Nostalgia
Based on Wikipedia: Nostalgia
In 1688, a Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer faced a puzzle. Mercenary soldiers from Switzerland, hired to fight in foreign lands, were dying—not from battle wounds, but from an inexplicable wasting illness. They refused food. They wept uncontrollably. Some developed fevers so severe they couldn't recover. The only cure that worked was sending them home.
Hofer needed a name for this condition, so he reached back to ancient Greek. He combined nóstos, meaning "homecoming"—the same word Homer used to describe Odysseus's decade-long journey back to Ithaca—with álgos, meaning "pain." The result was nostalgia: the pain of homecoming, or more precisely, the pain of wanting to come home but being unable to.
What began as a fatal military disease is now an emotion we scroll through on Instagram. How did we get here?
When Homesickness Could Kill You
The Swiss mercenaries weren't just sad. Military physicians documented soldiers fainting, running dangerous fevers, and in some cases, simply dying. The condition was so common among Swiss troops specifically that it earned the nickname "mal du Suisse"—the Swiss illness.
Why the Swiss in particular? One theory centered on their homeland's distinctive geography. These soldiers had grown up in the Alps, surrounded by dramatic peaks and the sound of cattle bells echoing across mountain valleys. When they found themselves stationed in the flat plains of foreign countries, something in them broke.
Military commanders eventually identified a trigger: music. Swiss folk songs called Kuhreihen, or Ranz des vaches—simple melodies originally sung to call cattle—could send homesick soldiers into dangerous spirals. The songs were banned outright. According to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing in 1767, Swiss mercenaries faced severe punishment if caught singing their mountain songs. The melodies were considered that dangerous.
This wasn't metaphorical danger. It was tactical. Commanders worried that nostalgia-stricken soldiers would desert, fall ill, or simply lose the will to fight. The only reliable cure was discharge—sending the soldier home. But receiving such a diagnosis was considered shameful, almost an insult to one's toughness.
The Search for the Nostalgia Bone
Eighteenth-century medicine treated nostalgia as a physical disease, which meant scientists went looking for its physical cause. Where in the body did nostalgia live?
Researchers literally searched for a "nostalgic bone"—some anatomical structure that might explain why certain people fell ill with longing while others seemed immune. They didn't find one, of course. But the search reveals how seriously the medical establishment took the condition. This wasn't dismissed as mere sadness or weakness of character. It was investigated with the same rigor applied to any other potentially fatal illness.
By the 1850s, the concept began to shift. Nostalgia stopped being classified as a disease in itself and started being seen as a symptom—a warning sign that might indicate deeper psychological troubles. Physicians linked it to melancholia, what we would now call depression, and noted its frequent appearance in suicide cases.
But old classifications die hard. During the American Civil War, military doctors still diagnosed soldiers with nostalgia. Cases appeared again in both World Wars, with the American armed forces taking particular interest in understanding and treating the condition. Too many soldiers were leaving the front lines, incapacitated by an invisible enemy that no amount of discipline could defeat.
The Modern Reversal
Something remarkable happened to nostalgia in the twentieth century. It flipped.
The condition that once warranted medical treatment and military discharge transformed into something people actively sought out. Nostalgia went from being a disease to being a marketing strategy. From a symptom of psychological distress to a source of comfort. From potentially fatal to reliably pleasant.
How?
Part of the answer lies in what nostalgia actually does to us when we experience it now, in our modern context of safety and stability. Researchers have discovered that nostalgic reflection triggers a cascade of psychological benefits. It improves mood. It increases feelings of social connection. It enhances self-esteem. It even, remarkably, makes people feel physically warmer.
That last finding deserves emphasis. In controlled studies, participants who engaged in nostalgic reflection literally perceived the room temperature as higher than participants who didn't. The warmth of fond memories isn't just a metaphor—it appears to be a measurable physiological response.
Why Your Brain Lies About the Past
Here's an uncomfortable truth: the past you remember probably never existed.
Psychologists have identified a cognitive bias called "rosy retrospection"—our systematic tendency to remember past events more positively than we actually experienced them at the time. That summer vacation you recall as perfect? You probably complained about the heat, got sunburned, and argued with your travel companions. But memory has a way of airbrushing the irritations while preserving the highlights.
This bias creates what researchers call the "nostalgia effect." We consistently perceive the past as better than the present, even when objective measures suggest otherwise. Crime rates might be falling, life expectancy rising, and material comforts expanding—but still, things were better back then. The good old days always seem to be behind us, no matter when "now" happens to be.
When this bias gets applied to society as a whole rather than personal memories, it earns a different name: declinism. This is the conviction that institutions, cultures, and civilizations are in perpetual decline—that whatever we have now is a degraded version of what came before.
One researcher described declinism as "a trick of the mind" and "an emotional strategy, something comforting to snuggle up to when the present day seems intolerably bleak." It's easier to believe things are getting worse than to grapple with the genuine complexity of a world that's simultaneously improving in some ways and deteriorating in others.
The Comfort Machine
Modern nostalgia operates primarily as a coping mechanism—and a surprisingly effective one.
Studies have shown that people who are prone to nostalgic reflection cope better with stress at every stage of the process. They're better at planning strategies to address problems. They're better at implementing those strategies. And they're better at reframing difficulties in positive terms. Nostalgia doesn't just feel good; it appears to build psychological resilience.
The mechanism seems to work through social connection. When we feel nostalgic, we're usually remembering people—family members, friends, romantic partners. These memories remind us that we've been loved, that we've belonged, that we've mattered to others. Even when those relationships exist only in memory now, recalling them restores our sense of being connected to something larger than ourselves.
This explains one of nostalgia's most interesting properties: it's frequently triggered by loneliness, but it counteracts loneliness. Researchers found that lonely people often have diminished perceptions of social support—they feel more isolated than their actual circumstances might warrant. When these same lonely people engage in nostalgic reflection, their perceptions of social support increase. The memories of past connection become, in effect, a bridge to present well-being.
What Triggers the Time Machine
Emotion is the key that unlocks nostalgic memory. When a stimulus reaches your brain, it first passes through the amygdala—the brain region responsible for processing emotional information. If that stimulus carries emotional weight, it gets flagged for special attention. This is why nostalgia tends to be triggered by sensory experiences rather than abstract thoughts.
Music is perhaps the most reliable trigger. A song you haven't heard in twenty years can instantly transport you to the specific moment you first heard it—who you were with, what you were feeling, even what the weather was like. But there's a catch: songs you've heard continuously throughout your life lose this time-traveling power. They become associated with too many periods to evoke any particular one. It's the songs that disappeared from your life and then reappeared that carry the strongest nostalgic charge.
Movies and television shows work similarly, especially for people who encountered them at formative ages. The animation renaissance of the 1990s, for instance, created a generation of adults for whom films like The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast carry powerful nostalgic associations. Researchers have found that rewatching such films can be genuinely therapeutic, allowing viewers to access the emotional safety of childhood through the lens of adult understanding.
Video games have emerged as a particularly potent trigger for more recent generations. The phenomenon of "retro gaming"—adults deliberately seeking out the games they played as children—has become its own subculture. There's something about the combination of music, visuals, and the muscle memory of learned controls that creates an especially immersive form of time travel.
Places matter enormously. The home where you grew up, the school you attended, the venue where you got married—these locations carry accumulated emotional weight that can be released simply by being there. Even photographs of such places can trigger the response, though less intensely.
And then there's weather. Cold temperatures, it turns out, make people more nostalgic. This might seem paradoxical until you consider the feedback loop: nostalgia makes people feel warmer, so cold weather might trigger nostalgic reflection as a kind of psychological temperature regulation. We warm ourselves with memories when the world around us grows cold.
Two Kinds of Longing
The cultural theorist Svetlana Boym proposed a distinction that helps explain why nostalgia can be both comforting and dangerous.
She identified two fundamentally different ways of relating to the past: restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia.
Restorative nostalgia focuses on the nóstos—the homecoming itself. It wants to rebuild the lost home, to recover the idealized past and make it present again. This form of nostalgia takes itself deadly seriously. It doesn't acknowledge itself as longing; it presents itself as truth. The past really was better, and we can get it back if we just try hard enough.
Reflective nostalgia, by contrast, focuses on the álgia—the longing itself. It dwells in the bittersweet space of knowing that the past is past. It doesn't try to reconstruct what's been lost but instead contemplates the nature of loss and memory. This form of nostalgia is self-aware, even ironic. It knows that the past it remembers never quite existed in the form it remembers it.
The distinction matters because restorative nostalgia can be weaponized. Politicians and movements can invoke an idealized past—a time when things were simpler, purer, greater—to provoke social and cultural anxieties. Research has shown that people experiencing major disruptions and uncertainties in their lives become more susceptible to nostalgic appeals. By creating a sense of present crisis, political actors can amplify the attractiveness of a promised return to former glory.
One recent study examined different portrayals of apartheid in South Africa through this lens. It found that restorative nostalgia—the desire to return to that past—operates very differently from reflective nostalgia that critically examines what that past actually meant. The distinction between "I wish we could go back" and "I understand why some people miss aspects of that time, even as I recognize its horrors" is the difference between historical amnesia and historical reckoning.
Nostalgia and Its Shadow
In 2003, the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined a new term to describe a form of distress that had no adequate name: solastalgia.
He built it from the Latin sōlācium, meaning comfort, and the same Greek álgos that Hofer had used three centuries earlier. But solastalgia describes something different from nostalgia—something in some ways opposite.
Nostalgia is triggered by spatial separation. You're far from home, and you long to return. Even if you never make it back, the possibility of return exists in principle. The place you miss is still there, waiting.
Solastalgia is triggered by the destruction of home while you remain in place. The separation isn't spatial but ontological—a philosophical term meaning it relates to the fundamental nature of being. The place you loved no longer exists, even though you're still standing in it. The familiar forest has been logged. The coral reef has bleached. The neighborhood has been demolished for development. You can't go home because home isn't somewhere else. Home is gone, replaced by something else wearing its name.
This distinction illuminates something important about nostalgia itself. Part of what makes nostalgic reflection psychologically beneficial is the implicit promise that the past still exists somewhere—in memory if nowhere else. Solastalgia denies this comfort. The grief is for something truly and irrecoverably lost.
The Nostalgia Industry
Once nostalgia stopped being a disease and started being a pleasure, an entire industry arose to supply it.
Publishers release books specifically designed to evoke nostalgic feelings—collections of old advertisements, compilations of forgotten toys, visual histories of decades past. Movie studios mine their back catalogs for properties to reboot, knowing that audiences raised on the originals will pay for the chance to feel young again. Video game companies sell "classic" consoles pre-loaded with titles from the 1980s and 1990s. Even product packaging sometimes returns to "retro" designs, explicitly trading on consumers' associations with childhood.
The commercialization of nostalgia raises interesting questions about authenticity. When you feel nostalgic for a product specifically designed to trigger nostalgia, what exactly are you remembering? The original experience? The subsequent reconstructions of that experience? The feeling of nostalgia itself?
But the industry also points to something real about human psychology. We want to feel connected to our own pasts. We want to believe that who we were matters to who we are. We want, perhaps, to keep faith with the child we once were by honoring the things that child loved.
Growth and Memory
Here's something counterintuitive: nostalgia—that backward-looking emotion—actually makes people more interested in moving forward.
Researchers found that nostalgic reflection increases people's willingness to engage in growth-oriented behaviors. After experiencing nostalgia, people rated themselves higher on statements like "I am the kind of person who embraces unfamiliar people, events, and places." They expressed more interest in exploring new places they'd never been.
How does looking backward make you want to move forward?
The researchers identified two pathways. First, nostalgia makes people feel good, and feeling good makes people more willing to take risks. Second, nostalgia increases self-esteem, and higher self-esteem makes people more confident in their ability to handle new challenges.
There may be a deeper logic at work. Nostalgic memory often focuses on periods of transition and growth—childhood giving way to adolescence, adolescence to adulthood, new relationships, new homes, new phases of life. By reminding us that we've successfully navigated changes before, nostalgia might give us courage to navigate changes ahead. The past becomes not an anchor but a launching pad.
The Continuing Mystery
Why does remembering the past make us feel warmer? Why does an emotion originally classified as potentially fatal now seem reliably beneficial? Why do cold temperatures trigger nostalgic reflection, creating a feedback loop of memory and perceived warmth?
These questions point to something we still don't fully understand about the relationship between memory, emotion, and physical sensation. The amygdala—that emotional processing center where nostalgic memories get their charge—is deeply connected to the brain's systems for regulating body temperature, heart rate, and other physical states. Mind and body aren't as separate as we sometimes imagine them to be.
What we do know is that nostalgia serves functions. It restores social connection when we feel lonely. It buffers threats to meaning when life seems purposeless. It provides warmth when the world grows cold. It reminds us that we have been loved, that we have belonged, that we have mattered.
The Swiss mercenaries who died of homesickness on foreign plains were suffering from a real condition, even if we now understand it differently than their physicians did. They had been severed from everything that gave their lives context and meaning. Their bodies responded to that psychological wound as bodies do—with fever, wasting, and sometimes death.
We've gotten better at maintaining connection across distance. We've gotten better at carrying our contexts with us. We've learned to trigger nostalgic reflection deliberately, using music and photographs and visits to meaningful places as tools for emotional regulation.
But underneath all of this sophistication lies the same fundamental human need that Johannes Hofer observed in 1688: we need to feel that we belong somewhere, to someone, to some continuous story that makes sense of who we are. When that sense of belonging is threatened, something in us hurts.
That hurt has a name. It always did.