Exploring Anemoia: Nostalgia for a Time You’ve Never Known

Ever Been Nostalgic for a Time You’ve Never Known?

I was listening to the radio the other day and one of my favourite feel-good tunes came on. It was Tom Petty’s Learning to Fly, which is a quite simple song based on four chords. One of the reasons I like the song so much is that it invokes a complex emotion in me. It is an obscure feeling of nostalgia for a time I’ve never known. 

 

What I feel when listening to Learning to Fly is a longing for a simpler life as a teenager in 1980s America even though my own teenage years were spent in early noughties County Dublin, Ireland. The song itself was actually released in 1991, however, to me its melody is strongly evocative of the 1980s. Upon listening to Learning to Fly, I immediately become nostalgic about different aspects of how I imagine life as a teenager was during that decade.

I miss driving on the open road with a pretty girl beside me in my second-hand Chevrolet Camaro, listening to Boston and Queen at full-blast on the car’s radio. I miss drinking foamy root beer with my friends. I miss the cultural euphoria of the beginning of the end of the Cold War in 1989, the excitement of the first IBM personal computer, and watching Live Aid on TV. I miss being present with friends, drinking a cold Coke on a balmy summer day; laughing together without the distractions of mobile phones or game boys. 

I miss all of these things even though I’ve never experienced them.

Tom Petty’s 1991 song is not the only thing that invokes this type of emotion in me; it happens when listening to certain other tunes or when looking at old photos from bygone generations. The beauty of language is that simple sounds can symbolize highly complex feelings and ideas, however, when I went looking for a dictionary-listed word for this unique type of nostalgia, I was left disappointed.

I then stumbled upon a video on YouTube with 3,000 views entitled Anemoia: Memories You Never Had. Someone must have coined the term anemoia for the exact feeling of nostalgia I’ve described. This was reassuring⁠—it showed me that there are other people who feel this same nostalgia, and that I’m not a complete crackpot :-). 

The fact that anemoia isn’t listed in any official dictionary doesn’t deter me; this type of word-play excites me. It’s always nice to know that despite the beauty of the English language, its official lexicon still doesn’t quite yet encompass the full diversity of possible human emotions. 

Nostalgia in Other Languages

There are, of course, approximately 6,500 other languages spoken around the world. And being someone who loves language, I felt writing this blog post provided ample opportunity to seek out words that describe this anemoia; this yearning for a time you’ve never experienced. 

Thankfully, my research was fruitful. Part of my professional writing work is to be a whizz with Google and unearth research, statistics, or insights that articles on similar topics have not yet mentioned. My Googling prowess transferred nicely to this bit of personal blog research, and I found two words that are somewhat sufficient in their definitions. 

What is Sehnsucht?

The first term is a German noun: Sehnsucht. This is described as an intense yearning or longing for something that you can’t quite pin down or explain. Sehnsucht kind of describes what I feel when listening to Learning to Fly.

I know I’ve mentioned longing for specific things about 1980s America, but the emotion itself is less concrete—it is a general nostalgia for life back then, and the examples I gave were just snippets of what that nostalgia encompasses for me. 

(As a random tangential tidbit of information, the German band Rammstein’s second album was named Sehnsucht.) 

Anyway, an interesting 2009 paper in the Journal of Research in Personality explores Sehnsucht from a scientific, experimental, and psychological standpoint. The paper is titled, “What is it we are longing for? Psychological and demographic factors influencing the contents of Sehnsucht (life longings).”

According to the authors of the paper, Sehnsucht is a word that captures feelings of an incomplete aspect of one’s past, present or future, coupled with the desire for alternative experiences. One of the central characteristics of this complex emotion is the feeling of lack or incompleteness in one’s life.

Relating this back to my original nostalgia, I guess I possibly spent too much of my teenage years playing video games, and not enough time being present with my friends. Certain songs and images can tap into this feeling of incompleteness, creating a longing for something different; a depiction of the lifestyle of American youths that was perhaps subconsciously idealized from reading Stephen King’s novels (you know, the background story before the killer clown kills everyone or the telepathic demon child destroys the place). 

The second interesting characteristic of Sehnsucht is that it invokes yearnings for utopian versions of what we lack. All of my examples above highlighting what I “miss” about life in 1980s America were not only strikingly positive; they were also utopian in nature. This nostalgia for times we’ve never known tends to entirely overlook the struggles specific to what we imagine we’re missing about a time we’ve never lived in.

The 1980s, of course, were not all fine and dandy. Raegan’s economic policy caused a terrible recession in early 1980s America, which the country admittedly recovered strongly from towards the middle and latter part of the decade. America in the 80s went through a huge cocaine and crack problem. There was a global AIDS epidemic to contend with, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster caused serious, widespread damage both to the environment and to human life. 

Life longings like these seem to hint at an individual’s reflection on their imperfect stages of development. Playing the role of a self-diagnosing amateur psychologist for a moment, maybe my nostalgia for the 80s arises because I feel my teenage years were not what they could’ve been or what I wish they were. But don’t we all have regrets about some parts of life?

Maybe there’s no need to analyze my anemoia or Sehnsucht so deeply⁠—it could be a latent feeling that everyone has the capacity for, even those who feel like all stages of life have gone well for them. 

Saudade

The second word I found is Portuguese in origin, and it probably describes even more succinctly the type of nostalgia that is the topic of this article. This is a deeply emotional state of longing that is difficult to translate into English. 

According to a really nice blog post on the Rosetta Stone website, saudade is “a yearning for a happiness that has passed, or perhaps never even existed. It carries with it a touch of melancholy, yet in that wistfulness, there is love as well.”

This more accurately encapsulates the emotion I feel when listening to certain songs or viewing certain images. I gave some utopian examples above of what I felt like I miss about 1980s America, but what those examples neglected to convey was a kind of bittersweet undertone to the nostalgia. 

Whether Sehnsucht or saudade represent this feeling better, I haven’t quite decided. Both words are great, and it has been fascinating to explore this intersection of complex human emotions and linguistics. 

I don’t know if I’m shouting into the void on this blog or if I have readers, but if you have read this and it resonates, I’d love you to share some of your own personal experiences of nostalgia for a time you’ve never lived in. Write a comment below the article. 🙂

Thanks for reading. The below suggestions are some excellent books set in the 1980s that kind of influenced my perception of growing up during that era, particularly in America.