What's the point of nostalgia?

We all look back with fondness on aspects of the past, but how much do we know about the important purpose it might serve, and what has it got to do with a plethora of street parties?

Graham Landi

May 04, 2025

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Some neighbours with too much time on their hands have organised a street party.

There are requests to bake cakes, and instructions to move cars after the council grants permission to close the road so that adults can get pissed under the thin guise of commemorating the 80th anniversary of VE day.

Recognition for those who fought for their country is fair enough but is it best done sitting at long tables with people rarely spoken to, eating blackened sausages, and listening to “We’ll Meet Again” on crackly audio?

Until relatively recently I harboured the belief that I just don’t like other people very much which, you might reasonably argue, is not a great look for a therapist but a conversation in supervision made me think again. My supervisor pointed out that evidence suggests I am able to cultivate very deep and nourishing long-term relationships both personally and professionally, albeit small in number.

Buoyed by this news I asked, 'Does that mean I don't need to eat hot dogs with the man at number 3 who listens to techno at unreasonable volumes and parks passive aggressively?'

It's slightly confusing that my antipathy toward the street party is in contrast to nostalgia I experience for those I've attended in the past, like the one we had for the Golden Jubilee when the children were small.

We all lined our BBQs up in the road and cooked for one another, while the man from number 43 kept stepping in with his tongs and turning all the burgers, apparently unwilling to trust any of us to do things properly. He is a retired pharmacist, although I don't know if that's relevant.

There was a fire engine too, and the sight of my children sitting in the cab wearing helmets the size of their heads and grinning widely are one of those simple but joyous lifetime memories it's hard to overstate.

In 1977 we had a celebration for the Silver Jubilee, a party I was due to miss as I was away on scout camp, but then Stephen Stubbs threw an enamel plate high into the air which came down and struck me on the back of my head, at which point, my homesickness merged with the pain in my skull and created a level of grief so inconsolable that my mother had to come and take me home.

By the way, I don't feel at all nostalgic about scout camps. I hated them, and I still don't fully understand why my mother always insisted I go.

As an adult-diagnosed autistic, I've often wondered if it was to give her some respite from my peculiarities, or perhaps to quell her growing realisation that I sucked at making friends, so two weeks with boys prone to tying each other into their sleeping bags and throwing them into a patch of stinging nettles might be just the thing to turn it all around.

If anything, social integration across the intervening forty-five years has become harder.

It's partly the role of nostalgia to connect an earlier model of ourselves to the current version, but if you spent a good deal of time masking authenticity to avoid appearing odd, it's hard to know to what extent remembered joy and despair are reliable.

I am frequently nostalgic for a childhood during which I was often sad and anxious, but that's also partly the role of nostalgia, to highlight positive memory and diminish the impact of everything else.

My fondness for memories of time spent alone playing made up games involving the repurposing of other games makes sense to me now as a respite from an assumed need to behave in a certain way and an opportunity to return to the simple authenticity of isolation.

'Were you bullied at scouts?' my daughter asked me recently, recognising in me irresistible potential for being intimidated by my peers.

I couldn't remember any instances, but partly I suspect I escaped because I wasn't enough a part of the group to be ostracised by it. When you operate peripherally, isolation sometimes provides an unexpected upside.

In such memories, nostalgia and age can create a new and more comfortable context, where it's possible to see rejection a result of difference rather than deficiency.

But nostalgia is valuable not only in helping us to re-write pain so that it sits in a frame of mitigation, but because it also reminds us that we are in a constant state of forward motion. What feels intolerable now, almost certainly won’t later. Just look back if you're unsure.

Even though nostalgic reappraisal doesn't heal the pain of past experiences, it changes the relationship to them and often makes them feel less burdensome.

Perhaps though, one of the most interesting pieces of research on nostalgia is related to its impact on reducing materialistic tendencies and increasing feelings of altruism.

It turns out that recalling nostalgic experiences leads to individuals placing less value on money or material possessions and more on relationships, either with others or oneself. These reminders of the importance of social bonds trigger a desire to strengthen connections and create a more stable sense of identity, less reliant on external validation through the usual material markers of achievement and success.

So if looking back at the past is a good way to remind us whats important in the present it seems, as a society, we may not be doing it enough.

Perhaps I feel nostalgic about the street parties from my past because they remind me of my young children, my parents, and an entirely alien version of myself, all of whom only now exist in my memory.

After a recent breakup, my daughter told me she knew she'd get over the hurt but worried she may never be able to leave behind the imagination of a relationship she'd never had the chance to enjoy. I told her that the very worst that can happen is that she'll always remember it, but that nostalgia will smooth the sharp edges. I could see it didn't make any difference.

Nostalgia reminds me how much easier it was to soothe her when she was little, because I could just pile her into a fire engine and put a massive helmet on her head.

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