Homesick for Yesterday: When the Past Was Never Yours

I found myself longing for the 1970s last Tuesday while watching a film about that decade—the warm film grain, the unhurried conversations, the sense that people had time for each other. But I was born in the 1980s. I have no memories of that era, no actual experience of its rhythms, no real knowledge of its struggles. I’m nostalgic for a time I never lived, missing a past that exists only in my imagination.

This is a peculiar form of modern homesickness: yearning for homes we never inhabited, mourning losses we never experienced, feeling displaced from times we never belonged to in the first place.

The feeling intensifies when I look at old photographs from decades before my birth—couples holding hands on park benches, families gathering without phones, people reading newspapers on trains with complete focus. These images trigger something that feels like memory but isn’t, something that resembles longing but for what? For a slower pace? For genuine connection? For the absence of things that didn’t yet exist to complicate life?

Happy laughs when I talk about missing the “simplicity” of earlier eras. “You’re romanticizing,” she says, and she’s right. I’m nostalgic for curated versions of the past, for the edited highlights that photography and film preserved while ignoring the poverty, discrimination, limited opportunities, and countless daily struggles that don’t make it into nostalgic montages.

But the nostalgia persists, and I think I understand why. We’re not really missing the past—we’re mourning the present, grieving for qualities that seem to have vanished from contemporary life: depth over speed, presence over productivity, community over connection, meaning over metrics. We project these losses backward, imagining they existed more fully in times we never knew.

I watch Arash sometimes and wonder what era he’ll be nostalgic for that he never experienced. Will he long for the 1990s, when children played outside until dark? The 2000s, when people still got lost and had to ask for directions? The 2010s, when social media felt more innocent? Or will he create nostalgia for decades that exist only in his imagination, cobbled together from movies, music, and stories?

The internet feeds this displaced nostalgia, serving us carefully curated glimpses of past decades—the fashion, the music, the aesthetics—while stripping away the context that made those times as complicated as our own. We see the surface beauty of past eras without their underlying tensions, their hidden struggles, their own forms of anxiety and uncertainty.

There’s something tragic about being nostalgic for times we never lived because it prevents us from fully inhabiting the time we do have. While I’m longing for the imagined simplicity of the 1970s, I’m missing the real complexity and possibility of 2025. While I’m mourning the loss of things I never experienced, I’m failing to appreciate what exists only now, in this moment, in this particular configuration of circumstances that will never repeat.

I think we’re also nostalgic for the people we might have been in different times. I imagine myself in the 1960s, writing by hand, taking long walks, having deep conversations without the interruption of notifications. But this version of myself is as fictional as the era I’m projecting him into. The person I am now—shaped by this technology, these opportunities, these particular challenges—couldn’t exist in any other time.

The nostalgia reveals something important about our current dissatisfaction. We’re not actually missing the past; we’re missing qualities we fear we’ve lost: patience, presence, the capacity for boredom, the ability to be fully where we are. But these qualities weren’t inherent to previous eras—they were cultivated by individuals who made conscious choices about how to live, regardless of their technological context.

My grandfather, who actually lived through the 1970s, doesn’t romanticize them the way I do. He remembers the uncertainty, the limited communication with distant family, the difficulty of finding information, the social restrictions that younger generations fought to change. His nostalgia, when it appears, is specific and personal—for particular people, specific moments, individual experiences—not for entire decades viewed through rose-colored filters.

Perhaps the real tragedy isn’t that we’ve lost something from the past, but that we’re so focused on what we think we’ve lost that we’re not fully engaging with what we actually have. The opportunities for connection in 2025 are different from those in 1975, but they’re not necessarily inferior. The challenges we face are unique to our time, but so are our tools for addressing them.

I’m learning to transform this displaced nostalgia into intentional present-moment living. Instead of longing for the imagined simplicity of the past, I’m trying to create actual simplicity in my current life. Instead of missing the deep conversations I imagine people had in previous decades, I’m working to have deeper conversations with Happy, with Arash, with the people actually in front of me now.

The cure for false nostalgia might be true appreciation—recognizing that every era has its gifts and limitations, that every time is both the best of times and the worst of times, depending on perspective and circumstances. The 2020s will someday be someone else’s nostalgic fantasy, viewed through the selective filter of hindsight and imagination.

Maybe what we’re really nostalgic for isn’t the past but the eternal human qualities that can exist in any era if we choose to cultivate them: presence, kindness, wonder, connection, meaning. These don’t belong to any particular decade—they belong to any moment when we decide to embody them.

The past we’re nostalgic for never existed exactly as we imagine it, but the present we’re living is more rich and complex than we often recognize. Our task isn’t to return to an idealized yesterday but to bring yesterday’s imagined virtues into today’s actual reality.

In the end, perhaps all nostalgia—even for times we never lived—is really homesickness for our truest selves, for the people we could be if we fully inhabited whatever time we’ve been given. The 1970s I’m nostalgic for aren’t about that decade—they’re about who I imagine I could be: more present, more patient, more genuinely connected to life.

And that person doesn’t require a time machine to exist. He requires only the choice to begin, here and now, in 2025, with whatever opportunities this moment actually offers.