From its origins as the ‘Swiss disease’ coined by Johannes Hofer, to its classification as a formal medical diagnosis in American Civil War hospital reports, the term nostalgia has undergone a massive evolution. It later shifted from a clinical affliction to psychological trauma ‘PTSD’ and finally to a distinct emotion, as outlined by Fred Davis. There is no doubt that the term has evolved entirely beyond its original bounds; yet to our surprise, modern nostalgia continues to branch out into newer, more insidious niches.

Traditionally, we think of nostalgia as an ache directed backwards, i.e. recalling a pivotal moment that has already slipped through our fingers. We associate it with worn out polaroids, obsolete mixtapes, monochrome albums or the phantom scent of a house we haven’t stepped inside for a decade. But recently, a temporal glitch has begun to impact the human psyche; we find ourselves grieving an instance we are currently experiencing.

Often standing in the middle of a crowd or in an afternoon with someone intimate, an abrupt, throbbing anxiety stirs just beneath the skin; This will end. I will never be this exact age, in this body, with these people ever again. We find ourselves mourning how this exact second will inevitably collapse into a faded memory, desperately wishing to replay the scene even while it hasn’t fully anchored. This eerie phenomenon is familiar to most, as we collectively become the loges of our own lives.

This is not the usual sentiment our ancestors used to indulge in while tracing the worn contours of a distant youth. This contemporary suffering is called pre-emptive nostalgia: the psychological failure to inhabit the present tense in earnest. We have effectively lost our grip on the immediate moment precisely because we have already been consumed by longing for it, while simultaneously mourning its inevitable passing.

How did we arrive at this fractured state?
We are biologically hijacked by the thought of losing what is valuable while we are still holding it as our neural pathways treat the potential absence as an active threat. The moment our brain registers an experience as non-frivilous, its reward circuitry fires not just to celebrate the present, but to evaluate its worth. The instant the mind calculates the eventual loss of that high-value moment, dopamine shifts from driving satisfaction to triggering anticipatory anxiety.

However, this isn’t how pre-emptive nostalgia often operates. The panic is amplified by a modern cultural shift, one where we have stopped being participants of our own lives, rather transformed into archivists. Conditioned to document and romanticize every experience i.e. intensive journalism in the form of modern compulsion to archive the self, capturing every moment spent with your friend in an attempt to form ‘dumps’ or creating playlists for every occasion to revisit the time spent together, we end up compartmentalizing every experience by their perceived worth into ‘suitable’ sects of the memory. We constantly step outside our own bodies to view our lives through a third-person lens and therefore the focus shifts from just being present to collecting temporal excerpts.

This is analogous to the portrayal of ‘islands of memory’ in Inside Out, coupled with the subconscious obsession to sort our present to specific eras or emotional archives before it passes, thus the moment you step back to admire how precious a memory will be, you rob yourself from actually creating one, thereby trading the organic warmth of presence for the ‘art of noticing’ – yes, the commonly used algorithmic phrase which fuels this narrative of living as a watchdog of latent remembrance.

The reason why people now follow this ritual almost religiously is partly due to the over-antagonisation of forgetfulness. The idea that your brain will never retain certain memories if you don’t actively force yourself to constantly think of its inevitability and thus validate its worth, you end up living calculated experiences which no longer hold significance simply because the instance matters but because you fear the end, you fear ignorance, you fear not holding onto it enough, you fear not adding it to your journal and most importantly, you fear facing the version of yourself once the candle dies out or the hangout ends.

In theory, you end up creating this illusion of an emotional shield; a mechanism of performing this mirco-mourning routine earlier on to avoid the innate fear of transience and try attaining catharsis by creating an illusion of control over time. We deceive ourselves thinking that if we grieve the loss of the moment right now, time cannot surprise us with its brutality later. Although the irony lies in the fact that in the attempt of protection, we rob ourselves of the organic progression of life.

By transforming the spontaneous moments into a checklist for this hyper-documentation, we disconnect from our own lives. Experiences lose their authenticity once weighed for their nostalgic potential and seemingly ordinary moments are scrutinized for their depth since they cannot be cataloged properly. This is where we close the doors on our ability to just be.