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Key points
- Nostalgia is a common human tendency, affecting us and our decisions in politics and other areas.
- Nostalgia can comfort us and buffer against painful current realities.
- Nostalgia also distorts the past and can lure us into inaccurate perceptions.
As a psychiatrist, I once treated a woman who had pursued and had a two-week affair with her boss. He was a successful married businessman with two children, and she was his secretary. She told me he had promised her that he would leave his wife for her. But he then ended the affair. My patient felt furious and betrayed, and desperately wanted to renew the relationship. Single for several years, she romanticized this brief past fling. At the office, she constantly argued with him.
Over several months, I repeatedly tried to engage her in reality testing, to focus on finding a new job and potentially a new romantic interest. I have treated other patients as well who fixated on the past, and had trouble focusing instead on the present. Usually, reality testing eventually helps, but it is not always easy.
I have recently been thinking about these patients as millions of voters seek to return to the past, to "Making American Great Again." In the recent debate between the vice presidential candidates, for instance, JD Vance talked several times about going backwards, arguing, “We're going to get back to that common-sense wisdom.”
Many observers remain perplexed why tens of millions of voters fix so resolutely on particular views of the past.
Recent research on the psychology of nostalgia suggests why. Our brains can store only so much information, so we consciously or unconsciously pick and choose. Unfortunately, we are highly selective in our recall, and commonly fail to recognize the discrepancies. We have the illusion that we accurately remember earlier events, and forget how much we have forgotten.
Importantly, nostalgia frequently alters and distorts our recollections. In 1688, a Swiss medical student, Johannes Hofer, first coined the term “nostalgia.” He noticed Swiss mercenary troops away from home becoming physically ill when they thought about their native country, often after hearing a sweet, melodic traditional Swiss song about cowbells. He combined the Greek nostos, meaning “homeward bound” (first used by Homer to describe Odysseus’ longing to return home), and alga or pain.
I, too, at times, get nostalgic. I love wandering in old historic towns, from Athens, Rome and Venice to cities like Dublin, largely unchanged since 1914. The preserved streets provide a sense of what it must have been like to live then. Similarly, many of us admire Greenwich Village, Beacon Hill and Georgetown, partly because their intact historical characters evoke earlier, simpler times, more grounded and less cluttered with modern intrusions. We long for the past, which seemed somehow easier.
Recent studies suggest that 79% of people get nostalgic at least once a week, often triggered by loneliness, meaninglessness and negative mood. Nostalgia, in fact, enhances mood, self-regard and well-being, giving people a sense of purpose, social connection and belonging, and helping in coping with stress, diminishing pain and loneliness, and providing positive memories to buffer against hardships. People want to feel good, not bad about themselves and their past—even if it was not always so wonderful—and remember good times more than bad ones.
This trait is inherently human, and comforts us in our individual lives, but becomes dangerous in politics, romanticizing history and warping the truth. Rosy pictures of the past blind people to current problems.
So, what should we do? Foremost, we need to recognize fully the limitations and distortions of our selective memories, beware of conflating them reality, and work to remind ourselves and other voters of the past more accurately.
Certain politicians' promise of returning to a vague, mythic, idealized America carefully selects certain facts and dismisses others, and is impossible to re-create. Many Americans look back fondly on the late 1950s and early 1960s, when factories seemed to boom and people drove big, gas-guzzling cars. But wars also raged. Millions of Americans faced discrimination, and we had only five TV channels and lacked cellphones, online shopping, banking, airline, hotel, restaurant and theatre reservations, dating, Google, or Uber.
Turning back clocks is impossible, just as we cannot return to our own personal pasts, our youth, to look younger, or possess additional energy, sex appeal, and more decades of life than we have now.
In the face of urges to return to the past, rather than accept present realities, psychotherapy has demonstrated the importance of reality testing.
Especially in our current era of disinformation, fake news and AI bots, it is essential to recall to voters as vividly as possible.
But, importantly, as I saw with my patient who had had an affair with her boss, reality testing, while crucial, can meet resistance. Certain individuals cling to the past, denying evidence, and avoiding facts they don’t like. When pushed to face it, they can become anxious, furious and at times impulsive, lashing out, since facts are not necessarily neutral data, but carry emotional meaning, threatening firmly-held beliefs. As I have seen with patients, on-going, repeated reality testing may be needed.
Ultimately, my patient managed to find a new job and boss—to move on—and felt better. Success is thus possible.
I hope more voters can shift from the past, too. Many people feel resigned to the power of nostalgic distortions, and fear that little can be done in response. But we must continue with vigilant fact checking and reality testing since, as I saw with my patient, eventually, with countless people, it works.
