaning. One potential hedge against such a loss of meaning, demonstrated in a number of psychological studies to be “a robust and reliable resource of meaning,” is nostalgia. Reflecting back on meaningful experiences in our past can give us confidence that our lives have meaning in the present and optimism that they will continue to have meaning in the future. Nostalgia cannot prevent us from experiencing disillusionment, but it can allow us to endure disillusionment without losing our sense of meaning so that we emerge from disillusioning experiences not as cynics, but as realists, fully aware of the illusory nature of some of our beliefs, but adaptable to the real world revealed to us through our more enlightened perspective.