Is there a term for nostalgia for a time and place that one never experienced? Triggered by music or movies or reading about history, some people experience a kind of nostalgia for life in times they never lived and places they've never been to. (A popular one is Japan during the economic boom of the 1980's.)
I actually felt something like that, both times I played the LA Noire video game, years apart.
(It's a film noire-ish detective story set in booming postwar Los Angeles, with a mostly open world you can drive around in accurate models of period cars, and walk around.)
I didn't feel that because it was a nice social environment (it wasn't), nor did I want to be the traditional white male head of household (it was especially not-nice for POC and women), and I actually dislike cars.
I think what caused the feeling was the immersion in the prosperity, and new/recent construction, which seemed accessible to most. (While in real life living in overpriced, deteriorating old New England apartments.) I'd guess the game atmosphere like background music also contributed.
It's a persistent general feeling of curiosity tinged with melancholy while in the game, longing for something I want maybe more than I realize, but that I believe doesn't exist or is inaccessible.
I enjoy soviet-era rock, which wasn't really a thing until the 1980s, but to better understand its context, I've sampled a fair number of 1970s VIAs as well.
The strangest thing happened while I was watching Частное пионерское 2 (set in 1979, including computer printed samizdat): a song I knew came on in the background, and I had a very strong nostalgic sensation, as if I had just heard "Heart of Glass" as diegetic music — but for music I'd never heard before this century and YouTube (2005).
Reminds me of “Paris syndrome” where people fall in love with the idea of a thing/place and the disillusionment of experiencing the real thing can be so violent that people can have panic attacks.
Not what you’re talking about exactly, but it seems like a similar vibe.
BTW we got to meet the psychiatrist who coined the term, he went independant and was still practicing with a florishing business in Paris mainly targeting Japanese patients.
* "Heimweh" (what the articles names as "Nostalgia")
* "Fernweh"
The common part, "weh", means something like the english "hurt".
"Heim" means "home"
"Fern" means "abroad" or "distant".
Since Germans are VERY travel friendly (e.g. if we can pay for it, we do one holiday per year in a foreign country), we're people that have a high amount of "Fernweh". But ... "Fernweh" for us is mostly only some mild kind of yearning. If we cannot travel, e.g. due to finances or due to COVID-19, we won't die. The extreme form of "Heimweh" described in the article however is some kind of serious illness. Something that one will never attribute to "Fernweh".
There should be a term for it. A couple of people I know seem nostalgic for Marvel movies but I know they did not read Marvel comics when young at all. Some kind of manufactured nostalgia.
I didn’t read their comics, but there were Xmen cartoons, plus Spider-Man, when I was a kid. Also the Justice League which of course is different but hey when you are 8 you don’t know that.
Also toys. When the Marvel Movies started up I was mostly excited for Iron Man, a character I’d never actually seen in anything, but I had a couple different colored Iron Man’s when I was a little. It turns out that they are mostly all the same guy which is sorta boring.
Other people probably were nostalgic for the movie about the silver robot from Marvel vs Capcom.
I would say the US is a far more common one, outside the US of course.
Maybe not as much now because of the "gun", "bad healthcare" and "expensive college" memes (in the scientific sense of the word "meme"), but it definitely used to be a thing.
I think this still happens today, except that people are so denatured that they can't even articulate: "I want to go home" because they don't know where home is or what it is, and it would seem ridiculous even to them to say "I want to go home but I don't even know what that means!". Don't wanna be thought mental.
It's probably not simply "home" either, it could involve periodicity, repeated activities, etc. Rosaries, doodling, shoveling shit.
I am deeply touched by the expression of a need for actual "home". I hope everyone can figure out what home is and find it. It is in some way related to self.
As a young child I moved from an extremely urban environment, to a relatively pastoral one, and then back to an urban environment. The pastoral one is the one which "stuck" with me. I now live on enough land that there's always yard work and I keep chickens; it's repetitive but changes (with the seasons), and to me that feels like "home".
My father was a psychiatrist. An NLP practitioner turned me on to a great hack (for me) of "charging up" (by handling) some object (could be a set of keys, could be almost anything) when I'm in a setting where I'm grounded, centered, at peace, etc. etc. and then handling that object when I need to "find myself".
My father in law was an origami master. This gave him the opportunity to learn from and teach others, but the practice not only helped him maintain dexterity but I think it also helped ground him in old age.
My wife is an artist. The act of making art helps her mentally process things, helps with dexterity, etc. etc. She also teaches art at a senior center. Not only does it help with dexterity, but it helps stave off dementia. "Art therapy", at least in some form, is not a joke.
My father sold our first flat when I was around 13 or 14, then sold our second flat and moved into a rental unit while I was conscripted. When I got out, he had moved again while all my stuff was left at a relative's.
It's partially about not having that physical destination to go to. It's partially about losing a connection to an environment where all my memories, good or bad, developed. It's also partially about just not having anywhere go back to.
I could go live with my relatives (I did for 2 years) but it's not really 'my' home. I could go live with my father again but we're both too accustomed to living our own lives to want to live together again.
I felt more 'at home' when I moved to Japan, whether living by myself or with roommates than I ever felt back home.
There's nothing to go back to anymore.
I tell my friends but few people really understand.
I've always had a house but I can't remember a strong sense of feeling at home.
I don't really like my family. In college I spent 3 years waiting for life to happen, and by the time I started to enjoy it I had to move out. Then I spent about 10 years just saving money at the first job that made me an offer.
I've lived a very privileged and sheltered life but I'm in my 30s and never really lived anywhere on purpose or thought "ah I'm home". Even the house I live in now I hate. My next move will at least have a little intention to it.
By the modern definition I'm prone to nostalgia. And I moved a few times during adolescence. Yet I can't imagine it being fatal unless the circumstances were completely outside my control, such as a serving during a war.
I also wonder how much of it was due to the place vs the community the sufferer came from. Places aren't that special to me, at least not nearly as much as the community and the people.
When you take elders into care and move them to places, that are closer to you, i am sure, that it disrupts their life in a way, that could incur nostalgia. Ambiguous. Modern life sucks in many ways.
I feel nostalgia most strongly for my grandmother’s house I used to live in and for Japan where I lived for a year. In both cases I believe the feeling is most acute because these are places I can’t return to or in the case of Japan, am afraid I won’t return. It’s like grieving a loss of a loved one
That's not homesickenss. 1700s medicine was doing more harm than good and when she was sent home and they were no longer filling her with what was likely poisonous she recovered.
Frankly, today's hospitals are so poor in terms of infection control (because of simple things like doctors not washing their hands, or staying home when they themselves are sick) and providing patients with good nutrition - the food is basically prison quality - that you are indeed better off going home as soon as it is safe to do so.
> because of simple things like doctors not washing their hands
Because of very complicated things like needing to maintain sterile rooms too. Educating people is important, but hospitals are inherently prone to spreading infections. If everyone behaved flawlessly, they would still have this problem.
And let's not forget how incredibly stressful they are.
Honestly, I can't understand the bias from modern medicine of interning people into them.
Hospitals are terribly unhealthy places to be: stress, broken sleep, weird temperature and queer air, noise, light, sedentary, theft, viruses and bacteria, removal of choice, domineering doctors and nurses, drugging, and worse. A necessary evil, but much of the system is more evil than necessary.
Mental hospitals are even more unhealthy: violence, rape, threats, stress, forced submission, locked away from all comfort and familiarity, no family, no love, the vulnerable learning from completely whacko inmates (worse than YouTube LOL), trusting insane people, can't trust nurses or doctors. I try to always look after my friends and family. I would admit them into "professional" care only as a last resort: the mental health environments are dangerously toxic.
Hospitals are great places to meet people though. Deep intimacy is wonderful for getting to know people and we don't get many opportunities for knowing people properly. And usually an eclectic mixture of backgrounds - which I enjoy.
It projects the values of 2024 coastal America on the 17th century Switzerland of all places. A country so poor and desperate its only export was young men to be canon fodder.
As Swiss abroad in far away Japan "Kühreihen" didn't make me deadly nostalgic. I guess the soldiers lived in the alps. I miss my family more than mountains.
I was thinking of all the refugees from early ussr, who were lured back home by fairy tales of socialism, only to get sent to far north (government knew they would get disillusioned quickly, and tried to isolate from the rest), and the ones wanted to flee again got jailed and tortured.
