Chances are, either you or a family member suffers from
it. It’s not a rare condition. In fact,
by some estimates, one in five is afflicted with it. Might you have it?
Nostesia derives from two familiar words: nostalgia and
amnesia. So it’s easy to understand that those afflicted with the disease long
for the past, but have clearly forgotten that the “good old days” weren’t all
that good. Nostesiacs, it is said, have
fallen victim to the “Golden Age Fallacy.”
Authors, bloggers, playwrights and pundits weigh in.
Woody Allen,
in his wildly creative film Midnight in
Paris, offers insights when his lead character shares: “Nostalgia is denial;
denial of the painful present. . . . And the name for this fallacy is called golden-age
thinking - the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the
one one’s living in. It’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people
who find it difficult to cope with the present.”
Author Jamie
Vollmer, who coined the word nostesia, informs us that “written expressions
of . . . disapproval regarding ‘these
kids today’ and ‘these schools today’ go back as far as Plato.”
And how about the phrase “age of uncertainty?” How long
has that been around? Says author Dan
Gardner, as quoted in thefourthrevolution.org: “We call our time the ‘age
of uncertainty‘, believing that there is something uniquely uncertain about
this moment. But the phrase ‘age of uncertainty,’ which has appeared in the New
York Times 5,720 times, made its debut in 1924!”
To those who maintain that the world “was simpler back
then,” blogger Erik Rasmussen
delivers his verdict: “Remember back when you were a child, and the world
wasn’t so complicated and messed up? That was a simpler time, wasn’t it? Wrong!
It was a simpler time for you because you were a child, free to play and almost
entirely free from responsibility. We live in the most peaceful time in all of
human history.”
Further, Rasmussen rejects the theory that Smartphones
are making us more lonely, more isolated, less social. He explains: “As with
absolutely everything, you can do Smartphone social networking too much, but
reasonable people set reasonable boundaries. Yes, I have been in a room with
two other people, and every one of us was using their Smartphone. But I’ve also
been in a room with two other people in which all three of us were reading
books. Does that mean that books are destroying our relationships? Down with
reading! Why aren’t we talking to each other?!”
Added Jon Krutulis
of trythought.com: “Even from the perspective of a few hundred years ago, we
live like kings. We enjoy luxuries and benefits that were simply unknown in
times we credit with being ‘the good ‘ol days’.” Added Krutulis: “It is easy to
look at the social problems that plague us and claim that our morals are in
decline; however, look at the things we have conquered: disease, slavery,
serfdom, inequality, etc. We have alleviated suffering, pain, and injustice
that made life in these Golden Times ‘nasty, brutish, and short’.”
A host of books affirm the notion that nostesia is an
illness without merit. Author Norman
Finkelstein, in The Way Things Never
Were, points to the 1950s and 1960s when the fear of communism and nuclear
attack reached into our schools. Author David Fryxell, in Good ‘Ole Days My Ass, shares over 600 “terrifying truths” that
reveal that the Good Ole Days, for most people, were a “filthy, dangerous,
exhausting slog simply to survive.” And Joseph
Campbell, in Getting It Wrong,
dismantles prominent media-driven myths about times gone by.
Is there a cure for nostesia? Vollmer insists there is: “Nostesia can be
cured, but it must be aggressively treated.” So what’s the cure? Powerful doses
of good news, along with frequent reminders of the struggles endured by our
predecessors.
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