Nostalgia and Other Symptoms of Retirement

In 1688, a Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer wrote a dissertation on a condition he had observed among Swiss soldiers fighting far from home. The soldiers were low, listless and feverish. They lost their appetite, fainted and, in the worst cases, died. Hofer needed a name for it and went to the Greek, combining nostos, meaning a return home, with algos, meaning pain. He called it nostalgia, and they treated it as a disease. Physicians of the day tried leeches, purges, and, where possible, a trip home - probably the only treatment on the list with any merit.

So, a feeling we now treat as harmless sentiment spent its first two centuries on the medical charts as something to be cured. Even the modern version, if overdone, is still treated as a symptom. If your mind keeps drifting back to 1979 (real music, cars with style, proper manners, etc.), you're nostalgic - but I have good news.

What nostalgia does

When people describe a nostalgic memory, it's rarely solitary. More typically it's full of other people: family, friends, a particular team, a particular summer. The feeling is often bittersweet, but the sweet outweighs the bitter, and the stories tend to end well. Even memories that contain a difficult stretch are usually told as a redemption, where something hard led somewhere good.

In experiment after experiment, nostalgia increases a sense of social connection, a sense that life has meaning, and what researchers call self-continuity, the feeling that the person you are now is recognisably the same person who was there then. It lifts mood and nudges people toward optimism about the future. And it's triggered by the very things you'd expect to need a remedy: loneliness, low mood and a sense of drift. Lonely people become nostalgic, and the nostalgia makes them feel slightly less lonely, if only for a time.

My favourite finding is that people who recalled a nostalgic memory while sitting in a cold room reported feeling warmer. Maybe I'll try that and save a bit on my gas bill.

Nostalgia isn't something going wrong. It's something the mind does when it needs support, using the one resource that cannot be taken away, which is everything you've already lived. That makes it rather well suited to retirement.

Why the old days seemed better

You may be right about the cars and the music. There are two other reasons you might be right, and neither involves cars or music.

The first is the reminiscence bump. When people recall their lives, they remember a disproportionate amount from roughly the ages of ten to thirty, with the peak somewhere in the late teens and early twenties. This is when the self is forming, when everything is happening for the first time, and when the brain lays down memory with unusual enthusiasm. It's also why the songs you loved at seventeen have a power that nothing since has quite matched, as my article on loud music, bad taste argued at greater length. The music wasn't necessarily better. It merely arrived while you were being assembled.

The second is what psychologists call the fading affect bias. The emotion attached to unpleasant memories fades faster than the emotion attached to pleasant ones. Time, in other words, edits the footage. The 1970s you remember is warm and sunlit and full of mates. The 1970s that really happened also involved power cuts, a car that needed a push before it would start, and a generally alarming approach to dentistry. Nobody is lying. The brain has simply been tidying up on your behalf for forty years.

Why retirement turns the volume up

The psychologist Marie Jahoda identified five things a job provides beyond the pay: time structure, social contact, shared purpose, status and identity, and regular activity. Retirement removes all five at once and replaces them with a calendar that is, on paper, entirely your own. That is a great deal to lose at a single stroke, and nostalgia is partly the mind's way of going back to check that those things were real and that you were, in fact, there.

There is also a simpler loss, which gets less attention. For decades, a working man has had an audience. Colleagues who knew the people in the story, who laughed at the right places, who remembered the disastrous conference in Leeds. Retirement takes the audience away. The stories don't go anywhere, but the audience has.

And there's something else I've noticed repeatedly over a career. Men are very bad at saying "I miss it." They are considerably better at saying "do you remember when." The second sentence is the first one in disguise. Nostalgia is, for many men, the emotion they're permitted to express, because it comes wrapped in a story and nobody has to say anything vulnerable out loud. The man telling you about the winter the whole depot got snowed in is not really telling you about snow. He's telling you that it mattered, that those men mattered, and that he'd like some of it back.

This is the same mechanism described in the article on anger as a secondary emotion, applied to a gentler feeling. A primary emotion, in this case grief for a lost life, comes out through a more acceptable channel. And it is worth noticing which channel you're using, because it tells you what's underneath.

Other symptoms

Since the title promises others, here is a short differential diagnosis:

Waking at five. Covered in the article on fifteen years retired and still dreaming about work. The alarm has gone. The body hasn't received the memo.

Developing expertise in the weather. Not just awareness. Opinions. A detailed view on whether it will hold off until two. A mind that spent forty years managing complexity has to put it somewhere.

Knowing everyone's bin day. Sudden, comprehensive knowledge of the street's collection schedule and a quiet disapproval of anyone who leaves the bin out over the weekend.

Strong views on supermarket layouts. Which, as the article on why your patience has left the building explains, is not really about the supermarket.

The refined story. The anecdote, told so often over so many years that it has acquired a structure, a pause for effect and a punchline. This one is the nostalgia in its purest form, and it's perfectly healthy.

Arriving early everywhere. Because for the first time in forty years there is no reason not to, and the habit of the working day hasn't realised it can relax.

Notice that none of these is a malfunction. Each is a mind that built its routines around a structure that has gone and is rebuilding something to put in the space. The jokes are affectionate. The point is serious. These are adaptations, and so, in the main, is the nostalgia.

When it helps, and when it doesn't

Restorative nostalgia wants to rebuild the lost thing. It insists the past was better and that, if everyone would only behave properly, we could have it back. Reflective nostalgia enjoys the longing while accepting that the thing is gone. It can laugh at itself, hold the warmth and the loss together, and carry on.

The first tends to make men bitter, and the second tends to make them good company.

So here are the signs that nostalgia has stopped doing its job:

• Everything is in the past tense. If the present never features in conversation unless it's being compared unfavourably with 1985, the memory isn't supporting the present. It's replacing it.
• It's the only thing that lifts your mood. A warm memory that rescues a bad afternoon is fine. A man who can only feel good by leaving the room in his head has a problem that's bigger than nostalgia.
• It has a sour edge. The longing has curdled into resentment about how things are now, or about people who "ruined it".
• It's replaced contact rather than prompting it. Reflective nostalgia sends you toward people. If it's sending you toward the photo album at the expense of the telephone, something has reversed.
• It slides into rumination. A memory that keeps circling a regret rather than a pleasure is the loop described in the article on rumination, not nostalgia at all.

Using it on purpose

Reminiscence is used deliberately with older people, including those with dementia, and the benefits are modest but real for mood and wellbeing. The point is that nostalgia works better when it's used than when it merely happens to you.

Ring someone. Use the memory as a launch pad. "I was thinking about that winter at the depot, do you remember Barry's van?" is a perfectly good opening line to a man you haven't spoken to in six years. Nostalgia is at its best when it ends in a phone call, and it's one of the easier routes into the connection described in the article on why so many men are lonely.

Tell it to someone younger. The stories that seem to have lost their audience have a new one waiting, which is the grandchildren. As the article on becoming a granddad suggested, stories are one of the more valuable things a grandfather can give, and a child who knows where the family came from has something money can't buy.

Write some of it down. Not a memoir, necessarily. A page about a job, a place, a person. It is the retirement version of the life review described in the article on downsizing, done on purpose and at your own pace rather than all at once in a loft.

Go back once, but expect it to be smaller. The school playground is always smaller. The pub is always different. A visit can be lovely, provided you aren't expecting 1982 to be waiting.

Set the memory against something forward. For every look back, find one thing ahead, however small. The aim is for nostalgia to be a resource you draw on, not somewhere you live.

Be wary of the phone. The modern "on this day" photograph, delivered by an algorithm that has never met you, is a nostalgia machine with no sense of timing. Use it, enjoy it, and don't let it set the mood for the afternoon.

Last thoughts

Nostalgia began as a disease. Three hundred years on, we know it was never really a disease. It's one of the mind's reliable coping mechanisms, drawing on the one thing retirement can't remove, which is the life you've already lived. It binds us to other people, steadies a sense of who we are, and warms us on cold afternoons.

For many men it is also the only acceptable way of saying "I miss it", which is worth knowing, because it tells you what to listen for in yourself and in the man next to you telling the story about the snow.

Used well, it sends you toward people and toward the future. Used badly, it replaces both, and that is the version to watch for.