It’s the third official month of lockdown in Ontario and millions are continuing life in a more dreadful and anxious state. In the new era of uncertainty, many people have gone back to what is familiar.
Instant access to millions of shows and games has made reviewing the past accessible. Modern interpretations of childhood video games, such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons, are extremely popular during the pandemic. The recent reboot of the 2001 Animal Crossing video game for the Nintendo Switch had over 13 million users in its first six weeks of release.
Carleton University professor of sociology, Tonya Davidson, explained why reconnecting with experiences from the past can be chicken soup for the soul—especially during a pandemic.
“When people are engaging in nostalgic activities, they are fundamentally seeking some security,” Davidson said. “They’re longing for a time and place when they felt total security in the world.”
Davidson explained homesickness is a common form of nostalgia where the person is longing for a time from the past. The global shift to everyday life which occurred due to COVID-19 could also be making people homesick for a pre-pandemic world, she added.
“At times of insecurity like this pandemic, nostalgia for childhood or nostalgia for adolescence [is common] as well,” Davidson said. “These years in one’s life are actually quite relatively short in our memory because they are kind of the time before nostalgia is possible.”
According to a 2016 study published by Elsevier Ltd., nostalgic experiences stimulate metabolic activities in the brain—specifically the hippocampus—where memory is formed. The substantia nigra, the ventral tegmental area, and ventral striatum are activated during nostalgic activity and these reward centers can explain the pleasant feelings upon revisiting positive experiences from the past.
Consuming older media, such as video games, shows or books, trigger reward pathways in the brain that result in positive feelings of nostalgia, the study explains. Good feelings work as a response to whether the experiences in the former environment were considered positive or largely neutral, but not if those experiences were unpleasant or personally hurtful.
While nostalgic activity can feel rewarding, Davidson also cautioned that there can be some negative accompanying side effects.
“There are a lot of problems with nostalgia culturally,” she said.
Davidson said that there are two main types of nostalgia: restorative and reflective.
“Restorative nostalgia is a type of nostalgia where people are trying to reproduce what is imagined as a lost society,” she explained. “Restorative nostalgia can be awful because a lot of restorative nostalgics are remembering and longing for times that were actually quite awful for many, many people.”
She used the Trump administration’s campaign, “Make America Great Again (MAGA),” as an example of restorative nostalgia gone wrong.
“It’s fundamentally an expression of nostalgia […] saying we want to go back to another time,” she said. “But what people who like MAGA are nostalgic for is a time of even more heightened racism, xenophobia, and sexism.”
A 2014 study conducted by Routledge showed how nostalgia can be used as a way to deal with political problems. When people face major disruptions and disturbances in their daily lives, they longed for an idealized version of the past. Nostalgia can be provoked by politicians as a tool of political persuasion to soothe the social and cultural anxieties of the day.
Reflective nostalgia is more thoughtful, Davidson explained, and doesn’t try to reclaim a whole lost society for the present or future. Reflective nostalgia considers which parts of the past could be useful for the present and the future.
Davidson said some activities becoming popular during the pandemic, such as home cooking, could trigger a reflective nostalgic response.
“A lot of people are maybe cooking the food their grandparents made and rediscovering these things in a nostalgic way,” she said. “When you think about our food culture, it is that home cooking is very good for you and family togetherness.”
She added the reflective component occurs while critically thinking about why something encourages nostalgia.
“There’s a lot of things that can be good about being nostalgic for home cooking that we can hold on to, but we can also be critical of being nostalgic for dominant gender roles [attached to cooking],” Davidson said.
Davidson added she has a hunch that in the near future, people are going to have odd feelings of nostalgia for their time during COVID-19. Although the pandemic has certainly been an awful time for many people, she said it may also cause people to reflect on what aspects of life they want to keep from the pandemic moving forward.
“People are not going to be nostalgic for all of what’s happening now — they’re not going to be nostalgic for the financial strife and the health anxiety,” Davidson said.
“But people might want to bring into the future some of the things like heightened connections with some of their kin or their relations, the people in their lives, and also a different relationship to time as well.”
Featured image provided by Nintendo and NBC.
