The Secret Psychology of Nostalgia
That familiar pang is less about the past than you think.
Updated June 2, 2026 | Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
I was zooming through the airport the other day when I saw a kid, maybe 19 or 20, wearing the exact pair of wide-leg baggy jeans I wore in 1993. I'd bought mine at a rundown suburban mall in Northern California because I thought they made me look like a guy who knew about skateboards and esoteric music. Seeing them on this kid more than 30 years later braced me for the oh-my-god-I'm-old feeling that comes with watching your youth show up in someone else's closet.
But that wasn't what happened. What it felt like was closer to recognition, except I couldn't figure out exactly what I was recognizing. I definitely do not want those pants back, and I don't particularly miss 1994, which I mostly remember as a time of crippling insecurity. The feeling was for something underneath the pants, some quality of experience I could suddenly feel the absence of—like the way you walk into a room and know something has been moved even though you can't say what.
I've been kicking this feeling over for weeks, partly because I keep seeing versions of it everywhere. The internet has decided that 2026 is the new 2016. There's even a full Wikipedia page devoted to it!
Then there's the sumptuous word anemoia , coined by the writer John Koenig, for the experience of feeling nostalgic for a time you never lived through. Millions of young people have seized on it recently because it names an ache they've been harboring without language to anchor it. They're buying film cameras, joining phone-free social clubs, building entire identities around decades that ended before they were born.
The usual explanation—that nostalgia is comfort food we reach for when the present gets hard—is true enough, and decades of research back it up. But it doesn't account for what I felt as I sprinted toward my boarding gate. That feeling wasn't warm and fuzzy the way nostalgia is supposed to be. It felt pointed , like my mind was trying to get my attention about something I hadn't noticed going missing.
Now I think I understand what's going on here.
When You Were Holding the Pen
When researchers study the content of nostalgic memories, a pattern emerges that most people don't notice: The self is almost always the protagonist. What I mean is that these aren't primarily memories of being comfortable or content or wrapped in warmth. They're disproportionately memories of acting on your own volition — organizing the road trip with a paper map, calling a friend on a landline to talk for two hours about nothing, walking into a record store with no idea what you were looking for, and spending 45 minutes finding it. The scenes your psyche considers worth preserving are the scenes where you were the one holding the pen.
A companion finding makes this richer. Experimental work at the intersection of nostalgia research and self-determination theory has suggested that when people's sense of autonomy is constrained—when they're put in situations where their ability to choose feels restricted—nostalgia fires almost reflexively, like a little alarm tripped before the conscious mind has registered what set it off. The mind senses a deficit in authorship and dips into the archive for evidence that you were once a person who caused things to happen.
And that breadcrumb lit something up for me. Because if nostalgia is what fires when the mind senses it's lost the ability to choose, I had to ask myself why that alarm has been going off so much lately.
Most of us treat nostalgia as a feeling about the past, and in some obvious way, it is. But I've been convinced that it has just as much to do with the present; it's a signal you've lost more authorship over your own experience than you realize. And the reason that signal is firing so relentlessly right now has less to do with the passage of time than with how much of your daily experience has been written for you without your noticing.
Just consider how much. A recommendation engine chooses what you'll listen to on your commute. GPS tells you exactly how to get where you're going, and neuroscience research has shown that relying on it actually changes the brain, shifting you from building your own internal map to simply following the next prompt. AI drafts your emails in your voice—and your voice drafted by a machine is a contradiction that would have been incoherent five years ago.
A computer scientist named Max Hawkins noticed a version of this in the mid-2010s: his life had become so algorithmically optimized that a machine could predict his tomorrow from his yesterday. His solution was to build apps that randomized everything , from where he lived to what he ate to what events he attended. Hawkins did this for two years before he understood that the problem was never which system was directing his life. The real problem was that a system was directing his life.
I understand his experience a little too well. Nearly 10 years ago, my job as head of business marketing for Instagram was to make the platform attractive to advertisers, which meant I spent more time inside the product than I ever wanted to. We tuned the advertising algorithm so finely that I ended up buying things through the platform I never knew existed, let alone needed. I'd open my closet and realize: I didn't build it—Instagram did. So when I left the company, I deleted the app along with it. And, for better or worse, my closet feels like mine again.
This is what makes that beautiful word anemoia so interesting. When a 19-year-old in London tells a reporter she's "nostalgic for a time when we were still doing things in the real world"—a time she was five years old, if she experienced it at all — she's talking about something far more specific than vintage aesthetics. She inherited a world where the basic ingredients of self-authored experience were replaced by systems that choose, find, and fill the spaces of boredom for you. She has never fully inhabited the mode of experience she's mourning, which is precisely why that mourning burns so hot.
Research bears this out in an unexpected way: One of the most reliable triggers of nostalgia is boredom, which psychologists increasingly define as the feeling of having lost control over your own attention. That's a jarring description of what it feels like to scroll numbingly through your feed for an hour and absorb none of it.
It's tempting to think of film cameras and vinyl records as mere fashion trends. But they're more accurately artifacts from a world in which humans steered their own attention, and that girl in London is studying them the way you'd study the remnants of a language your grandparents spoke but never taught you. Even the social memories nostalgia retrieves are wrapped up in this. They're rarely scenes of being passively surrounded by people. They are memories of architecting the connection yourself, organizing the dinner, making the call, driving across town because you felt like seeing someone or doing something. And that alone was enough.
So what do you do when that pang of nostalgia, or anemoia, hits? The drive is to chase it, to buy the baggy jeans, the vintage records, plan the unplugged weekend, romanticize whatever era the feeling attaches itself to. But the memory is really a container, not a destination. I've started conjuring up three questions, and they've changed how I hear the signal:
What quality of experience is hiding behind this memory? The song, the city, the smell, the decade: These are all packaging. What's inside? Is it an open-ended possibility? Bounded attention? Connection I built with my own hands? Name that quality, and you've found what's actually missing.
Where in your current life has that quality disappeared? Your first instinct will be to focus on when you lost it. The more useful question is where it's absent right now. Is it something about your mornings? Your commute? Your friendships? Nostalgia is almost always about what's missing now, not about some vague fondness for the past.
What's one thing you could author this week? You really don't need to overhaul your life. You need to pick up the pen in one specific place. Choose your own music, intentionally, for the long drive. Leave your phone in another room during dinner. Call someone when you're thinking about them instead of texting. Show up somewhere without GPS or a plan.
I keep thinking about that kid in the airport, as I see hordes of his doppelgängers everywhere. I finally understand that my weird feeling wasn't for 1993 or about those stupid pants. It was my mind, in the only language it had available, telling me that somewhere along the way I'd handed over the pen more than I realized. A guy in baggy jeans just happened to walk past at the moment I was ready to hear it.
Hawkins, M. (2018). I asked an algorithm to randomize my life for two years. TED Talk.
Koenig, J. (2021). The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows . Simon & Schuster.
Maguire, E. A., Gadian, D. G., Johnsrude, I. S., Good, C. D., Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R. S. J., & Frith, C. D. (2000). Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 97(8), 4398-4403.
Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Routledge, C., Arndt, J., Hepper, E. G., & Zhou, X. (2015). To nostalgize: Mixing memory with affect and desire. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 51, 189-273.
Van Tilburg, W. A. P., Igou, E. R., & Sedikides, C. (2013). In search of meaningfulness: Nostalgia as an antidote to boredom. Emotion, 13(3), 450-461.
Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Arndt, J., & Routledge, C. (2006). Nostalgia: Content, triggers, functions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(5), 975-993.
Kassova, L. (2026, April 1). Gen Z is engineering an analog future—and it's at least a $5 billion opportunity. Fortune .
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Eric Solomon, Ph.D., transitioned to business after earning his Ph.D. in psychology. He's held leadership roles at YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, and Bonobos and is currently serving as the CEO of The Human OS.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.