Are you obsessed with a past that never existed?

The strange psychology of nostalgia and why the future will always disappoint you if you're comparing it to a fantasy.

"Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember."

Joan Didion

I have complicated feelings about banning under 16s from social media.

That might surprise any of you who know my work. But although I do support regulation, I think a ban is a pretty short-sighted idea. I don’t believe it holds big tech companies accountable or treats young people with much respect or empathy either.

But I don’t want to talk about the ban itself today. What I’ve found fascinating is how often people argued for it by appealing to this very pervasive idea that “things were better in my day.”

Now, I do understand this thinking.

I get misty-eyed about the best bits of my childhood. I was so very lucky to spend a lot of time with my mum and my brother, making messy arts and crafts in the garage, climbing trees in fields and dancing around on the beach with our beloved black Labrador. With no phones, notifications or algorithms.

And do I think some more trees, some more arts and crafts and a few less phones might benefit many kids today? Absolutely.

But I also think the idea that we can simply remove social media and somehow snap back into the past, as if we’re respawning at the start of a video game level, is incredibly naive.

Because that’s not how time works, too much has changed. But I think there’s something deeper going on, too: the past we’re longing for is often not the past we think it was.

Why the past feels better than it was

People look back on their time as a child and conclude that everything was easier, simpler and more carefree. But was the world actually easier? Or were you simply, you know, a child?

This is the strange power of nostalgia, a word I’m sure we're all familiar with at this point. It’s a bittersweet longing for the past, a mixture of warmth, comfort and loss. The pleasure of remembering combined with the sadness of knowing we can never go back.

But nostalgia isn’t just a feeling. Psychologists have spent decades studying it, and some of what they’ve learned helps explain why we’re so easily convinced that things were better back then.

There’s something called the reminiscence bump. Which explains why people tend to remember experiences from adolescence and early adulthood more vividly than almost any other period of their lives. These are the years when we’re forming our identities, experiencing major life events and encountering many things for the first time.

The effect can be powerful. When I was a kid, my grandma was already approaching her 90s and dementia had slowly and cruelly erased nearly 70 years of her life. But despite not knowing who I was, she could tell me stories about how she worked as a hairdresser in her late teens with incredible detail and delight.

Researchers think the reminiscence bump may help explain why so many of us look back on that period of our lives so fondly. We’re often convinced that music peaked when we were teenagers, films were better, fashion was more exciting. That the world itself felt more hopeful and full of possibility.

This makes sense, those were the years when life felt most alive. And while some things may have been “better” back then, our memories are far less reliable and objective than we’d like to believe.

There’s also something else going on that I’ve always found fascinating, which is sometimes called rosy retrospection. This is a cognitive bias where we remember past experiences more positively than we experienced them at the time.

The awkward moments, frustrations and anxieties, they all fade away. And what’s left is more likely to resemble a highlight reel. So it’s the summer holiday but not all of the arguments in the car on the way.

Longing for a false past

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”

Michael Proust

If you know me in real life, you’ll know I’m slightly obsessed with time travel films. Recently I watched La Jetée, the seminal 1962 French science-fiction short film that went on to influence countless time travel stories. It’s brilliant, haunting, unlike anything I’ve seen before and only about half an hour long.

The interesting thing about La Jetée is that it’s about longing as much as it’s about future technology.

The entire story revolves around a man fixated on a singular memory. A moment from his past exerts this magnetic pull on him, and he spends his life trying to return to it. Yet, like so many things we chase in our memories, it turns out not to be what he imagined at all.

The reason I’m mentioning it is that I find science fiction offers a really useful lens through which we can think about our own relationship with time, memory and the future.

And La Jetée captures the seductive power of nostalgia with haunting clarity. Our tendency to continuously sacrifice the present in pursuit of an idealised version of the past. To spend so much time looking backwards that we stop paying attention to what’s right in front of us.

Now, we may not spend our lives trying to travel back to a particular moment, but we often find ourselves drawn towards these idealised versions of the past.

There isn’t always a problem with that. Sometimes we look backwards because looking forwards feels frightening, which I absolutely understand. I’ve been noticing this a lot in the return of Y2K aesthetics, retro gadgets and analogue technology.

Now, to be clear, I like much of it. I’m not rolling my eyes at people buying digital cameras or listening to CDs, I understand the appeal. After all, I was a teen during that era too. So consider my rosy retrospection well and truly activated whenever I step into Urban Outfitters.

But I don’t think people are really nostalgic for low-rise jeans or colourful plastic ‘blobjects’. They’re nostalgic for what they think those things represent.

A time before smartphones felt mandatory. Before every experience became content, every interaction became data and every spare moment became something to optimise.

Because although you might tell me you miss the feel of flip phones or MP3 players in your hands, I suspect what you miss even more is a sense of optimism without technological exhaustion.

And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Symbols and aesthetics help us express emotions that are otherwise difficult to name. We attach meaning to objects because objects help us make sense of our experiences. They become like containers for our hopes, fears, identities and memories.

Most of the time, that’s harmless. People aren’t really trying to return to 2000. They’re reaching for a feeling. Maybe that’s a sense of possibility, simplicity or connection that they worry has been lost. So in this way, nostalgia becomes less of a blueprint we can snap back to and more of a comfort blanket.

But that distinction is important. Because there’s a difference between using the past to understand what we value and treating it as a destination we should be returning to.

This is why I think it’s worth paying attention to the way we talk about the past, especially when we invoke it in conversations about the future. Because not all nostalgia is created equal. Some forms of nostalgia help us understand what we value now. Whereas others make it harder to imagine anything new.

There are two types of nostalgia

In The Future of Nostalgia, cultural theorist Svetlana Boym describes two very different forms of nostalgia. The first is reflective nostalgia, which accepts that the past is gone. It understands that memories are incomplete and imperfect, and cherishes what happened without demanding its return.

Then there’s restorative nostalgia. This doesn’t miss the past, it wants to rebuild it. It believes there was once a golden age and that society’s problems can be solved by returning to it. Rather than reflecting on history, it attempts to recreate it.

You can see traces of restorative nostalgia in political slogans like “Make America Great Again” or appeals to restore a lost Britain. You can see it in nationalist movements across the world built around promises of returning to a better time. And this is where I’d argue it’s fuelled some of the arguments for the social media ban, too. But the problem is that these golden ages are often heavily edited versions of history, selectively remembered and elevated to serve an agenda.

I think it’s vitally important we understand these different forms of nostalgia because when the present feels overwhelming and the future feels uncertain, the past becomes an incredibly tempting place to retreat to. Nostalgia can be a source of comfort, meaning and stability.

But not all nostalgia serves us equally well. Restorative nostalgia keeps us fixated on recreating a world that never really existed. It turns our attention backwards and invites us to draw inspiration from the past when it should be helping us look ahead. The future will never seem appealing if we keep comparing it to an idealised version of the past, especially one that is so often weaponised in the present.

Reflective nostalgia is different. It might be able to help us identify what mattered and why instead. The values, experiences and ways of being that we don’t want to lose. It can help us understand why a particular era, place or memory still exerts such a powerful pull on us.

Because I don’t believe the goal should ever be to recreate the past. Or ban social media and imagine we’ll somehow wake up in 1998 the next day. Or fill our homes with retro gadgets and pretend it’s 2000. It’s to understand what those memories are trying to tell us.

And once we understand that, I hope we can begin carrying those lessons forward into the future.