Past Forward: How Nostalgia Can Help You Live a More Meaningful Life

Praise for Past Forward

"Clay Routledge makes the thought-provoking case that looking back with nostalgia can actually be good for us. Past Forward comes to a surprising but solid conclusion: thinking about the past can help us cope, build self-esteem, connect to others, and manage stress. It’s a fascinating look into the research on how humans think about time."

Jean M. Twenge, PhD

author of Generations

"In Past Forward, acclaimed psychologist Clay Routledge delves deeply into the profound and often underestimated power of nostalgia. Drawing on decades of research, this thought-provoking and lucidly written book unravels the mysteries of our longing for the past and reveals how we can all use nostalgia intentionally to improve our present lives and build a brighter future."

Constantine Sedikides, PhD

professor of social psychology, University of Southampton, UK

"If you miss ‘the good old days,’ well, lucky you. In Past Forward, Clay Routledge shows us that nostalgia is an unmistakably positive force in life—combating loneliness, boosting self-esteem, and driving society forward. A fascinating book."

Arthur C. Brooks, PhD

professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, author of From Strength to Strength, a #1 New York Times bestseller

"In Past Forward, Clay Routledge convincingly argues that nostalgia can be a critical ally of progress. Counterintuitively, our nostalgic longing for the past doesn’t hold us back. It helps us adapt to a changing world and find the motivation to move forward with an optimistic outlook. Importantly, Routledge shows readers how they can take advantage of the power of nostalgia to improve their own lives and the world around them."

Marian L. Tupy

founder and editor of humanprogress.org, coauthor of Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know and Superabundance

Clay Routledge thoughtfully explores the value of memories and nostalgia, emphasizing their profound impact on our personal growth and collective advancement, urging us to embrace the past as a guiding force toward a brighter tomorrow. For our scrapbooking community, we’ve known for a long time that there is magic in nostalgia, but Clay Routledge helps us understand exactly how that magic of the past impacts our futures.

Alison Dutton

CEO of Creative Memories

Past Forward

Also by Clay Routledge

Supernatural: Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World

Past Forward

How Nostalgia Can Help You Live a More Meaningful Life

Clay Routledge, PhD

Contents

Introduction

Part 1: The Nostalgia Revolution

Chapter 1: The New Science of Nostalgia

Chapter 2: Nostalgia Is about the Future

Chapter 3: What Makes Nostalgia Possible (and Necessary)

Part 2: How Nostalgia Enhances the Self

Chapter 4: Nostalgia Shapes the Self-Concept

Chapter 5: Nostalgia Builds Healthy Self-Esteem

Chapter 6: Nostalgia Helps the Self Grow and Expand

Part 3: How Nostalgia Connects You to Others

Chapter 7: Nostalgia Strengthens and Builds Relationships

Chapter 8: Nostalgia Connects You to Groups

Chapter 9: Nostalgia Helps You Care about Others

Part 4: How Nostalgia Makes Life Meaningful

Chapter 10: Nostalgia Helps You Cope with Existential Fears

Chapter 11: Nostalgia Focuses You on What Gives You Meaning

Chapter 12: Nostalgia Inspires Existential Agency

Part 5: Using the Past to Build a Better Future

Chapter 13: Nostalgia Helps You Navigate a Fast-Moving World

Conclusion: Nostalgia and the Psychology of Progress

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

About Sounds True

Introduction

You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov¹

At our core, humans are a progress-oriented species. We aren’t satisfied with the world our ancestors left us. We strive to make it better. Culture plays a role, of course. In some parts of the world, people live much as they have for several generations; in others, societies change dramatically within a single lifetime. My grandmother rode a horse to her small country school as a child, and she watched the first moon landing on television as an adult.

Even in the United States—a relatively young nation that prides itself on being a forward-looking and dynamic society—there are subcultures such as the Amish that purposely reject features of modernity to preserve an older way of life.

Though cultures differ in the extent to which they prioritize change or stability, at some fundamental level, humans are equipped with psychological characteristics that push us toward novelty seeking, exploration, creativity, invention, innovation, and future-oriented goals aimed at improving the world for ourselves and our descendants.

Even the Amish and other groups that appear to be anti-progress don’t entirely reject modern technological innovations. They are just more cautious and deliberate about how they approach change. The Amish studies professor Donald Kraybill at Elizabethtown College has spent decades studying the Amish and has documented ways the Amish navigate technological progress. For example, some Amish people have started using cellular phones to improve their ability to communicate for work or with people in other Amish communities that are far away. Additionally, Amish entrepreneurs and businesses will sometimes use electricity and power tools to compete with modern businesses. What is key to the Amish when deciding what technology is acceptable to use is whether it will potentially undermine or support community bonds and traditions. For example, televisions, radios, and personal computers are largely avoided out of concern that they will threaten the Amish way of life by introducing foreign cultural messages through mass media.²

The Amish creatively modify technology in ways that allow them to take advantage of progress without letting it compromise their cultural beliefs. For example, Amish communities don’t want to rely on the electric grid as this would increase their dependence on the outside world. For this reason, they have experimented with ways of using air pressure, batteries, and other sources of power so that they can use some modern appliances.

Many efforts to restore an older way of living actually reflect a desire for progress. An urban dweller who wants to move toward a simpler way of living that is more connected to nature may look to new models of remote work made possible by advances in computer technology as well as new ideas about organizational structure and management. Someone like this isn’t looking to abandon modern professional and economic life to live off the land, nor are they longing for the physically challenging and dangerous existence of early American frontier life. They have a contemporary vision of interacting with nature. They seek a lifestyle that will allow them to gain the physical and mental health benefits of a slower pace of life in the country while benefiting from emerging technology, changing business culture, and the latest discoveries about health and wellness.

Most people don’t want to live exactly like their ancestors did; they want to use the past as inspiration for improving their lives. They are borrowing from the past to build a better future. Understanding this point helps us understand the power of nostalgia.

We are a progress-oriented species, but we are also a nostalgic species. As much as we are driven to plot out paths for our future, we feel the pull of our past. This tendency isn’t a barrier to progress. The past paves the way for a better future. Just as the lessons of history are critical to progress, personal and collective memories offer valuable guidance for the decisions we need to make going forward. Our nostalgia works hand in glove with our hopes and dreams for the future.

At first blush, nostalgia may seem to conflict with progress. After all, our longing for yesteryear is often accompanied with a displeasure with the present and fears about the future. If our response to present-day problems and future challenges is to feel nostalgic for the past, wouldn’t that make nostalgia an enemy of progress? Even if nostalgia gives us a warm, fuzzy feeling, might it ultimately get in the way of us improving our lives and making a positive difference in the world?

My hope is that after reading this book, you won’t think of nostalgia as a barrier to personal growth and societal progress. Instead, you will appreciate nostalgia as a critical ingredient of personal growth and societal progress.

As you will learn, nostalgia has a fairly wild history. It was once considered by experts to be a medical disease and mental illness, but modern psychological science is discovering that nostalgia is a psychological resource that helps us in various ways. If we want to better understand and find inspiration from our true selves, connect with and serve others, live a meaningful and intentional life, and improve our communities and the broader world, we should embrace nostalgia, not reject it.

Nostalgia doesn’t get in the way of building a better future for ourselves and others. Nostalgia inspires personal growth, social and community engagement, and human progress and flourishing. When we engage in nostalgia, we are not moving toward the past. We are bringing the past to the present to help us plan for the future. Nostalgia pushes us forward, not back.

Part 1

The Nostalgia Revolution

Chapter 1

The New Science of Nostalgia

My personal path to studying nostalgia began when I was an undergraduate student and started thinking seriously about how humans experience time. I have always been a fan of science-fiction movies about time travel. I’m not alone. People love thinking about what life was like in the past and what it might look like in the future.

For my first lab experiment on the subject, I designed and ran a study to figure out if time feels different when people listen to pleasant or unpleasant sounds. I found that the same amount of time feels longer if you are listening to unpleasant sounds (not a shocking discovery, I know). I probably made plenty of mistakes during this early study, but the experience of exploring ways to scientifically investigate how the human mind works (along with some encouragement from a few inspiring professors) helped me realize that I wanted to pursue psychological research as a career.

Later, as a psychology grad student, I remained fascinated with the psychology of time and how so much of human mental life involves thinking about time. We use our imagination to engage both the past and the future, and we don’t just do it for pleasure. Sure, we enjoy imagining the lives of people living in ancient Rome, the Wild West of America, and even other worlds in distant futures when humans are able to travel through space like they do in Star Trek. But our capacity for mental time travel is also functional; it helps us learn and grow. It also helps us cope with challenges and stressors we face in the present.

Turns out I was not the only psychologist fascinated by mental time travel. Thousands of miles away in England, two social psychologists who would later become my colleagues and good friends were also thinking about time but more specifically about people’s sentimental feelings about their own past. Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut at the University of Southampton were launching a new research project focused on developing a science of nostalgia, while my PhD advisor, Jamie Arndt, and I were developing our own nostalgia project at the University of Missouri. Once both research teams learned about each other, we decided to combine our efforts and collaborate.

Nostalgia is a ubiquitous, crucial, and rewarding aspect of the human experience.

As we would later learn, most people regularly experience nostalgia. Even those of us who study nostalgia for a living are not immune to its pull. Nostalgia is a ubiquitous, crucial, and rewarding aspect of the human experience.

Nostalgia’s Complicated Past

Based on hundreds of studies conducted over the last two decades, this book makes the case that nostalgia improves our lives. This evidence-based view of nostalgia stands in stark contrast to how scholars and medical professionals thought about nostalgia for centuries. Until our team and a few other contemporary scholars started systematically examining how nostalgia works, the generally accepted view among scholars, mental health practitioners, and other thought leaders was that nostalgia is detrimental. The view dates all the way back to when the word nostalgia was first coined by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss medical student, in 1688.

Hofer created the term to indicate what he believed to be a medical illness among Swiss mercenary soldiers who were serving in European wars far from home. Nostalgia is the combination of two Greek words: nostos (return to the native land) and algos (pain). In other words, nostalgia was originally thought of as the pain caused by the desire to return to one’s native land.

Hofer proposed that nostalgia was causing these soldiers a significant amount of psychological and physical distress. These men not only complained of constantly longing for home but they also experienced sadness, anxiety, fatigue, insomnia, irregular heartbeat, loss of appetite and thirst, indigestion, fevers, and related symptoms. Some of them were so distressed that they had to be discharged from military service. Ultimately Hofer viewed this condition as a neurological disorder that was caused by the quite continuous vibrations of animal spirits through those fibers of the middle brain in which impressed traces of ideas of the Fatherland still cling.¹

Hofer’s view of nostalgia as a disease would become shared by other physicians of the time. But there was disagreement as to what caused this ailment. One fellow doctor proposed that nostalgia was caused by a sharp differential in atmospheric pressure causing excessive body pressurization, which in turn drove blood from the heart to the brain, thereby producing the observed affliction of sentiment, believing this account explained why nostalgia was afflicting Swiss soldiers fighting in regions with a much lower altitude than their homeland.² Based on the idea that nostalgia was a Swiss disease, some physicians even suggested that it was caused by clanging of cowbells in the Alps, which might be responsible for trauma to the eardrum and brain.

Nostalgia would be viewed as a disease of the brain or medical illness well into the nineteenth century, but the illness wasn’t confined to the Swiss. Nostalgia was documented among British, French, and German soldiers. During the American Civil War, Union physicians reported that many Northern soldiers fighting in Southern states required treatment for this disease. Some scholars proposed that nostalgia was not a uniquely human disease and that perhaps dogs, cats, horses, and cows could come down with it as well. It’s no surprise that nostalgia would become a global illness because the homesickness that was believed to be at its core was not specific to any one group of people. But eventually the view that nostalgia was a disease started to fall out of favor as physicians failed to find any link between nostalgia and bodily processes.

It’s worth noting that a few scholars challenged the mainstream view of nostalgia by observing that the longing for the past often involved positive emotions. For example, Charles Darwin, when describing people’s recollections on the past, wrote, The feelings which are called tender are difficult to analyze; they seem to be compounded of affection, joy, and especially of sympathy. These feelings are in themselves of a pleasurable nature, excepting when pity is too deep, or horror is aroused, as in hearing of a tortured man or animal.³ However, for the most part, nostalgia was still viewed as a negative experience.

With the rise of psychology in the early twentieth century came a new way of framing nostalgia as a sickness, but this time a mental one. Some psychologists saw nostalgia as a form of depression and entertained ideas such as nostalgia representing stunted mental growth arising from a failure to let go of childhood, or nostalgia reflecting a subconscious desire to return to one’s fetal state. In other words, nostalgia was still a problem—a problem of the mind as opposed to one of the body.

During this time, there was another change in how experts thought about nostalgia. Originally nostalgia was tied to homesickness. To suffer from nostalgia meant to be separated from one’s home and long to return. But during the twentieth century, psychologists began recognizing that just as people could attach their longing for the past to a specific place—home—they could also attach it to a range of objects, people, and even abstract aspects of the past. For instance, someone can long for the days of their youth when they felt freer. This feeling might involve places (missing home), but it could also reflect missing people, hobbies, the structure (or lack of structure) of daily life, and one’s previous state of mind.

At this point, nostalgia and the concept of homesickness started to become differentiated. Scholars and practitioners who were focused on the anxiety and related emotional states associated with separation from home began building a narrower area of research on homesickness. This paved the way for a broader analysis of people’s more general nostalgic longing for various aspects of their past. Whereas homesickness is clearly tied to psychological distress, nostalgia was beginning to be understood as something more emotionally complex.

Psychologists started to see that yearning for the past has a positive emotional dimension. It isn’t solely about the pain of something or someone that isn’t present. It’s also about the pleasant feelings that come to mind when thinking about those past experiences and people. Once this deeper and more complex understanding of nostalgia as pleasure mixed with pain began to emerge, the view of nostalgia as a mental illness started to fall out of favor.

Nostalgia helps people make sense of their lives.

It was then that scholars