Today is the good ol' days

Random question popped up in the family group chat one day courtesy of my ever so introspective mother in law. “History is always so nostalgic, why is that?” My brother-in-law, the designated smart ass, immediately pushed it to me, the designated purveyor of random information. My quick response was simple: “it’s cognitive bias. We polish the past”. Then the other voice in my head cut in like, wait… what does that even mean? You sound like one of those “intellectual yet idiots” Nassim Taleb talks about, summarizing intricate ideas with cool sounding but meaningless explanations.

So why does history feel nostalgic? The question assumes it always does, but obviously that isn’t true. Someone with a traumatic past, or someone living through the bubonic plague, or watching Genghis Khan roll through their village probably wasn’t romanticizing the “good old days.” That said, we’re focusing on nostalgia here, not PTSD.

The word nostalgia itself, like many technical English words, has Greek roots meaning “pain of returning home.” And the term wasn’t originally a single ancient word. That only happened when a Swiss medical student in the 1600s fused the parts together and used nostalgia as a clinical label for severe homesickness. No, you are not medically ill when you feel nostalgic, because over the centuries the meaning evolved into what we know now: a bittersweet longing for the past, not necessarily a place, but a time, an atmosphere, or in more modern language, a certain vibe.

But why do certain parts of your past trigger this feeling so intensely? Why did I suddenly realize I’m listening to millennial classics while writing this? Is it longing for simpler times? A quiet way of mourning who you were before life happened to you? Before taxes, work nonsense, and the hamster wheel of society got you? Longing for what life used to feel like? Or maybe it’s innocent reminiscing, missing a version of yourself who could take more risks because you had less to lose. It can be all of the above and a million other things. These framings are a bit cynical, but nostalgia isn’t always that. Sometimes it’s genuinely sweet. I have songs and moments I remember with affection, and instead of depressing me, they make me want to recreate that feeling in the present. That’s a good thing, right?

Ask a therapist, or a professional listener as some people call them, and you’ll hear something like this: nostalgia is a psychological response to uncertainty. It helps regulate emotion and restore a sense of safety. It strengthens identity by linking past and present into a coherent story, reminding you that you’ve loved, belonged, and survived before. And because it’s often rooted in people and shared moments, it can reduce loneliness and bring connection back into focus.

The thing is, nostalgia isn’t a clean replay of reality. It’s a selective filter that softens the hard parts and intensifies the emotional peaks. At its best, it becomes fuel and meaning. At its worst, it becomes a trance that keeps you living inside what already ended. In simpler English, nostalgia can ground you, but you risk getting stuck in the ground and not moving.

Which brings us to the next thought: the present. Think back to a moment that makes you nostalgic now. When you were living it, it was just another day. It wasn’t “the good old days.” It was simply today. So if that’s true, then the present moment you’re in right now might be nostalgia fuel a few years from now. You might miss the life you’re currently living. You never really know when you’re in the good old days. You only realize it after they’ve already slipped into history.

An odd thing that occurs also is the ability to be nostalgic for moments you never actually experienced. Feeling nostalgic for times, music and vibes that existed before you did. How does that happen? Well one of the best things about being human, and also one of the most painful, is that we can feel emotions across time. We can relive the past, react to the present, and even suffer the future before it happens, which is why you can feel secondhand embarrassment at something you’re watching or anxiety about what next year might bring. Humans can simulate experiences we’ve never even had, and still respond to them as if they’re real. So when you see a 70s photo or hear an old song, your mind runs an internal movie and gives you the emotion anyway.

And as with every human emotion in modern times it is being farmed. History can feel nostalgic because we never encounter it raw, we encounter it curated and polished. The past reaches us through vintage photos, museum lighting, documentaries, remastered films, and aesthetic trends. So it arrives already styled for longing. And now the almighty algorithms amplify that effect, constantly feeding us throwbacks, endless reboots, old songs, and resurfaced memories because nostalgia is a shortcut to emotion, and emotion is a shortcut to attention. Attention becomes clicks, clicks become revenue, and suddenly your longing is feeding a quarterly earnings report.

So answer the call from the past, have a short conversation, but hang up. Don’t stay on the phone so long you forget your actual life.