CULTURE
WHY ARE WE SO OBSESSED WITH NOSTALGIA? KERRY POTTER TAKES A DEEP DIVE INTO THE PAST…
Like grief, nostalgia can sometimes hit you when you’re not expecting it. While watching the movie Saltburn, in which the two leads meet at university, I was transported back to my own student days. That dreamy intensity of new friendships and crushes. Everyone piling into the pub on a whim and then all back to someone’s house to talk nonsense until dawn. The sun streaming in through the window the next day to gently wake you – and the realisation that you have a languorously empty day ahead to nurse your hangover.
The movie’s time and place – Oxford, 2006 – doesn’t cor respond to my own university experience, but those feelings – being free, spontaneous, technically being an adult but not yet having to behave like one – sent me off into a delicious reverie. Aah, the good old days!
For me, the really good old days were the 1990s – the decade I return to most in my head. I spend too much time trawling a Facebook group called Raved In The ’90s, where people post bittersweet photos of car parks where my favourite nightclubs once stood. I’ve joyfully embraced the 1990s cargo pants revival – every time I pull on my Me+Em pair, I remember a boy I fancied back then telling me I looked like All Saints babe Nicole Appleton (he’s now my husband). I attend gigs by bands I’ve been trailing around after for three decades – Massive Attack this summer, Blur the last one (where all around me in the stands were middle-aged men crying because they were happy).
‘We tend to be the most nostalgic for our coming-of-age period – late teens, early 20s – because nostalgia is very tied to our sense of self,’ says historian Agnes Arnold-Forster, the author of Nostalgia: A History Of A Dangerous Emotion. ‘At that time you’re finding yourself, it’s an emotional, intense period. There are some big feelings to remember.’
Nostalgia has two purposes: social bonding and to improve our psychological wellbeing. ‘It makes people feel connected to other humans,’ says Arnold-Forster. ‘It’s rare we feel nostalgic about being alone – it’s almost always about collective experiences.’ And it’s interesting how we reframe those experiences; I may fondly recall the 1990s but, actually, my life wasn’t always so great back then. That tendency to wear rose-tinted glasses is, says Arnold-Forster, ‘our brains tricking us into remembering the past as better than it was. It wants us to feel good about it to help us feel closer to the people around us.’
So, nostalgia can be a handy therapeutic tool. ‘You get more nostalgic at times when your sense of self is under threat. You might feel anxious about ageing or your kids leaving home, and retreating into nostalgia is your brain giving you something comforting that makes you feel better,’ says
