What Psychology Tells Us About the Nostalgia Paradox

“One of the first things I do when I visit my parents’ home is to dig out old family photo albums and spread them out on the floor. I then sit down, and spend hours looking at all the pictures and reliving the memories attached to them.”

This anecdote was how I initially started this post on nostalgia. But then I thought about it a little more. I realized that I don’t usually do anything as dramatic as spreading out the photo albums on the floor. I take them out one by one, and most definitely do not spend “hours” at a time reliving my memories.

In essence, I had created a story that sounded nice and dramatic; I got nostalgic about my nostalgia.

The inaccuracy of our memories

Mark Twain apparently said, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” The human brain appears to adhere to this philosophy quite religiously. If my brain were an unreliable narrator about something that happened only a year ago, is it even reasonable to expect that it would accurately recall memories of events that occurred decades previously?

In his TED talk, Daniel Kahneman makes the distinction between how we live our lives on a day-to-day basis (the experiencing self), and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives (the remembering self). The best example I can think of is that of childbirth – for the experiencing self, it is an excruciatingly painful process. For the remembering self, however, which probably looks back at the experience a few years later, the predominant memory of the event is not of the pain, but of the fact that a baby was born at the end of it. (This makes the process feel like it was worth it, and possibly even worth doing all over again.)

This is also a good example of the fading affect bias – emotional memories associated with negative events fade more easily than those linked to a positive event or outcome.

In Professsor Kahneman’s words, “What defines a story are changes, significant moments, and endings.” Endings are so important, he says, that a person who had a colonoscopy that was overall not very painful but ended very painfully is going to have much worse memory of the event than another person who had not just a longer colonoscopy, but also one that was more painful overall.

Nostalgia as a paradoxical emotion

Now that we have established that our memories are not all that reliable, let us delve into the fascinatingly complex phenomenon of nostalgia. The term nostalgia—nostos refers to the desire to return home, and algos to pain—was coined in the late 17th century by physician Johannes Hofer to describe an illness affecting Swiss soldiers on battlegrounds away from home whose symptoms included anxiety, melancholia, and rumination.

The understanding of nostalgia over the previous few decades has shifted in meaningful ways. For one, it is no longer considered an illness or even a bad experience. Nostalgia is a paradoxical emotion, it can be incredibly sweet at the same time as it is sad. Scientists have also learned that nostalgia is not necessarily about one’s homeland. It is often far less specific—ranging from missing people to holidays in childhood, nostalgia is simply a general longing for the past.

The surprising benefits of personal nostalgia

What makes someone more susceptible to nostalgia? Not surprisingly, people who are lonely or otherwise unsatisfied with their current lives are more prone to viewing the past with rose-tinted glasses. Nostalgia also appears to strike people who are undergoing a transition in life—looking back at better, more stable times might give us the strength to cope with an uncertain future. People who have a propensity towards nostalgia are not just better able to cope with adversity, but also more likely to seek emotional support during trying times.

This autobiographical nostalgia, or personal nostalgia, comes with many benefits. Engaging with nostalgic memories can cause a decrease in loneliness and depression and has also been shown to reduce levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines that are involved in pain pathways.

The Golden Age: The dangers of historical nostalgia

But nostalgia has a dark side. Literary theorist Sveltlana Boym has described two kinds of nostalgia, reflective and restorative. While reflective nostalgia looks back at the past with a recognition that while things might have changed, some things have changed for the better, restorative nostalgia aims to bring back an idealized golden age.

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Restorative nostalgia is exploited by politicians all over the world who hark back to a glorious past. Hitler might have employed this tactic to devastating consequences in the 1930s, but this trend persists to this day—be it the Make America Great Again campaign, or the imperial nostalgia behind the Brexit campaign in the UK, to nationalistic regimes in countries like Brazil and India. Historical nostalgia aims to bring back a golden era, but golden for whom? At the expense of which groups of society?

By all reasonable measures of progress—including literacy, prosperity, and longevity—humankind is constantly getting better overall. We have far fewer wars now than a few decades earlier, we live in a less racist and a less sexist time, and society is moving to a more inclusionary framework.

But why are populist movements all over the world gaining so much traction now? What are the factors that cause people to be susceptible to historical nostalgia? A crucial factor, it seems, is the perception that a country is undergoing decline. Nostalgia also seems to be more prevalent among societies or communities that have lived through social catastrophe, the 2008 recession is a good example. Such a personal catastrophe, no doubt, provides fodder for "golden era-style" nostalgia, with a neat line in between “before catastrophe” and “after catastrophe.”

Of course, populism appeals not just to people who have undergone a negative life event. Historical nostalgia also appeals to groups of people who hold a privileged position in society today as a result of having been beneficiaries of an unequal system in the past. As is often said, “When you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

Interestingly, we do not have to have lived through a time to feel nostalgic about it. A cleverly painted picture by a politician, a collectively imagined past, works perfectly well. This longing for a period of history that we have never experienced ourselves has been dubbed anemoia.

In an interview with Mashable, Herman Gray, professor of sociology at University of California, Santa Cruz, said: "Nostalgia is softening the hard edges of history and intensifying those moments we find desirable." Given that our brains are such unreliable narrators of the past, and that humans have a tendency to paint a rosy picture of times gone by, we owe it to ourselves to examine our collective pasts with a critical lens and call out injustice that our own people have committed against others. While nostalgia might be a useful crutch to get through personal trauma, an excessive reliance on it can make us susceptible to viewing entire problematic histories as perfect. As Franklin Pierce Adams said, "Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory."