Anticipatory nostalgia: missing the present when it's not yet lost
Past lives, the what ifs, and all the versions of nostalgia at once
In our house, there are two of us who are prone to nostalgia and two of us who are not. It isn’t without coincidence that the same two have an easier time living in the present than the two of us who often ruminate about the past and worry about the future.
There seems to be a correlation; I will let you guess which side of the line I fall.
I’ve always wondered why some people are more nostalgic than others. I connect the dots between sentimental longing, personality traits, and cognitive biases as I observe this particular divide in our household.
I was not raised by nostalgic parents. When I think about them escaping poverty and war, it makes sense; they inhabit that self-protective survivors’ mentality like armor that propels them to always look forward. If lived experiences and cultural influences are some of the factors that make one person more nostalgic over another, I’m not sure why I grew up to become such a sentimental, nostalgic-prone adult. If I didn’t have a child who ended up like me in this regard, I would have moved through life feeling greatly mismatched with the rest of my family.
It’s not that I even want to revisit my childhood. Yet here I am, actively searching for nostalgia through the specific smells of Sanrio erasers or a particular flavor of boxed gum from HMart that doesn’t taste like anything I can identify except the tase of childhood. I latch onto these memories that convince me that my childhood was happier than it was.
But this is what makes nostalgia so powerful and fascinating: that feeling of connection that grounds you in periods of transition, like I am now, when I’m overwhelmed with trying to hold on while simultaneously letting go. It allows us to explore through layered emotional experiences, the continuity of identity and our ability to self-comfort. Yes, it’s often a fragmented comfort that is invoked from filtered memories softened over time, but nostalgia can also help us cope with all these relentless changes in our lives as we connect our past to our future.
All the versions of nostalgia at once
It shouldn’t come as a surprise when I tell you that the past year in particular has been especially steeped in nostalgia. It feels unavoidable. From thumbing through baby photos for my high school senior’s yearbook pages to archiving my design work, I feel like I’m constantly wading through past memories to clear the path for future possibilities.
What I didn’t realize I was also experiencing, however, was anticipatory nostalgia. I’m sure you have felt it too if you’ve ever looked out on a view on your last day of vacation and started having pangs of sadness that your vacation was ending soon. Of course, in my ridiculous version of extreme anticipating, I start feeling this sadness halfway through the trip. Or maybe you’re like one half of my household who doesn’t experience life in this way.
This version of nostalgia—preemptively grieving a sense of loss for something that you’re experiencing now in anticipation for missing it in the future—is a multi-layered paradox of emotions and can be a total mind trip. Most recently, I’ve been feeling this intensely as I talk to my kid, knowing that she’ll be gone in six months and we won’t be having our daily after-school check-ins much longer. Her, sitting on the floor of my room by the balcony doors, offering me a handful of chips as we weave in and out of various topics.
If this sounds convoluted, perhaps it is. I’m already missing these moments even as she sits six feet away from me.
All our past lives
Past Lives has been coming into conversation a lot on my social feeds. It may be because it’s awards season and a new wave of audiences is streaming it, but it’s crept back into my mind lately too. It was the only movie that I saw in the theater last year and my friends warned me to bring tissues because the ending made them cry—and I did. Not big fat tears and the heaving sobbing kind of cry, but the kind that just wells up in your eyes and threatens to roll down your face.
I’ve read a few reviews that called the film slow and the characters dull. This particular review called it “frictionless” and “unconvincing.” I’m not really sure we saw the same movie. It’s true that there are a lot of awkward pauses between Nora and her childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung, and between Hae Sung and Nora’s husband, Arthur. There are also uncomfortably long silent gazes, some met by the person on the receiving end and some missed. The awkwardness jumps off the screen; you can feel it prickling at your skin. The film is a quiet mastery of deliberate pacing with an undercurrent of nuanced tension that hums along in a whisper, but that’s what makes this movie achingly real for some.
Life isn’t always about the grand gestures and emotions. Those can happen, but more often than not, life is a series of quiet fleeting moments that stitch together into future memories of something wonderful, but also sometimes terrible. It isn’t often that you find this quality in a film; the pacing and the quietness allows the characters and the city backdrops of NYC and Seoul to breathe and amble forward. It even allowed space for some of my own wistful introspection to creep in as I watched these characters struggle to reconcile their past lives with each other and themselves.
(Some vague spoilers in the next paragraph)
I didn’t see the movie quite like a romance, but more as a farewell to a past identity that the main character, Nora, comes to terms with at the end. Except this time it’s by her own choice and not one that was chosen for her when her parents decided to immigrate to Canada when she was 12. Hae Sung was really just the vessel in which she makes this realization, first when she ends their ritual of Skype calls after reconnecting in their 20s, and then again in-person a dozen years later. In this final farewell, Nora is saying goodbye to her old identity that she left behind in Korea for good.
We have all left something behind. We all have our unbearable what ifs. Maybe because I’m an immigrant myself, even as young as I was, it conjures up these lingering sentiments of having missed one life over the other.
What if I never came to the U.S.?
What if I never quit art school and left NY?
What if I never came back to NY?
I see the manifestations of my life choices everywhere I look: the city I live in, the person I decided to build a life with. The what ifs allow us to entertain the missed opportunities and the alternate possibilities. Not all of us have the chance to face this exploration head on like Nora did when she reconnected with her past face-to-face.
Maybe this is why the movie made us cry. In the intersection of where our what ifs and nostalgia collide, it’s human nature to contemplate how things could have been different.
Related reading
Some things I found interesting this week
The True Meaning of Nostalgia (The New Yorker)
Why the politics of young men and women are drifting further and further apart (The Guardian)
No, You Shouldn’t Be Afraid of Fungi (Time)
Friendship (The Paris Review)
This "anticipatory nostalgia" pretty much describes what my life was like for the six years while my wife was living with terminal cancer.
I would have these out-of-body experiences every day, not knowing if it were the last meal we would eat together, our last trip, or her last new iPhone. Every moment became a moment to miss and a reminder of my impending loss.
I photographed every big and small thing to capture as much of our life together as possible, hoping to bring it forward when she was gone.
Until now, reading this, I didn't have a term for what I was going through. So, thank you, Jenna.
Hi jenna,
I saw past lives à couple of weeks ago, liked it pretty well until the very end which moved me very deeply, i couldnt quite say why. I understood it as 'sometimes life is complicated' but your explanation sounds more sophisticated 😀 and sensible. Thanks for this new perspective!