I’ll cut right to the chase. Here are a few of the ways poverty influences nostalgia, or did when I was a kid, anyway:

1. Your family doesn’t have the money to make renovations on your house, so you grow up with paneling, flooring, furniture, and siding that pre-dates you by one to two decades. You end up feeling nostalgic when you watch Brady Bunch or I Love Lucy because that shit was cutting edge back then, and you lived in the second-hand 50s or 70s.

I still get misty thinking about the paneling in the living room of my childhood home. (photo from carlaaston.com)

(image from atariage.com)

2. Your family can’t afford the latest technology, so you grow up playing ColecoVision while your friends play NES, and you play NES when they’re playing Sega Genesis. You’re always a generation behind on new technology. As a result: Now that you’re an adult and the internet has sort of leveled the playing field, nostalgically speaking, you find yourself identifying with folks who are 10 years your senior or more.

3. There’s a possibility that the house you lived in as a child, the house in which most of your memories were forged, has been condemned or is gone completely. The concept of “forever home” is unknown to you.

At least this house is still standing. That’s a start. (Image from Pinterest)

4. The town you lived in might be a veritable ghost town. The factories or mines your families worked on may have long since been shut down, leaving your home town empty, or close to it. Where I grew up, we lost J&L Steel, Newtown Falls Paper Mill, and OWD (a plastic factory). The place cleaned out between 1995-2005. Those remaining are retired, or work hours away, or are on welfare. Not surprisingly, most of these areas are characterized by opiate epidemics.

5. Instead of reminiscing about what you did have, you will spend a lot of time thinking about what you didn’t have, and assuming that the longing you feel can be satiated by acquiring the items you felt you lacked as a child.

Maybe this isn’t exclusive to the poor, but I find nostalgia to be a double-edged sword. For a few years, I spent time trying to re-acquire what I had as a child that I sold at garage sales to buy newer toys, and trying to acquire the toys I had longed for as a child.

The Takeaway

The takeaway–at least in my opinion–is that nostalgia is a much more difficult emotion to navigate for the poor. It is longing for things that can’t easily be re-attained, for things that never were and can never be attained, and realization that even the things you long for are merely fragmented delusions that stem from the naïveté of youth.