What Is Nostalgia Good For? Quite a Bit, Research Shows

I didn't know that "nostalgia" means "home pain" (pretty close to "homesickness", really) or that the term was invented by a 17th century Swiss physician. According to [1], it was a calque from the German "heimweh", presumably because if you were a 17th century physician, your new disease wasn't proper until it had a classical name. (Edit: in fact, "homesick" was also a calque from the German "heimweh", according to [2]. So "nostalgia" and "homesickness" are cognate!)

The article doesn't make clear how the researchers distinguish nostalgia from simply remembering with emotion, which is not the same thing.

[1] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=nostalgia

[2] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=homesickness

The researcher set out to prove his own pet hypothesis, several of the experiments quoted are based on self-reported results (of "feeling warmer"?) and the whole thing seems wholly unquantifiable.

People "felt loved" and "that life is worth" living. Who asked them? Were those leading questions? Did they spontaneously report? What was the protocol? What about control groups?

This is an interesting article, and it does link to several (sometimes inaccessible) papers, but despite curiosity for the topic, I can't help but be surprised at how superficially some of the research mentioned seems to be substantiating the claims made.

I guess I expect more rigor from the NYT.

It’s also good for advertising: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus

For me, nothing conjures up nostalgia better than the Pokemon Blue Pallet Town music [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOWRNLaCMJg

I love this little pun they worked into the content seamlessly:

"After a decade of study, nostalgia isn’t what it used to be — it’s looking a lot better."

When is nostalgia harmful?

I fear that one can gorge on nostalgia, and horde memories.

When is forgetting and letting go, instead, a more healthy course of action?

I remember reading elsewhere that middle age is when people are the least happy, so it's interesting that that's also when we're least nostalgic.

Nostalgia is also one of the most powerful economic drivers, tied in with social class and prestige. This might make it seem like it concerns only marketers, but it actually affects all of us. It determines how the schools we attended, the cities we lived in, and the jobs we held will be evaluated by others. Ivy League colleges (the oldest) are well-regarded because of a self-perpetuating loop (strong reputation => good professors and students => strong reputation) rooted in nostalgia. Same with star cities. People would rather relive New York's 403-year history or San Francisco's gold rushes than that of a no-name city (est. 1894) where the quality of life might be just as good.

Even Silicon Valley is waist-deep in the stream of nostalgia. Its glory days of 1970-99 have been re-erected, Disney-style, in the current VC-funded world which now provides second acts for fired investment bankers and private equity people who've decided to play startup for a few years. The winners and losers and stars have already been worked out, the equity slices are calibrated in management's favor, but it's a very successful theme park.

Nostalgia is like romantic love or religious faith; it might be good for you on the whole, but you have to treat all the decisions that come out of it with heightened skepticism. It's selective (people remember the good, not the bad) and that's well-documented, but it's also oblique insofar as people compare what they have in the present to what the elite had in the past. It can carry a reactionary impetus because people mistakenly believe they'd have a better life if the past were restored than what they'd actually get. In the U.S., we're paying for the "elitism is sexy again" Reagan Era 1980s, which was a clever way for the old upper class (the one that murdered strikers in the 1900s, tanked the economy in the '20s and was emasculated by the New Deal) to reacquire its old ways of doing things. Those yuppies turned out not to make it into the new robber baron class; they were useful idiots for the new upper class that turned out to be the grandchildren of the old one.

Nostalgia has some value, for sure. Its focus on tradition gives us a community, a historical narrative, and a place that need not be explicitly religious. It can bring us a focus on excellence by reminding us of less cluttered (perhaps in imagination only) times. However, it can also result in some terrible decision-making, and there's the rub.