

What Is Nostalgia Good For? Quite a Bit, Research Shows - daegloe
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/science/what-is-nostalgia-good-for-quite-a-bit-research-shows.html?pagewanted=all

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gruseom
I didn't know that "nostalgia" means "home pain" (pretty close to
"homesickness", really) or that the term was invented by a 17th century Swiss
physician. According to [1], it was a calque from the German "heimweh",
presumably because if you were a 17th century physician, your new disease
wasn't proper until it had a classical name. (Edit: in fact, "homesick" was
also a calque from the German "heimweh", according to [2]. So "nostalgia" and
"homesickness" are cognate!)

The article doesn't make clear how the researchers distinguish nostalgia from
simply remembering with emotion, which is not the same thing.

[1]
[http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=nostalgia](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=nostalgia)

[2]
[http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=homesickness](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=homesickness)

~~~
pjmlp
For Portuguese speakers you also have "saudade", which is also hard to express
in other languages, as it means a mix of nostalgia, home sickness, to miss
something, depending on the context.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade)

~~~
vichu
I am tempted at this time to post the source from where I personally learned
the word "saudade."

Dinosaur Comics:
[http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2129](http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2129)

The alt-text for the comic is particularly fascinating as well. To know that
Brazil celebrates a National Saudade Day is reassuring and romantic.

~~~
tptacek
Also that Canadians also celebrate a national nostalgretz day, just on
different days and by surprise. Sounds about right!

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Stratego
The researcher set out to prove his own pet hypothesis, several of the
experiments quoted are based on self-reported results (of "feeling warmer"?)
and the whole thing seems wholly unquantifiable.

People "felt loved" and "that life is worth" living. Who asked them? Were
those leading questions? Did they spontaneously report? What was the protocol?
What about control groups?

This is an interesting article, and it does link to several (sometimes
inaccessible) papers, but despite curiosity for the topic, I can't help but be
surprised at how superficially some of the research mentioned seems to be
substantiating the claims made.

I guess I expect more rigor from the NYT.

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mostafah
It’s also good for advertising:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus)

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GotAnyMegadeth
For me, nothing conjures up nostalgia better than the Pokemon Blue Pallet Town
music [0]

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOWRNLaCMJg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOWRNLaCMJg)

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josscrowcroft
I love this little pun they worked into the content seamlessly:

 _" After a decade of study, nostalgia isn’t what it used to be — it’s looking
a lot better."_

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bravura
When is nostalgia harmful?

I fear that one can gorge on nostalgia, and horde memories.

When is forgetting and letting go, instead, a more healthy course of action?

~~~
jameskilton
The gaming, specifically MMO community, has a _huge_ problem with nostalgia.
Nigh every day someone complains about how World of Warcraft is only getting
worse, and that the "good old days" of earlier expansions were some sort of
Nirvana of MMO gaming, yet in pretty much every case, this nostalgia is in
fact a manufactured memory and these people don't really remember what the
game was really like back then. They misunderstand the feeling of nostalgia as
a "things were better" feeling rather than what it really is: "we had so much
fun together back then."

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lmm
I remember reading elsewhere that middle age is when people are the least
happy, so it's interesting that that's also when we're least nostalgic.

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michaelochurch
Nostalgia is also one of the most powerful economic drivers, tied in with
social class and prestige. This might make it seem like it concerns only
marketers, but it actually affects all of us. It determines how the schools we
attended, the cities we lived in, and the jobs we held will be evaluated by
others. Ivy League colleges (the oldest) are well-regarded because of a self-
perpetuating loop (strong reputation => good professors and students => strong
reputation) rooted in nostalgia. Same with star cities. People would rather
relive New York's 403-year history or San Francisco's gold rushes than that of
a no-name city (est. 1894) where the quality of life might be just as good.

Even Silicon Valley is waist-deep in the stream of nostalgia. Its glory days
of 1970-99 have been re-erected, Disney-style, in the current VC-funded world
which now provides second acts for fired investment bankers and private equity
people who've decided to play startup for a few years. The winners and losers
and stars have already been worked out, the equity slices are calibrated in
management's favor, but it's a very _successful_ theme park.

Nostalgia is like romantic love or religious faith; it might be good for you
on the whole, but you have to treat all the decisions that come out of it with
heightened skepticism. It's selective (people remember the good, not the bad)
and that's well-documented, but it's also _oblique_ insofar as people compare
what they have in the present to what _the elite_ had in the past. It can
carry a reactionary impetus because people mistakenly believe they'd have a
better life if the past were restored than what they'd actually get. In the
U.S., we're paying for the "elitism is sexy again" Reagan Era 1980s, which was
a clever way for the old upper class (the one that murdered strikers in the
1900s, tanked the economy in the '20s and was emasculated by the New Deal) to
reacquire its old ways of doing things. Those yuppies turned out _not_ to make
it into the new robber baron class; they were useful idiots for the new upper
class that turned out to be the grandchildren of the old one.

Nostalgia has some value, for sure. Its focus on tradition gives us a
community, a historical narrative, and a place that need not be explicitly
religious. It can bring us a focus on excellence by reminding us of less
cluttered (perhaps in imagination only) times. However, it can also result in
some _terrible_ decision-making, and there's the rub.

