Think back to a fond time and place in your childhood — perhaps a stroll with a parent along a waved-washed beach. The memory is a happy (and likely idealized) one, but still tinged with the bittersweet knowledge that you can never go back.
It's a complex emotion we know as nostalgia.
People experience it for their lost youth, first love and some even pine for a time they never experienced. That feeling is especially potent this time of year, as the holidays creep in.
As part of NPR's Word of the Week series, we take a look at nostalgia, its origin and how it was transformed from a 17th century malady to a 21st century marketing strategy.
It started with homesick soldiers
During the 1600s, Europe was gripped by a series of major conflicts — the Thirty Years' War, the Franco-Dutch War, the Nine Years' War, and others. Switzerland, though largely neutral, became a key source of mercenaries. Many of those Swiss soldiers, far from home in unfamiliar lands, experienced an odd set of symptoms such as anxiety, irregular heartbeat, stomach pain, and melancholy first described in 1688 by the Alsatian medical student Johannes Hofer.
Jess Zafarris, the author of Useless Etymology, says Hofer attributed those symptoms to the soldiers' longing for the Swiss Alps, labeling the condition heimwehe or "home-woe."
"It started out as a medical diagnosis — a kind of homesickness specific to Swiss soldiers — and became, over time, an emotional longing for the past," she says.
In a scientific paper about the condition, Hofer coined the term "nostalgia" from the Latin forms of Greek words nostos ("homecoming") and algos ("pain").
Zafarris says the ailment that Hofer described likely involved healthy doses of what we'd today call Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. But it has "evolved to mean far more than homesickness," she says. "It's often not about place at all, but about time."
Recognizing the change that comes with time can be a powerful trigger for these emotions, according to Thomas Dodman, author of What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of Deadly Emotion. As a result, the rapid transformation of modern society makes ours a particularly nostalgic era.
"I think of nostalgia as a modern emotion," Dodman says. "It is tied to capitalism. It is tied to modernity. It is tied to this accelerating, forward looking time that leaves things behind and therefore creates the sense of loss and longing. People didn't think of loss in that way 300 years ago, 400 years ago."
Tapping into that emotion can also be a money-maker, according to Mark Schaefer, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. Everything from vintage Pepsi cans to the re-release of "classic" video game consoles made by Atari and Nintendo, "almost every brand today is tapping into nostalgia in some way. It's become a universal marketing language," he says.
"In times of economic or psychological insecurity," playing the nostalgia card — at least from a marketing perspective — makes sense, he adds. "Brand marketing is about creating an emotional connection between what you do and your audience [and] nostalgia is one of the deepest emotional connections we have."
Personal and historical nostalgia
Krystine Batcho, a professor of psychology at LeMoyne College, studies nostalgia. She draws a distinction between personal nostalgia — "when someone misses or yearns for something from their own lived past" — and historical nostalgia, a longing for a time never experienced.
"When someone says they wish they'd lived during the Victorian days, that's historical nostalgia. But when someone misses family outings or childhood conversations, that's personal nostalgia," she notes.
That historical nostalgia is illustrated at Ka-Chunk!! Records, a store in Annapolis, Md., that specializes in new and used vinyl. The 47-year-old owner and manager, Matt Mona, remembers listening to 45s and long-play records. But most of his clientele don't. On a Saturday afternoon, the store is brimming with 20-somethings pawing through shelves of old records.
Mona says as a kid, he had a Fisher-Price Record Player and had albums like Michael Jackson's Thriller and the soundtrack to Star Wars.
"But then as I grew up, all my favorite bands I tended to like, I guess [were] more obscure, like punk music and indie music, and all those guys still made records throughout the years," he says. "All my favorite bands always had records. So for me it was always kind of normalized."
When he decided to open his shop in 2010, his customers were mostly older. "Now there's still a little bit of everyone, but there's a lot of young kids who are getting into it."
Historical nostalgia? Perhaps, but Mona sees the seed of a future personal nostalgia as well. Vinyl has advantages over streaming digital music, he says. There's a reason why people like thumbing through stacks of old albums.
"You're literally creating memories when you're interacting with something that's physical, anything that's tangible and tactile," Mona observes. "It just sets off elements in your brain that really react and create memories. And you're not doing that with MP3s or anything. So I think people really enjoy that."
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