How Do You Feel Nostalgic For Something You Never Experienced

There’s a question I see asked on Reddit at least once a month: ‘Is there a word for feeling nostalgic for something that you never actually experienced?’ It’s something I’ve wondered about a fair too. Turns out the answer is: Yes, there is! The word is ‘anemoia’. And it’s such a colossal-level troll by the human mind that you have to stop and admire its audacity really. Think about it. Regular, vanilla nostalgia—crippling and insidious as it can be—is bad enough. Regular nostalgia has all your actual memories as ammunition. That should be enough! But no. No, no, that’s not enough, apparently, as the brain also decides to pick up on vibes from random scenes, events, and times that you didn’t even exist in or had any direct experience of, and it then jumbles that up with your actual memories. Truly deranged behavior.

Anyway, I bring all this up because I came across a really lovely animation from last year by filmmaker Nate Milton. It’s a short selection of mini-vignettes, designed to evoke late-’90s/early-’00s childhood vibes, and it made me completely lose myself in a nostalgia haze, despite the fact that a lot of it is very specifically American-focused and I have zero actual experience of many of the scenes depicted. Once the feelings as a whole started rising up, as far as my brain was concerned, I’d been there and done all of that. The human brain. What a wan*er.