Nostalgia

I post about nostalgia a lot, so I figured I'd need a page to put all of the background knowledge I've accumulated about it. First though is my favorite clip from any show ever:

Powerful enough for me, aged 14, to remember it forever. I hadn't even watched Mad Men! My dad and stepmother loved it (in the "missed the point by idolizing them" way), and it's on my to-watch list now.

The comments give a bit of context. He turns aside "new" as a tactic, and uses "old" instead. He also discerns nostalgia from memory. What he says about the Kodak Carousel applies to nostalgia too. You can view things through a nostalgic lens no matter when they take place.

On Wiktionary the definition is different--"From New Latin nostalgia, coined by Johannes Hofer in 1688 from Ancient Greek νόστος (nóstos, “returning home”) + ἄλγος (álgos, “pain”), calquing German Heimweh. Ancient Greek *νοσταλγία (*nostalgía) is unattested. Transferred sense probably influenced by French nostalgie, especially in literature."

Here is a short defense of nostalgia in my generation specifically.

"Romanticizing the past isn’t a trend for Gen Z, it’s survival. We’ve come of age in a constant state of crisis: economic downturn, a global pandemic, the loneliness epidemic, the fall of Roe v. Wade and a climate catastrophe that will have bigger consequences for us and our children than anyone else."

The Short End of the Stick: Gender Pleasure deals with nostalgia indirectly, but this quote is great:

"Hence even one's own pleasure is always elsewhere—not at the place from which one says 'pleasure,' the place from which one says 'I.' (Perhaps this explains why our most vivid images of happiness are so bound up with the past, the lost, the might-have-been: we can reflect on happiness and comprehend it only as what is lost."