Why Does Nostalgia Exist?

Have you ever realized that when asked, majority of people talk about how good the old days were?

You can see these people trying to convince other people that their arguement is correct, commonly by giving plenty of examples from their childhood.

In the other hand, you can also see people criticize about the fans of those good old days, arguing that this feeling is just the manifestation of regretting decisions made in the past.

But what weighs on my mind about this feeling, called nostalgia, is that if this is all about decisions, which is an abstract term, how come these people also feel satisfied when they see old gadgets such as cassette players, polaroid cameras and typewriters.

I can’t wrap the possibility in my head of that most people regret their past decisions so much that there are now a bunch of communities for the sake of nostalgia.

When thought about these communities, one can argue that people there are mostly in a negative mood, but that’s not completely a real point.

Considering all, the answer to the question of why nostalgia exists still remains mainly a mystery to this day.

The dictionary of Oxford Languages defines this noun as “A sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past”, which can be considered correct. But we are actually asking “why”, not “what”.

One of the considerable reasons is that negative details of past events decay faster than positive ones. The rain gets faded, yet the picnic stays.

Even if the rain, in this example, stays, it does not hit as hard as it actually did, and you would think that how good the picnic was helps outweigh the rain, regardless of how bad it actually was.

The problem in this example is the way it transitions to something abstract from something concreate. The rain might have ruined your day and destroyed all the fun of picnic that day, you either completely forget it and start telling the picnic like it was the best, or the rain only remains as a small detail and you tell it with a spice of humor.

Either way, the memory gets far away from reality, and I mainly think this is the reason.

When we connect all the dots we previously talked about here, we get to a very concreate step-by-step explanation of the feeling of nostalgia.

1. When your brain feels like something important just happened, it creates that event as a memory in the hippocampus.
2. After created, brain sends the memory to the Neocortex in purpose of storing.
3. Over time, Amygdala joins the game to connect saved memories with emotions. This is the step where, in our example, rain gets edited out and the picnic stsys.
4. When you see an old-fashioned gadget, or someone talks about the past, the prefrontal cortex helps you recall the memory in its edited form, and the fact that negatives get edited out makes you think old days were simply better.

Now, think about that every humankind’s brain gets through this journey on a daily basis, and nostalgia becomes one of the main emotions, yet the hardest one to solve.