Anemoia

The ever-present and pervasive nostalgia for an era I was not even alive for…

By Sophia Goetz

Slightly blurred photos of an elementary school classroom decorated for Christmas, slides, a sunlit scene of scattered toys with a kids cartoon that was canceled long ago playing in the background, a trip to McDonald’s in the 90s, all digitally dated with yellow numbers in the right corner. What makes these images so haunting yet sentimental, pervasive yet incomprehensible? Why do we experience nostalgia for a time our generation was not alive or at least old enough to appreciate? These digitized forms of nostalgia are not only present in TikTok slideshows, but manifest as trends in fashion, music, and lifestyle. When taking into account the current political and economic landscape, it’s no wonder Gen-Z yearns for a simpler time, one before COVID, crazy inflation rates, and social media. But what does it mean to long for an era you were not alive for? Why are the sentimental memories of others–culminated in photo albums, home videos, and magazines–able to affect us in such a persistent way?

I recently learned that there was a name for this sort of nostalgia: Anemoia. Its definition is, as the word would imply,; a nostalgic yearning for an era in which you have never lived. More specifically, “the good ‘ol days,” or, a time for which you were too young to have fully appreciated. It is the feeling that something important was lost in our unrelenting pursuit of advancement, something that was fundamentally better in the distant past than it is now. While many people have felt it,; fewr have asked themselves whether the craving has any deeper meaning.

It has long been understood that nostalgia only depicts the past as we perceive it, not the real past. It is, quite simply, a fantasy. Its longings are not for times we truly experienced, but for moments we would prefer to believe we did. When considered in a personal context, this makes sense because we often romanticize our early years. The assurances that everything was “OK” take the place of the anxieties and arguments from those days. It ignores our past transgressions and failings so they can't pull us away from the here and now. From a historical perspective, nevertheless, this answer is woefully inadequate.

So why does it happen?

The past is notorious for its errors. The historical record is suitable for the probing eyes of nostalgia since it is but the tip of an unending iceberg that we may never fully unearth. Some people blatantly reject reality even now in order to maintain their cozier delusions. Therefore, it is possible to say that an accumulation of typical nostalgia leads to anemoia. People often perpetuate false memories of the past by remembering it incorrectly. Those stories are later embellished by others who hear them. Therefore, the past gets more adorned and idyllic the farther one travels back in time. We often see our own pasts as better than they actually were because of nostalgia. The same thing is done by anemoia, but much more extensively.

It would be lying to claim that everyone lived in perfect harmony in the 90s. Nonetheless, it's conceivable that people had better lives. Even though we are more linked than ever before, it is no secret that we truly feel alone these days. While seemingly worse off, our predecessors shared an unshakable bond with one another that we can hardly begin to imagine today. It's possible that people today yearn for this period of the past. Therefore, anemoia might not be a meaningless emotion after all. Of course, the main issue is that the modern era lacks the social cohesiveness of earlier eras. Rebuilding this social cohesiveness while maintaining our progress as a society is the answer.

So, continue to celebrate eras gone by, wear their clothes, listen to their music, and read their stories. From there, let’s let anemoia contribute to lessening the burdens of modernity, and, in the end, we might contribute to a transformation much greater than ourselves.