The Pain of Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a word that is derived from the Greek words nostos, meaning “return home,” and algos, meaning “pain.” We use this word in the modern day to represent a sense of sentimental longing towards the past. With the rise of technology and how fast it has advanced, this phenomenon has become a lot more widespread. It’s almost impossible to go onto the internet and not find someone nostalgic for the late 90s or early 2000s, often referencing the technology of the time, such as VHS tapes, old gaming consoles, or cathode-ray tube (CRT) television sets. While indulging in these things is an action typically associated with comfort, I associate nostalgia much more with the painful element.

With the modern sociopolitical landscape, thinking about the future is terrifying. Even the idea of getting through the week can fill a person with a sense of fear and uncertainty. To combat these feelings, I find myself thinking a lot more about my past, a time when everything in life felt better. Interestingly, if I look at it from an analytical perspective, my past wasn’t actually much better than the present day. My high school years were immensely difficult, plagued with terrible mental health, poor friendships, and a lack of motivation to even attempt to make my future seem bright. Yet, despite all the hardships I associate with it, I find myself nostalgic for my high school days, dwelling for hours on the conversations long since finished and the friends I haven’t seen in years. Nostalgia has warped my perspective of these situations, seemingly erasing the negative and focusing on the positive, solely to paint a picture that life was better in those days.

When I think further about why I might feel a sense of nostalgia regarding what should ultimately be a terrible time in my life, I realize that it has nothing to do with genuinely believing the past to be better. Instead, I find myself wishing that I had less knowledge. The older I get, the more I know, both in terms of general facts about the world around me, but also about myself. People don’t feel nostalgic for times, they feel nostalgic for naïveté. A prime example for me was the start of the COVID-19 lockdowns. I associate that time in early 2020 so heavily with a feeling of being happy and free, expressing myself in online environments, but that isn’t necessarily true to my actual lived experiences of that time. COVID was terrifying, especially for a 17-year-old who now had all her plans derailed by a once-in-a-century global event. But, because I had a sense of naïveté and knew less than I do now, I hold very fond memories of that time, potentially more so than those who were further along in life when everything happened.

The worst part about nostalgia isn't being unable to experience the things I find nostalgic — I own more VHS tapes than the average person my age probably does due to nostalgia. The part that feels the worst is the fact that I will never be that same person ever again. Knowledge is power, but knowledge is also pain. The feeling of nostalgia exacerbates that pain, reminding me that as time marches forward, the girl I was at 17 no longer exists. Those conversations, those friends, everything I experienced will not be experienced again. Some days, it feels as though the pain will follow me through the rest of my life before it inevitably swallows me whole.