"It's harmless, it's just nostalgia"

Some readers will say I've made a small thing into a large one. Everyone goes back. It's a bit of warmth on a cold evening. It's harmless.

Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Jamie Arndt and Clay Routledge, in 2006, ran seven studies on what nostalgia is and what it does. What people go back to, they found, is mostly themselves with people they were close to, or at big events, and the memories carry more good feeling than bad, and often have the shape of a hard time redeemed by a good outcome. What sets it off is negative mood, and one feeling in particular, which is loneliness. And what it does, in their experiments, is make people feel more connected to others, better about themselves, and better in general. Clay Routledge and colleagues, in 2011, added that nostalgia raises the sense that life has meaning, and that it does so through the feeling of being connected to people.

So the objection is half right, and I want to give it that. Going back isn't harmless. It's helpful. It's something a mind does when it's lonely or low, and it works, in the way that going to see an old friend works. It reminds you that you've been loved and that your life has had shape. I'd no more tell you to stop than tell you to stop seeing friends.

But notice what the studies describe. A visit. Someone goes back, is warmed, and comes forward again feeling more connected and more able to face the present. That's the function. Now notice what the sigh describes. Someone goes back, is warmed, and comes forward again feeling that the present is a poor thin thing compared with where they've been. Same trip, opposite return. The difference is what you carry back, and living there, in this book's sense, is a visit that ends in the sigh rather than in the present.

The distinction isn't mine to invent. It's the difference between going to a funeral and living in the cemetery. The first is right and necessary and does you good. The second is what the golden version, left to itself, turns into, because it's triggered by low mood, and the sigh produces low mood, and low mood sends you back. Chapter 21 is about keeping the visit and losing the sigh. And if going back is the only thing that makes the present bearable, and has been for weeks, that's not nostalgia doing its job. That's the preface's paragraph about the GP.