Why People Feel Nostalgic for Terrible Times
A popular Russian joke goes something like this: What did capitalism accomplish in one year that communism could not do in 70? Make communism look good.
As recently as 2015, nearly 70 percent of Russians said the breakup of the U.S.S.R. was a bad thing, and nearly 60 percent said that Stalin played a mostly positive role in history. (More recent polling is less reliable because of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on political expression.) Many Russians, apparently, are nostalgic for a time of bread lines, shared apartments, and state repression.
They aren’t the only ones who sometimes feel nostalgic for times that were difficult, unpleasant, or downright bad. Some soldiers returning from war long for the camaraderie and purposefulness of the deployment. Former co-workers gather and laugh about the nightmare boss who used to terrorize them. Some people miss the early, eerie first few months of the pandemic, when time seemed to have stopped. Periodically, social media bubbles over with people reminiscing about 2020’s empty streets, state-mandated personal space, and permission to do nothing.
Nostalgia for terrible things may sound absurd, but many people experience it, for reasons that speak to the way people make meaning of their lives. The central reason for this phenomenon, according to researchers who study nostalgia, is that humans look to our past selves to make sense of our present. Reflecting on the challenging times we’ve endured provides significance and edification to a life that can otherwise seem pointlessly difficult. The past was tough, we think, but we survived it, so we must be tough too.
To be sure, part of the explanation is that people tend to romanticize the past, remembering it more rosily than it actually was. Thanks to something called the “fading affect bias,” negative feelings about an event evaporate much more quickly than positive ones. As a difficult experience recedes in time, we start to miss its happier aspects and gloss over the challenges. And nostalgia is usually prompted by a feeling of dissatisfaction with the present, experts say, making the past seem better by comparison.
[Read: Why are people nostalgic for early-pandemic life?]
But even when people clearly remember the adversity, it frequently doesn’t seem so bad in hindsight. When Krystine Batcho, a psychology professor at Le Moyne College, began interviewing people of different generations about their childhood memories, she expected that those who grew up during wartime or the Great Depression would feel less nostalgia for their youth than people who grew up in peaceful or prosperous times. But that’s not what she found.
Instead, people tended to interweave negative memories with ways they overcame their struggles. One man who survived the Depression, for example, told Batcho that he never had enough to eat as a boy. But then he would remember clever ways he tried to find food, such as picking fruit off of a neighbor’s tree, or he would recall getting home from school and walking in the door to the smell of his mother’s freshly baked bread—a small luxury he did have.
Batcho says this kind of reminiscing can shed some perspective on current problems, making present-day challenges seem “more possible to overcome and to deal with, and it reminds you to appreciate what you have,” she told me. “It reminds us that the future is uncertain, but rather than feeling it as really scary, we can think of it as really exciting.”
There are few large, robust studies on this topic, but some experimental research has shown that nostalgia provides a feeling of authenticity and a sense of connection between your past and present selves. Because of this, we often get nostalgic for consequential moments in our lives. “People are nostalgic for things that give their lives meaning or help them feel important,” says Andrew Abeyta, a psychology professor at Rutgers University. Sometimes, these meaningful events can be stressful, or even harrowing. As the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich writes in her book Secondhand Time, many Russians who grew up in the Soviet era proudly remembered fighting in wars or rebuilding their cities; those who didn’t, she writes, “were bitterly disappointed that the Revolution and Civil War had all happened before our time.” Another survey found that the thing that Russians missed most about the U.S.S.R. was “a sense of belonging to a great power.”
Psychologists define meaning as the feeling that one’s life is significant, coherent, and purposeful, says Constantine Sedikides, a psychologist at the University of Southampton, in the U.K. And many times, our actions during a challenging time meet this definition—they are significant, coherent, and purposeful. Turning points in our lives usually provide fodder for nostalgia—and they are rarely drama-free.
Reminiscing about a difficult experience reminds you that at least you survived, and that your loved ones came to your aid. “The fact that those people did those things for you, or were there for you, reassures you that you have your self-worth,” Batcho said. Research by the psychologist Tim Wildschut and his colleagues found that people who wrote about a nostalgic experience went on to feel higher self-esteem than a control group, and they also felt more secure in their relationships.
[Read: Nostalgia is a shield against unhappiness]
The memories of relationships forged during periods of hardship can cast even extreme experiences in a positive light. In his book Tribe, Sebastian Junger describes a cab driver in Sarajevo speaking proudly of his experience during the country’s recent war, when “he’d been in a special unit that slipped through the enemy lines to help other besieged enclaves.” The war, though horrific, had created “a social bond that many people sorely miss,” Junger writes. “Disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations.”
Nostalgia tells you that your personal history wasn’t just scary or tragic; it helped make you who you are. This is perhaps why women who worked from home with kids during the pandemic probably don’t wish for a lack of child care, but they aren’t shying away from the workforce, either. Or why women who have recently had babies often grab random strangers by the lapels and regale them with their (in many cases brutal) “birth story.” It’s “a way of working through the negative aspects and coming out the other side eventually,” Batcho said. “There’s a catharsis to that.”
Remembering hard times allows you to make sense of your life and take stock of your strengths under fire. You may not wish for the past to return, but neither do you want to forget it.