Anemoia: Can You Have Nostalgia for a Time You’ve Never Lived?

I keep little metal tins of mementos stored away in my desk. They hold items linked to specific memories of mine, like the plastic sunflower a friend gave to me over a decade ago, or the beads from my mother’s work desk. This isn’t an uncommon practice, as most of us know that looking into the past and finding things that make you nostalgic feels good, especially when you connect to others who shared those moments or experiences with you. 

While nostalgic things can bring back those memories and elicit these feelings, some people find that certain parts of the past that they haven’t lived in give them a similar experience. This is anemoia, or feeling nostalgic for a time you’ve never known. According to Jeffrey Green, Associate Professor of Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, scientists largely agree that anemoia has little psychological backing. Yet, if this is the case, why do so many people seem to experience this phenomenon? 

In an email to Flat Hat Magazine, Green wrote that nostalgia is usually a melancholic emotional response to one’s past lived experiences. 

“In general, we adopt dictionary definitions that emphasize the emotional recollection of our personal past. It’s often described as bittersweet because there are mixed emotions,” Green said. 

Based on this definition, anemoia cannot be a real form of nostalgia, given that it does not rely on recollection of our past, but rather an imagined state that is not based on someone’s own experiences. 

“Strictly speaking, [anemoia] is not nostalgia. It’s misusing the word, but at the same time, we know what we mean. There is a ‘wistful longing’ [in anemoia] which is part of the dictionary definition of nostalgia sometimes. But nostalgia has to be about one's personal memories,” Green said. 

In his article “Nostalgia Reimagined,” Felipe De Brigard, a professor of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience at Duke University, counters this conclusion, by arguing that since memory and imagination are linked processes, the function of longing for an imaginary situation and the past would be largely the same. 

“Although memory and imagination are usually thought of as different, a number of critical findings in the past three decades have challenged this view. In 1985, the psychologist Endel Tulving in Toronto observed that his amnesic patient ‘N N’ not only had difficulty remembering his past: he also had trouble imagining possible future events,” De Brigard said. 

Remembering things and imagining them are not entirely separate. Therefore, scientists like De Brigard find that imagination-based anemoia is truly a real sensation, and it functions the same as reality-based nostalgia. Whether or not you find anemoia to be real nostalgia depends on how you categorize memories — can they be figments of your imagination or must they be wholly rooted in reality?

While some argue that the formal definition of nostalgia relies on personal memories and that anemoia does not align with that, there are some similarities in that both of them hinge on the imagination of “a better time” or “the good old days” which may provide someone with solace, regardless of whether or not those are lived memories. The idea that nostalgia can provide the bereaved with comfort and positive emotions might be part of the explanation for why some people wish to be nostalgic for the past, regardless of whether or not they were there for it. 

Green explained that negative psychological states are commonly correlated with upticks in nostalgia. 

“Experiments have revealed this to be true for states including boredom, loneliness, and social rejection. Even some physical states like feeling cold. The mechanism appears to be the fact that feeling nostalgic enhances our feelings of social connection. We’re recalling, usually, past momentous events that also involve friends and family,” Green said. 

Alongside negative feelings, such as loneliness and social rejection, exists grief. Oftentimes, the feelings of social connection that you get from feeling nostalgic can ease the emotional weight of being without the person or animal that’s been lost. 

Since nostalgia can offer a respite for people who are dealing with mental illness or sadness, it would make sense that similar effects from anemoia are present, which explains why some people take refuge in the past. 

Anemoia seems to pervade social media right now. From fashion to politics to lifestyle choices, there are many ways in which people long for times long gone. Some people joke that they were “born in the wrong generation” while others simply find joy in recreating historical settings in their daily lives. Regardless of someone’s individual interactions with this feeling, these ideas of yearning for a time you haven’t lived in are capable of shaping our lives today. 

Lots of people go to renaissance fairs or love midcentury garb or enjoy records and CDs, and these are all part of our modern culture and aesthetics. These fascinations with the past dictate current consumption patterns, and recycling trends from the past is a common business tactic within fast fashion and other industries. When people view the past through rose-colored lenses and wish to bring back products and experiences from other eras, it makes it easy for companies to profit from those tendencies. 

Anemoia exists both in an individual sense of one person’s specific relationship to history, but also in politics and collective nostalgia. Green wrote that populism today is largely centered around national nostalgia, which is made possible partly by social media’s representations of the past as a glorified, better alternative to today. 

“People long for a time that they didn’t personally experience — and importantly, that possibly NEVER actually existed. In today’s social media climate when people spend more time looking at posts and videos than living their lives in the real world, it’s not surprising that some people get huge exposure to a time period they never lived through. They only see the positive parts of that period, and they long for it,” Green wrote. 

Politicians can use anemoia and this romanticization of the past to create slogans and campaigns that allude to pasts that seem rosier than the present. 

“In the past few years, we’ve seen a resurgence of nationalistic political movements that have gained traction by way of promoting a return to the ‘good old days’: ‘Make America Great Again’ in the US, or ‘We Want Our Country Back’ in the UK. These politics of nostalgia promote the implementation of policies that, supposedly, would return nations to times in which people were better off,” De Brigard said. 

Social media, politics, and the fashion industry are all a part of why so many people seem to be experiencing so much nostalgia, even if it’s not for their own lives. With representations of the past being inaccurate and fantastical, it is unsurprising that people would feel a wistful longing for times that have come and gone. Regardless of whether anemoia is truly a part of nostalgia or not, the impacts of fantasies about a time that is better than what we currently have are real. This yearning for the past, imagined or not, is an extension of us wanting to feel social connections and comfort from shared nostalgic emotions. 

Therefore, people will continue to vote to bring back eras that they don’t truly understand, and we will see more and more people indulging in things like physical media and music from before their time. This is all because this aspect of imagination, anemoia, has the potential to bring us closer together — just like nostalgia.