Is Nostalgia Such a Bad Thing?
Is it warranted to long for a past that you have never experienced?
I’ve been thinking about how nostalgia affects decision-making for the past few weeks pretty heavily. This is likely tangentially related to all of the thought I have been putting into narratives. But I also know that these thoughts have come from two direct sources: this piece from Matthew Yglesias and my impending move a few hundred miles away. I’ll start with the latter.
I recently accepted a job offer that would require a move to a neighboring state. The intent to move here was part of the reason for me looking for a job, so this is not a burden on my family. Rather, it is a move towards the goals we have. Regardless, I still feel weird about moving. I have a sort of pre-nostalgia about where we are living right now. I am already starting to miss this place where we still live. This could be the last time we experience everything this city has to offer. The restaurant where we are known by name, the coffee shops we go to regularly, the grocery store we have memorized, the dog park where we know the names of the dogs but not the humans, the big neighborhoods we gawk at, and all of the other places we have been. My wife and I moved in together here (we were not married at the time), we got engaged, got a dog, got married, and had our daughter here. My mental map of this place is finally becoming coherent. It is no longer a series of self-contained bubbles of spatial memory connected by threads. And now we’re leaving it all behind.
All of this is enough to question our decision to leave. But leaving is the correct decision. It cuts the drive time to my wife’s parents by 5 hours1, my pay will increase tremendously, and we will be reunited with college friends. It’s a no-brainer. But, I can’t help but still feel sad. All of the bad parts of living here seem to melt away when the prospect of moving enters my brain. I know this is the nostalgia talking, but I can’t seem to shake it. I get this same feeling when I think about my honeymoon, the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and spending time with my high school friends. Each of these times in my life is relaxing and carefree in my mind’s eye. But, I know that the reality of each of them was stressful, anxiety-inducing, or depressing. It is likely that each of these moments represents times when I had few responsibilities, but didn’t know it at the time. Now that I have a career, a wife, and a child I realize how much time I had previously that I was not using. It’s like I am picking points in my life where I wish I could say, “You have more time than you know what to do with, don’t squander it!2”
The thing is, I would never actually want to go back to those times and continue on from there. I would hate to be an angsty teen or an overworked college student trying to make a long-distance relationship work. I would probably like to go back to Hawaii, but doing so without my daughter is unconscionable. The difference between these moments and the current one is the longing for it to pass. I wanted to graduate from high school and move away, I wanted to graduate and reunite with my girlfriend, I even wanted to get home from our honeymoon to start our real life. But now, there is no strong impulse to move on. I’m not sure why, but this is the first time that I have felt this type of longing for a past moment before it has even passed. Perhaps this is the first time we have had a moment to relax and reflect, despite our baby. Perhaps the move has some real trade-offs that the other moments didn’t have. Perhaps it is the stress of buying a house and moving that is making me want to stay. Regardless, the feeling is there.
Buying a house has also brought forth a feeling that I know is very real, though not well understood. The feeling of missing out. My wife and I are buying a house at a very strange time. Interest rates are the highest they have been in almost 20 years, though they have been falling rapidly, and house prices are still hyper-inflated from the low interest of the Covid years. This is not inherently a problem. Ask any parent of my generation and they will tell you, “This is the interest rate we had for our first house and it was seen as low.” House prices have also started to drop and buyers have a little more power than they did a couple of years ago. But the feeling remains. It is likely due to hearing and seeing my parents throughout my life. I have stated that I had a rough go of it at times in my life, and I have, but there was a period of time in which my parents were living the American Dream.
In 2004, they bought a house to move closer to my Dad’s job. Neither of my parents went to college or had high-paying jobs. They were likely making around the average salary in 2004, though I am not remotely privy to what their finances were like at the time. Yet, they were able to afford a four-bedroom, 2-1/2 bathroom house in a brand-new suburb. If we were to assume they were making the median household income in 2004 dollars, this house was roughly 40% of their after-tax income3. The house that my wife and I just purchased is also roughly 40% of our income. Here’s the issue though: our income is over 50% higher than the median income today. Now, obviously, there are a lot of variables to take into account here; the location of the house is the largest one4. Regardless, my parents and my wife and I should have vastly different spending power, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The expectations of what one should be able to afford have not been adjusted. This brings me to the political nostalgia that has been growing over the past couple of years.
Nostalgia for times gone is not new, nor is it unique to any generation. In his piece, Matthew Yglesias argued that the nostalgia for a past time, like the 1950s, ignores the terrible living and working conditions in that era, especially for minorities. To me, this quote laid out why this nostalgia exists and why it is faulty very clearly:
But factually speaking, living standards have risen dramatically since the era of that photo, and people who lived like that would be poor today.
And of course actual poor people in the 1950s lived in terrible conditions. The Census says that 35 percent of homes in 1950 lacked complete plumbing facilities; that fell to “only” 16.8 percent of homes by 1960.
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By 1960, the numbers in some of those states were still chillingly high by contemporary standards, but they’d fallen a lot and every state had full plumbing in the majority of homes. To the extent that nostalgia for that era makes sense, it’s that people who lived through it got to experience extremely rapid improvements in living conditions. More recently, things have continued to get better, but they’ve gotten better more slowly.
As Yglesias mentioned, this lack of plumbing probably had something to do with the rate of farms and poverty in the country immediately after WWII. This was especially true in the South. The rapid improvement from the previous decade that Yglesias mentions is extremely visible in the data. I don’t disagree with his thesis as laid out above, but the following heavily missed the mark:
They like the 1950s aesthetic. They like the fact that it annoys liberals to praise a clearly more racist and more segregated period in American life. They like nice photographs of old buildings.
It is possible that my lack of presence on Twitter/X doesn’t allow me to see these types of people often, though I know they do exist. What I see more often are complaints against those that were buying houses in the 2000s, not the 1950s. People like me saw their parents buy houses at much lower wages. These are houses that are not that much worse than what is available now. They were insulated, energy-efficient, and not drafty. Yglesias mentioned that “it’s definitely not the case that we could make things better by reversing the flow of time.” I agree. I don’t think that the 1950s are a good time period to return to whatsoever. But this period of transition we are facing after the pandemic has hit people hard. I think people have realized the world is different and want to go back 7 years, not 70.
The period of low-interest rates from around 2008 to 2018 changed the perception of what is possible to purchase. For my generation, this is a time period that we remember. It does not have the remoteness of the 1950s. The people who are able to tell stories from this period of time are dying. With them goes the detail that comes with individual experiences. The farther back into history one goes, the fewer and farther between these details arise. However, this is in our current collective memory. That is no longer the world we live in. Real wages have only recently recovered to pre-pandemic from the high inflation of the past few years. It’s possible that this nostalgia for a time past will wear off as inflation approaches normal levels and wages continue to rise. But there is something missing in this as well. I don’t think the longing is just financial.
We might be able to buy more stuff than we could in the past. There are gadgets galore and we have supercomputers in our pockets and in our cars and in our houses. But, all of this stuff does not make a society healthy or happy. In fact, we are more isolated than ever despite having immediate access to people all over the world. So, it is hard for me to get upset at people who think a simpler life would make them happier. This does not mean we need to revert to 2008 or 1958 or 1908. We can learn from the past, we don’t need to repeat it. I don’t think history goes one way. This may have been true in the long run for humans. I mean the alternative is the end of the human race. But, ask the Neanderthals which way history goes.
Throughout the podcast, we will encounter these ebbs and flows. We will likely find many people who long for the past and many who long for the future. Ask a Virginian who survived the Starving Time whether they would like to go back in time. Now ask a Bostonian who survived King Philip’s War. Will they have the same answer? Obviously, we live in far greater times than either of these invented people, but the impulse still remains. Rather than shutting these people down as racist or as haters of progress, try to understand them. Try to figure out why they are nostalgic. Perhaps the thing they long for is actually in the future.
The trip to my family will be lengthened a touch, but job opportunities have dictated the direction of the move.
The loss of time as life takes hold could be a whole essay on its own. Maybe it will be in the future…
Obviously, this would come back to bite my parents when my dad was summarily laid off. Despite that, they were able to “afford” this house for almost a decade before losing it.
My parents were also older than my wife and I when they bought their first house. My wife’s parents were not, though, and were in a similar position to buy a house despite making less than the median at the time.