Why nostalgia for the past is more a calling from the future

We’ve all felt it. I mean that strange ache for the past, for times we never actually knew. The triggers are many: TV shows, wartime stories, imagined versions of the home front in the 1940s, 1950s. It’s in the bric-a-brac of our junk shops, selling the things we remember in our grandma’s parlour, selling Nostalgia. Something in them feels warm, solid, reassuring. We look at the present day – rushed, loud, superficial, dangerous – and we feel we’ve lost something precious, something steady and certain, that we left it behind in our childhood perhaps, in grandma’s parlour, or further to a time we never knew at all.

But the truth is, the thing we’re missing was never in the past, so we’ll not find it by looking back. Nostalgia is a misdirection – not a lie, exactly – just a psychological misunderstanding. We’re not longing for a time and a place. We’re longing for a feeling.

But we’re losing our vocabulary for such things, so these unarticulated longings tend to collapse into historical fantasy instead. We imagine a return to the values of a different era would soothe the existential ache, the restlessness we feel now. But scratch the surface of any supposed golden era, and we find the same old hardships, prejudices, fears, dangers. We know this, yet we sanitise it. Our forebears, who lived through those times, would laugh at such cosy idealisations – as we would at future generations harking back to the 2020s as their own ideal era.

So, why does nostalgia feel so convincing? Well, why would it not, since the ache is real enough? It’s just that the story we make up to explain it is mistaken. What we really miss is depth – a sense that life has an inside to it, that it has a texture you can feel, an atmosphere you can breathe, and that it really, truly means something to be alive. We miss the feeling of being rooted, connected, held safe by something larger than ourselves. We miss a sense of belonging, and the dignity of an imagined slower time. These feelings are internal, insubstantial, but we literalise them as best we can, project them out into the world, where they find no purchase, so plunge them instead deep into that idealised past. But did you ever pause to wonder what it would be like instead, meeting those feelings head on by looking inward as they emerge and asking what they really mean?

The past can’t give us what we’re after, because it never had it in the first place. The real problem is not that life used to be better. It’s that we are losing our means of self-analysis, methods that can reassure us our lives right now possess the depth we’ve been seeking all along. But self-analysis takes time and a quiet room. It takes courage, even just the lack of embarrassment, to say to someone – you know I had the strangest dream last night. I wonder what it means.

When the British Empire moved into Africa, the tribes people said they stopped sharing dreams with one another, as was their long-held tradition. They said there was no longer any need for them, because the British knew everything. But too much literalism comes at the price of our souls.

It doesn’t help the way our attention is constantly broken, that in the absence of a way back inside our own heads, we surrender ourselves all too easily to the doom-scroll, to the bubble-gum of TikTok, to the sugar rush of social media, where our conversations are corrupted into polarised argument and slogans. We work too long in the day, and our dreams are erased by pills each night. Everything becomes literal, functional, efficient. Life loses its metaphor, its symbolism, and when things stop pointing beyond themselves that way, our imagination dries up, our souls become desiccated. Then the world appears insubstantial, because depth is soul.

So then this feeling we call “nostalgia” creeps up on us, not to deceive us, but to warn us. The ache we feel isn’t calling us backwards. It’s our soul calling us into a conversation with ourselves.

What we’re missing isn’t behind us, not lost in time. It’s beneath us – under the surface of the life we’re living, and it’s all around us in the objects and the encounters of the everyday. That ache for nostalgia is not our past calling us back. It’s our soul wanting to be let in. It is the shadow of a future which might yet be, if only we would let it.

So the next time you’re indulging yourself with that nostalgic drama on TV, and you feel a pang of longing, try looking it in the eyes and asking it what it’s doing hiding all the way back there, and what you need to change in your life right now to make it real and visible again.