My grandmother’s kitchen always smelled like onions frying in chicken fat, and it’s been twenty-four years since I last walked into that smell. I tell myself I’d give quite a lot to encounter it again, but that’s not exactly true. What I’m really reaching for is 2002 and being eleven and a version of myself who still believed certain things about the future, things that turned out to be wrong in ways I’m still discovering.
This is nostalgia in its benign form. Researchers at the University of Southampton—Constantine Sedikides, Tim Wildschut, others—have spent two decades establishing that this kind of reverie, the personal kind, the grandmother’s-kitchen kind, generally makes people feel more connected, more confident, less anxious about the strangeness of other people. The research program here is extensive and, frankly, a little relentless—there's a 'Southampton Nostalgia Scale,' there are cross-cultural replications, there's a whole apparatus of measurement. I mention this not to diminish it but because there's something poignant about the attempt to operationalize longing, to make it answer questionnaires. It’s medicine for loneliness. It reminds you that you have been loved, that your life has weight. Fine.
But there’s another nostalgia, and the two nostalgias turn out to do almost opposite things to the human heart.
The second one isn’t about your past. It’s about our past: the nation’s, the people’s, the way things were around here before. And this one, which feels like the same emotion, which uses the same word, which arises from the same basic human machinery of memory and longing, this one makes you meaner. The research is robust and a little horrifying: national nostalgia predicts anti-immigrant attitudes, predicts support for exclusionary definitions of who counts as a “real” citizen, predicts support for populist movements organized around identifying someone to blame for the feeling that home isn’t home anymore. The researchers most associated with this work are Anouk Smeekes and Maykel Verkuyten at Utrecht University. The pattern holds across multiple countries, multiple operationalizations, multiple years. National nostalgia predicts endorsement of 'ethnic' definitions of nationhood (a real German is someone with German ancestors) over 'civic' definitions (a real German is anyone committed to German civic life). It predicts opposition to Muslim expressive rights in the Netherlands. It predicts the whole architecture of us-and-them that organizes so much of contemporary politics.
Svetlana Boym, who taught at Harvard until her death in 2015, made a distinction I keep returning to. She called them restorative and reflective nostalgia. The restorative kind wants to go back, to rebuild, to patch the gaps—it doesn’t even recognize itself as nostalgia, just as truth, as wanting things to be correct again. It needs a conspiracy because if home has been lost then someone must have taken it. “In extreme cases,” Boym wrote, “it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill.”
Reflective nostalgia knows you can’t go back. Knows the past it’s longing for never quite existed anyway. It dwells in the longing itself rather than demanding restoration, and this makes it—Boym’s word—ironic, able to hold loss without requiring compensation, able to love what’s gone precisely because trying to reclaim it would destroy whatever was actually valuable about it.
The distinction sounds academic until you watch it operate in real time. Content analyses of speeches by populist radical-right leaders across Western Europe found the same pattern recurring: invoke a glorious past, denigrate the present as fallen, identify the contaminating element (immigrants, elites, some combination packaged for maximum grievance), promise return. The longing that started as your own private grief about time passing gets rerouted into a collective channel where it becomes a weapon. More than 50% of people in most Western countries, according to Ipsos polling, report longing for the way their country used to be. That’s not a fringe sentiment. That’s most of us. And that’s a lot of raw material for anyone willing to tell people what they should blame their longing on.
Here’s the thing I find difficult, and I’m not sure how to resolve it:
I am an extremely nostalgic person. Embarrassingly so. I have been moved nearly to tears by television commercials deploying certain chord progressions. I keep objects I can no longer remember the significance of because throwing them away feels like throwing away the moments they’re attached to, even though those moments are gone whether I keep the objects or not. I am exactly the kind of person who should be suspicious of his own nostalgic impulses, and I mostly am, but the suspicion doesn’t stop the impulses, just adds a layer of self-consciousness to them that may or may not be an improvement.
And there’s a further complication, which is that nostalgia doesn’t affect everyone the same way. Bas Verplanken, at the University of Bath, found that for people who are already prone to chronic worry—and I am, I absolutely am—nostalgic reverie can make things worse rather than better. The mechanism seems to be contrast: you remember the carefree past, compare it to your anxious present, and the comparison triggers rumination that deepens the very distress you were trying to escape. This is, if you think about it, a particularly cruel feedback loop: the people most in need of comfort from their memories are precisely the people for whom those memories become a source of further distress. Verplanken suggests mindfulness—staying present rather than reaching backward—as an alternative. But telling an anxious person to stop reaching for comfort is its own kind of cruelty.
It’s a drug whose effects depend on your existing neurochemistry. For some people, looking backward is medicine. For others, it’s poison.
And at the collective level, where the longing gets organized and directed and told what it’s really about—at that level, it can become something else entirely, something that builds phantom homelands people are willing to burn down the actual world to reach.
I don’t have a thesis here. Or rather, the thesis is just the distinction itself, which isn’t mine: personal nostalgia tends toward connection, collective nostalgia tends toward exclusion; reflective nostalgia accepts loss, restorative nostalgia demands redress. Maybe the test is something like: Does this feeling make you want to reach toward someone or defend against them? Does it make the world feel larger or smaller? Does it make you gentler?
I ask myself this sometimes, when I’m caught in one of those moments where some sensory trigger has transported me somewhere I can’t actually go. What am I doing with this feeling? What is it making me?
My grandmother’s kitchen is gone. My grandmother is gone. The eleven-year-old who sat at that table believing certain things about the future is gone too, replaced by whatever I am now. I can miss all of it. I do miss all of it, more than I usually let myself acknowledge, without needing to identify who took it from me. Time took it. That’s what time does.
The moment you start needing a thief, you’ve crossed into different territory. You’ve started building a phantom homeland. And the thing about phantoms is that they’re not real, they’re hungry, and they need to be fed.