Constant nostalgia: celebrating the physical in the digital age
By: Ryan Hooper
Tags: Music, Nostalgia, Memories, Digital, Digital Health

The roots of nostalgia

The Portuguese have the word ‘saudade’ to describe a deep emotional state of nostalgia, or a profound melancholic longing for something now absence in our life. A something that most likely will never return. A lost lover, or family member, someone who has moved away, or died.

Saudade has been described as “the love that remains” after someone is gone. The 17th century Portuguese writer Manuel de Melo once described saudade as “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy”. It brings sad and happy feelings simultaneously: sadness for the something missing, and happiness for re-experiencing this past.

I’m sure, at particular points in time, we all can admit to sharing this feeling of saudade. A wish to return to another particular when.

The Greek word ‘nostos’ forms the root of the word nostalgia and means a longing to return home.

One of the earliest nostalgists was also Greek. We can read Homer and discover how Odysseus used the power of memories to bestow him strength on his hazardous journey, in order to return home to his family.

Photo by Tbel Abuseridze on Unsplash

Similarly to Odysseus, who left home to fight the war in Troy, we’re often drawn to nostalgia during periods of transition. For Odysseus, and for many others who served in times of war, feelings of nostalgia have the ability to grow to such an overwhelming level, that by the 17th century many doctors considered it a psychological disorder. Whereby the visualising of the past can become such a constant daydream, it leaves the subconscious mind, and therefore the present, confused. This led to the Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer, calling nostalgia a “neurological disease of essentially demonic cause”.

Some theorists have viewed nostalgia as a negative mechanism – a way to retreat into safe and secure internal walls built on foundations of happier times, when faced with particular moments of upheaval, stress, or sadness.

The feelings of dislocation, or alienation, resulting from military conflict, is one major transition which can trigger nostalgia. But we don’t all have had to sail past the Sirens or take on the Cyclops as Odysseus did – or experience the intense fear and isolation of lying low in the trenches. We all experience potential triggers daily.

Maturing into adulthood, or ageing into retirement, are other very common triggers. All of us will, at some point, experience the feelings of moving house, schools, jobs, possibly even countries, either to live, or to temporarily long for home while on holiday.

Photo by iSAW Company on Unsplash

Whatever the trigger may be, when our subconscious mind discovers our present is not as happy as a thread in our past used to be, it may make us feel nostalgic in order to help us feel better.

This might storm a wave of euphoria up from our heart to our mind, which motivates us to take a stand, to fix things, to bring the happy moments back into our lives.

Nostalgia can become a psychological resource; a well of evidence to draw up in times when comfort is needed. A useful tool to harness the past, to endure change and create hope for the future.

If, for whatever reason, we’re unable to push forward, we may get carried under by the weight of the waves of nostalgia and achieve nothing.

There is no greater sorrow

⁠Than to be mindful of the happy time

⁠In misery — Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy (1320)

The Danish writer, Kierkegaard, wrote that our need to escape the present by keeping ourselves busy is our greatest source of unhappiness: “The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself.”