Anticipatory Nostalgia
Missing the present before it vanishes in the future
Dear Friends,
I am writing this during a short layover at JFK Airport en route to Ghana. It will be my last work trip to Ghana, or to anywhere in Africa; the last time I travel with my colleague Ousseynou; the last time I ride my bike with Ghanaian cycling friends and eat at my favorite restaurants in Accra. I haven’t even arrived and already I feel what
describes as “pre-nostalgia”:It's the feeling that something ... not good exactly, but important, momentous, happened, and is now over. A chapter done in the narrative of my life, with all its drama and fun and learning experiences and people met.
I asked a friend recently about the last time he cried. It was his daughter’s kindergarten graduation.1 He wasn’t ready to let go of the present, even though he wants her to grow into the future.
Another dear friend,
points to research linking nostalgia to happiness. From his newsletter:In that 2013 study, the lead researcher talks about feeding the memory bank. He makes a declaration to actually prepare nostalgic moments to make your life better. He calls this “anticipatory nostalgia”, and when I read that statement from this very old article, I almost fell out of my chair. It’s like finding a name for the thing that’s been bugging you for years, and finally, some random stranger at a bar drinking espresso martinis drops a bombshell of knowledge.
Indeed, a thorough body of research has linked nostalgia to happiness, gratitude, and pro-social behavior. Few activities can bring a group together like shared sentimentality for the past, as Trump and other politicians have been quick to exploit. And so I was surprised by some clever research that found that “anticipatory nostalgia,” by comparison, is linked to sadness and melancholy. When we feel a sense of creeping nostalgia for the present, the researchers speculate, we’re fearful that the future will be worse. This sense of fear is fed by doom scenarios about climate change, inequality, and artificial intelligence. To return to Etienne’s post about “Pre-Nostalgia in the Late Pre-AI Era,” he writes:
This time we know that society is on the cusp of major transformation. We may be wrong, but if we are, that will be the surprise. So, in the anticipation of the major changes AI is about to wreak upon the world, I have been feeling pre-nostalgic more and more often.
Fortunately for me, melancholy does not accompany my current state of anticipatory nostalgia. I am very much looking forward to the future while I’m nostalgic for the present.2
I hope to one day nostalgically reminisce with Ousseynou about this week’s trip to Ghana. And while I’m optimistic about the future state of the world when we do, only time will tell.
🌄 A quarter-century of friendship takes work
It wasn’t easy to pick where to backpack over the 4th of July weekend. Anything above 8,000 feet is still covered with snowpack. Anything below 6,500 feet had temperatures in the high 90s. The trailhead needed to be accessible enough to arrive in a Subaru, but not so accessible that it is swarming with crowds.
Emigrant Wilderness turned out to be just the right place. It wasn’t easy backpacking — sliding down snow, crossing waste-high rivers, tramping through muddy marshes — but it was enjoyable.
On the first two nights, we camped next to three new friends in their 20s. We told them that we’ve been friends for more than 25 years, that Sparsh and I went to high school together, and that Revaz and I would meet later in college. They were impressed that we’ve stayed friends for so long, and truthfully, so am I.
When you’ve known each other for over 20-30 years and you’re on an arduous journey in the wilderness, you’re bound to psychoanalyze the shit out of each other. And boy did we. We re-litigated episodes from over a decade ago and surfaced resentments that had accumulated along the way. We gave each other feedback, got defensive, and made up.
They say that friends are the family you choose. And while I agree, in my experience, it’s far too easy to let friends go when times get tough (and too tough to work through conflict when it arises).
I won’t lie: I still held on to a bit of annoyance and anger when we returned to the trailhead. But as we drank our icy beers at the Mexican restaurant and made fun of each other’s idiosyncrasies, I could already anticipate the nostalgia I will one day feel for our weekend together. I’m extremely grateful to have these two in my life and I hope they feel the same.
🚴 What a Tour de France!
I’m definitely definitely going to lose the fantasy pool for the Tour de France because I wasn’t caught up enough to pick any stage winners. (Plus, Richard Carapaz 🥺) But I just caught up on the NBC extended highlights of stages 1-6 while on the flight from San Francisco to New York. One of my favorite parts of the Netflix documentary about last year’s tour is how they show new cycling fans how it’s a team sport; one of my minor annoyances was how they played up the tension between Wout Van Aert and Jonas Vingegaard.
I tell you: I almost teared up when I saw how Van Aert sacrificed himself for Vingegaard in Stage 6. (That’s not really a spoiler.) And I couldn’t be happier for Sacramento native Neilson Powless, the first American cyclist to wear the polka dot jersey four days in a row. If you’ve ever been cycling-curious, this month’s Tour de France is a great race to tune in to live with NBC Sports/Peacock, or by catching the 20-minute extended summaries on YouTube.3
📵 Not a useful tool: Threads
Sure, I’m on Threads for now — the latest Twitter competitor to join Mastodon, BlueSky, Substack Notes, and countless others. Why am I there? My hope is that Threads dies just like all of the others. As Ian Bogost and Charlie Warzel write in the Atlantic:
With a few threads posted, and the most eager followees following or followed, the dopamine high cleared, revealing reality: The age of social media is over, and it cannot be recovered. Zuckerberg has merely copied and pasted a social network, and we are back where we started, only with all the baggage and psychological scarring of previous connectivity experiences.
Behold my youthful face and body! Behold my mimosa-encrusted brunch! Behold my career as an individual discharging ideas, takes, or takedowns!
Who, if anyone, is this for? Did anyone ask for this? Why are these hot people with excellent skin, blue check marks, and 750,000 followers so excited?
Amen. Or am I wrong? And if so, are you using Threads, and what are you getting out of it?
Wherever you are, I hope you’re making some meaningful memories for future nostalgia. Yours,
David
Really, they graduate from kindergarten now?
In our podcast about “technostalgia” last September,
and I discussed our unexpected nostalgia for old tools that were clearly inferior and more frustrating than what we use today. In fact, it was the repeated bouts of frustration and problem-solving that created an intimate relationship with the tools — for example, all those hours I spent slowly producing podcasts with Audacity instead of just pressing a few magic AI buttons with Descript.I admit that I strategically scheduled my meetings in Accra so that I can watch the end of each stage over the next ten days live.
I read this awhile back when you first posted and had an immediate reaction which I am only now getting around to posting. Nostalgia is my jam, my favorite is listening to 70’s music which makes me nostalgic for my mom and being an adolescent, and 80’s music which makes me nostalgic for teen movies of that era. It sounds morbid but I’ve always known this is the nostalgia I want to feel laying in my deathbed.
on anticipatory nostalgia: I'm weepy all the time with my kids. It's all so poignant. You're experiencing things, but also appreciating that you're experiencing them at the same time. I think that self-awareness is actually good and makes the experience that much richer for knowing that it's important and also transient.