The Allure of Nostalgia

Why We Crave the Good Old Days

This week I went down a rabbit hole losing an hour of my life I can never reclaim. Usually, I maintain a strict social media diet consuming a balanced amount of family/friend updates, and educational information garnished with TED Talks and sprinkled with news. This week I raided the junk food aisle. It’s true confession time. Not only did I read, I commented (twice).

There’s a social media app where you can share scary photos from your doorbell camera with neighbors and rant about the terrible service you had last night at a local restaurant. Allegedly, 1 in 3 households in America use the app, so it will remain nameless here.

The original poster was saddened by the growth and changes in an “amazingly enjoyable small community” over the past 25 years lamenting the influx of people, buildings, and traffic.

At that point, the lions entered the coliseum and it was on! Hundreds of comments and 3 days later, the site closed the discussion.

It is easy to look at the past with rose-colored glasses and yearn for a time when life was simpler. With six decades in my rearview mirror, I confidently know the outcome of every corporate move, vacation, and relationship of the past. The outcome of my current life choices are unknown and we cannot fathom the future.

In 1979 an Illinois Bell repairman arrived to install a pink princess phone in the bedroom of my first apartment along with a blue rotary phone in the living room! I was accused of reckless spending by a friend with a single black wall phone in their kitchen. Forty-five years later the mobile phone is a Swiss Army knife of gadgets. It is a calendar,  GPS, camera, video recorder, map, flashlight, calculator, photo album, clock, magnifying glass, wallet, and much more. No one is going back to the kitchen wall phone.

Photo by Bhargav Panchal on Unsplash

In 1971 when Carly Simon sang, “Anticipation” her chorus was “These are the good old days.” In 1976 Stevie Wonder released “I Wish” in the Songs in the Key of Life album, his chorus included, “I wish those days could come back once more.” Next month Stevie Wonder will be 74 years old and Carly Simon is nearly 80 years old. From 1971 until 1979, the television show All in the Family opened with “Those Were the Days.” The desire for nostalgia has always been with us.

A psychology professor in Syracuse, NY has studied nostalgia since the 1990s. Her research and others believe our brains are hard-wired to crave nostalgia. Studies have shown people feel a sense of warmness, fondness, and belonging thinking of the past. Their research confirms movies and music trigger nostalgia and during tough transitions a trip to the past often provides comfort.

There is good news and bad news for the original poster on social media. The bad news is the suburb you moved to in 1999 is not going backward. The good news is that property values have more than doubled in the past twenty-five years. Maybe it is time to cash in and find the next “amazingly enjoyable small community.”