Of Memory and Manifestos
A Storytellers’s Guide to Nostalgia
I spend the last week in the Arctic, hiking 120km through the wilderness of Lapland. For many years in my twenties that was the rhythm my life took - travelling, often with not much more than a tent and sleeping bag, rock climbing, being in the mountains or some remote place. And during those long days last week, I felt some nostalgia for the simple life this was. And it got me thinking of the feeling of nostalgia, not only in our personal experience, but also in society and the narratives that shape us. So when I reached civilisation (and phone reception) again, I looked deeper into it and wrote down my thoughts on how we can use it as storytellers. Enjoy!
Of Memory and Manifestos: A Storytellers’s Guide to Nostalgia
You feel it everywhere. It’s the ghost in the machine of modern culture. You hear it in the politician’s promise to restore a lost “golden age”. You see it in the endless stream of movie reboots and retro-themed TV shows that fill your screens. You even scroll through it on your phone, served up by an algorithm that knows the precise vintage of your longing.
This is nostalgia. But much deeper than that, it is a profound emotion that allows us to travel in time and find meaning in moments of the past. And for the storyteller—the writer, journalist, or creator trying to build work that matters—it is one of the most powerful and perilous materials in our toolkit. It’s a sentimental longing for the past that can be a source of profound comfort and meaning, but it can also be a tool for manipulation and a trap that prevents us from engaging with the present. To work with it effectively, you must first understand its grain.
Understanding the Grain: Why Nostalgia Feels So Good
Interestingly, for centuries, nostalgia was considered a disease. Coined in 1688 from the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain), it was a diagnosis for the sometimes-fatal homesickness of soldiers. Today, we understand it not as a pathology but as a fundamental and adaptive human emotion that serves critical psychological functions.
At its core, nostalgia is an autobiographical emotion, a mental time travel to a personally meaningful past. When faced with loneliness, anxiety, or a sense of meaninglessness, our minds often recruit nostalgic memories as a homeostatic corrective. This mental time travel performs three essential tasks:
It Strengthens Social Bonds: Nostalgic memories are rarely solitary; they are filled with family and friends, with connection. By reliving these moments, we reinforce our sense of connection and belonging, which can combat loneliness and even inspire us to be more empathetic and helpful to others.
It Provides a Sense of Meaning: Nostalgia acts as a narrative thread, weaving the events of our lives into a coherent story. This bolsters our self-continuity, the feeling that we are the same person across time, which is a powerful defense against existential dread.
It Improves Our Mood: By recalling cherished moments, nostalgia reliably boosts our mood, enhances self-esteem, and fosters a sense of optimism for the future.
These functions are the source of nostalgia’s power. It isn’t just a wistful feeling; it’s a deep psychological resource for building a stable and meaningful self. This is why it’s so easily co-opted for use in the public square, because the very mechanisms that help us build a personal identity can be scaled up to build a collective one.
I’m only scratching the surface here, of course, but there are two aspects of Nostalgia, I want to look deeper into: the restorative and reflective aspects and how they relate to our personal and societal feeling of nostalgia.
The Two Approaches: A Framework for the Storyteller
To use Nostalgia in our stories with integrity, we need a framework to distinguish its healthy use from its dangerous manipulation. Cultural theorist Svetlana Boym provided the perfect blueprint, identifying two distinct modes of nostalgia based on which part of its Greek etymology is emphasized: restorative and reflective. For the storyteller, I think, it’s useful to think of these as two different tools.
The Restorative Approach: Rebuilding a Lost Home
Restorative nostalgia focuses on the nostos—the return home. It is not content with longing; it wants to rebuild a lost past it sees as a stable, superior “golden age”.
The Mission: This approach sees the past not as a memory but as “truth and tradition”. Its goal is to create a perfect replica of a history that has been sanitized of all its complexity, injustice, and hardship. It presents a singular, totalizing narrative that explains what went wrong and offers a path back to a lost paradise.
The Output: This is the approach we often see with political populism and nationalist revivals. Slogans like “Make America Great Again” are masterworks of creating restorative nostalgia, promising a return to a vaguely defined but emotionally potent past. What makes “Make America Great Again” so effective, is the “again” in the slogan, that points towards this imagined elusive past. This approach is inherently divisive, creating a virtuous “us” (who belong to the golden age) and a threatening “them” (who are blamed for its loss). While personal nostalgia often enhances empathy, politicised collective nostalgia can stoke in-group favouritism and out-group derogation, justifying prejudice and exclusionary policies.
The Storyteller’s Warning: Work done at this bench is brittle. It offers false certainty and rejects nuance. It can be a powerful tool for mobilization, offering a simple, yet intriguing narrative of the past we can see ourselves in - happy, successful, without worry -, but it often does so by flattening history and excluding anyone whose memory doesn’t fit the myth. It is a tool for building walls, not workshops to learn and progress.
The Reflective Approach: Dwelling in the Longing
Reflective nostalgia focuses on the algia—the ache and the longing itself. It accepts that the past is fundamentally gone and finds meaning in the fragments and contradictions of memory.
The Mission: This approach does not seek to rebuild the past but to sit with the bittersweet feeling of its absence. It is self-aware, often ironic, and comfortable with ambiguity. It uses the past not as a blueprint for restoration but as a source of insight for understanding the present. It is more complex and potentially also more painful for the recipient and therefore also more difficult to use.
The Output: This is the approach of the memoirist who acknowledges complexity, the artist who creates ironic retro aesthetics, and the filmmaker who deconstructs the very fantasy of a “golden age”. A film like Midnight in Paris, for example, uses nostalgia to show that every generation incorrectly idealizes a previous one, ultimately arguing that fulfillment can only be found by embracing the messy reality of one’s own time.
The Storyteller’s Way: This approach aligns with a core philosophy, I try to communicate here: Clarity is kindness; nuance is respect. It allows you to tap into the emotional power of the past without sacrificing integrity. It uses memory to ask questions rather than provide dogmatic answers, trusting the audience’s intelligence to navigate the complexity.
Choosing Your Tools
As storytellers, you encounter nostalgia every day—both as a force shaping the culture and as a feeling within yourself. This simple framework is not just an analytical tool; it is also a choice about how you practice your craft.
When you analyze a political movement, a brand campaign, or a piece of media, ask yourself:
Which appraoch was this built at? Is it trying to restore a sanitized past, or is it reflecting on a complex one?. Does it offer the false comfort of a simple myth, or does it invite you into a more honest inquiry? Or does it bring both approaches together, to use the strong emotion of the idealised past to ask questions to build upon?
More importantly, when you create your own work, you must choose your tools. You can harness the immense power of nostos to offer certainty and belonging, but you risk creating work that is exclusionary and dishonest. Or, you can work with the quieter, more complex power of algia, crafting work that is resonant, nuanced, and humane.
The choice is between building a monument to a past that never was or using the fragments of what has been to build a more thoughtful and resilient future. That is the work of the storyteller. It can inspire, connect, and provide meaning, mobilising individuals to move forward. Yet, it also possesses a potent societal power, capable of forging national identities, driving consumer culture, and, in its darker manifestations, fuelling political division and historical distortion.
For storytellers and journalists, understanding this duality is paramount. The difference between restorative nostalgia, which seeks to dogmatically recreate an imagined and infallible past, and reflective nostalgia, which engages thoughtfully with an imperfect past to better understand the present, is critical. By conscientiously employing narrative techniques and aesthetic choices, creators can evoke nostalgia to foster genuine connection, inspire critical thought, and encourage a deeper engagement with both history and the present. When used responsibly, nostalgia is not merely a retreat into memory but a powerful lens through which to examine our present and thoughtfully shape the architecture of our collective future. It allows us to look back, not to remain trapped, but to learn, grow, and move forward.