Comment: A New Typology of Nostalgia: Its Promise and a Limitation

Abstract

This commentary considers some applications of the typology of nostalgia proposed by Saulius Geniusas. The typology can illuminate our understanding of existential feelings of temporal malaise, perturbations of temporal experience in grief, and common experiences of letdown and resistance to the passage of time. It can also help in diagnosing various obstacles to mindfulness. However, the typology does not reflect the more positive aspects of nostalgia, such as the appreciation of transience as contributing to value—an important theme in Japanese aesthetics.

We usually think of nostalgia as longing for times gone by, but Geniusas (2025) makes a rich and compelling case for the existence of nostalgia for the present and nostalgia for the future. Although this proposal may initially seem counterintuitive, the author reminds us that the term “nostalgia” did not initially have temporal connotations. It was coined to specify pathological homesickness, with the emphasis on spatial displacement. A temporal dimension was implied, however, in that the homesick person longs to return home and has in mind the remembered home of the past. Eventually, the term became associated primarily with temporal dislocation, connoting a longing for an idealized past. But to insist that the past must be the dominant focus in nostalgia would be unduly restrictive.

The typology draws attention to some of the ways in which temporal orientation itself can become a source of distress. Despite the differences among the types of nostalgia Geniusas describes, all three involve imaginative comparison among aspects of time—past, present, and future—and the impression that one's experiential world is deteriorating. In nostalgia for the past, the present is found wanting by comparison to the (typically idealized) past. Although the prospect of a future return to the longed-for situation is not foreclosed, it is a source of affliction in the present, and typically unattainable, in fact, because any home to which one returns is never quite the situation as remembered. In nostalgia for the present, the fleeting present is cherished relative to the future that is coming into being, which is interpreted as deficient by comparison. In nostalgia for the future, any attainable future is deemed inferior to the fantasized but unrealizable future with which it is compared. All three forms of nostalgia thus associate temporal experience with being dragged from a better situation into one that is worse.

Geniusas's proposed typology holds considerable promise. First, it suggests new ways of understanding both prolonged and more transient feelings of unease or malaise. It may add to our resources for understanding and addressing various kinds of existential discomfort. It suggests that nostalgia may be involved in many uncomfortable forms of what Matthew Ratcliffe has termed “existential feelings”—the affective background that characterizes one's overall sense of being in the world and restricts the possibilities for what feelings can become affective foreground (Ratcliffe, 2008, 2015). Existential feelings comprise the general condition of feeling at home or not at home in the world, and because these feelings are background, disturbances can be difficult to distinguish or to target. The categories proposed by Geniusas may help identify distinct perspectives on one's situation that make feeling at home in it seem impossible. Nostalgia may be implicated in various forms of existential hopelessness, including not just those that mourn a previously happy state but those that thwart aspiration toward the future, because one can only envision a future that falls short.

In addition to enriching our understanding of possible perturbations of existential feelings, the proposed typology may also illuminate some of the temporal disturbances related to loss. Bereavement grief, for example, is associated with various changes in temporal perception, including the impression that time has stopped moving forward, the loss of future-directed aims, and confusion regarding the relations of past, present and future (Ratcliffe, 2022; Riley, 2019). Nostalgia for the past is an aspect of some of these disturbances, often in the form of longing for the past when the deceased loved one was alive. However, the newly proposed categories may help clarify other nostalgic dimensions of bereavement loss. Nostalgia for the future may occur because bereavement closes off many possibilities that would have involved the deceased (Ratcliffe, 2022). Julian Barnes, for example, describes the way in which encountering a bridge whose completion enabled convenient Eurostar routes from London to Paris and Brussels painfully reminded him of vague plans he and his deceased wife had had to travel on the train (Barnes, 2013, p. 103). Bereavement may also involve nostalgia for the present. C. S. Lewis describes his fear that his memory of his late wife will fade and that he will ultimately retain only his own images (Lewis, 1961, p. 18).

The newly proposed modalities of nostalgia may help diagnose common experiences of letdown and help prevent overreaction. Nostalgia for the future, for example, may characterize the challenging period experienced by many relatively early in a marriage, sometimes referred to with the expression “the honeymoon is over.” This may involve a background sense that life has gone sour. The concept of nostalgia for the future is relevant to such cases. Assuming that the lead-up to the marriage involved happy anticipations of wedded life, the future life with the spouse was probably envisioned as happily harmonious. However specifically this life was envisioned, one's picture never has the specificity of actual experience, and the evenly joyous tone of what was visualized contrasts with the emotional variableness of ordinary life. The collision between what is anticipated and the less ideal reality of actual married life may prompt yearning for the previously imagined future that the present does not and cannot fully match. By identifying their feelings as a product of discrepancies between fantasy and reality, a person may recognize that a sense of disappointment does not indicate a problem with the marriage but instead stems from nostalgia for the future. Recognizing that one is in the grip of nostalgia does not, of course, eliminate it, but it may help one to manage one's expectations more realistically.

More short-term and minor distress over temporal passage, too, may be illuminated by the newly described categories. For example, nostalgia for the present may arise in connection with immediately anticipated developments, such as the announcement of election results. One may linger in the moments before the votes are counted or the results announced, feeling nostalgic about the short-lived present in which one can imagine that the future remains open, a situation that will soon disappear. Nostalgia for the present may also be involved in procrastinations of various sorts, such as delaying the project of taking down Christmas decorations because one wants the celebratory atmosphere to linger, even though one already recognizes that the holiday has passed.

Besides its value for analyzing distress that takes time as its focus, the typology on offer has further potential benefit for helping to diagnose obstructions to mindfulness. Mindfulness, which involves a non-judgmental awareness of the present, is widely lauded as promoting wellbeing. Because nostalgia compares and passes judgment on past, present, and future, it can be a hindrance to mindfulness. This is not to say that one cannot mindfully recognize that one is having nostalgic thoughts, but the first-order tendency of nostalgia is to pull one's focus away from what is immediately present toward imagined alternative conditions. ¹ The three proposed types of nostalgia, however, indicate alternative ways in which imagined versions of past, present, or future might interfere with living in the now. The concept of nostalgia for the present may be especially useful in this connection, for in this species apparent attention to the present may involve judgmental comparison with a fantasized future.

The proposal made by Geniusas admirably contributes to our understanding of nostalgia as a form of affective affliction, but we should not forget that nostalgic comparison of the aspects of time is not always experienced as negative. Recent articles in the popular press and numerous scholarly articles have argued that nostalgia has positive aspects, such as making one feel more connected with others and finding one's life more meaningful (Bishop, 2024; Haupt, 2023; Lawler, 2022; Routledge, 2016). This perspective contrasts with the idea that alienation from one's present or proximate future is characteristic of nostalgia. The explanation for this discrepancy may be found in the fact that in many recent publications, nostalgia seems to mean little more than fondly recalling the past.

However, nostalgia in a more fulsome sense is also sometimes regarded as a positive experience. Japanese aesthetic values reflective awareness of transience as a source of positive aesthetic worth. The concept of mono no aware, often translated “the pathos of things,” involves an awareness of the fragility and brevity of what is present, where this is taken to be an enhancement of the experience (Parkes & Loughnane, 2024). Mono no aware involves the comparison of the present with the other aspects of time, but this is seen as a reason to be particularly attentive and appreciative of the object in view. While there is a touch of negativity in the poignant emotion aroused, which involves a bittersweet awareness that the present moment will pass, transience is experienced as adding value to the present. The experience of mono no aware involves reflection on life in general—not just the object that gives rise to it—for the aesthetic is not segregated from the rest of life in Japanese aesthetics. The perspective on temporality in mono no aware involves the positive value judgment that the perishability of things makes them precious. The idea that the perishability contributes to the value of things is also among the responses that Freud considers in his essay on transience, which Geniusas (2025) mentions in a footnote.

Geniusas acknowledges that nostalgia is “affectively ambiguous” and mentions the bittersweet character of much nostalgic emotion. But the article places emphasis on the ways that nostalgia is a form of not feeling at home in the world. When it triggers a sense of alienation from one's present or the anticipated future, nostalgia seems akin to dread, with the nostalgic person being braced for the negative. But we should not lose sight of the more positive possibility that Freud and Japanese aesthetics propose. Nostalgia, in its comparison of the aspects of time, need not result in temporal alienation. Instead, it can prompt appreciation of being in the present and motivate gratitude for being temporal.