It's very easy to fall into the nostalgia trap. You click on an article like this, and the next thing you know it, you're trying to find more '90s memes. But don't worry—it's natural.
"Consuming nostalgic media of all types gives us a way of thinking about who we are, and helps us make sense of our purpose in life," said Krystine Batcho, a psychology professor at LeMoyne College and longtime nostalgia researcher.
Batcho has been studying nostalgia since, surprise, surprise, the 1990s, even developing a Nostalgia Inventory that assesses how prone one is to nostalgia.
She says she's seen an explosion of research into nostalgia in recent years as scientists increasingly want to piece together what makes it so powerful.
"Nostalgia is one way of coping with things like social isolation or disconnectedness, loneliness," Batcho said
"Times of adversity can trigger nostalgia because remembering who we were helps with our identity continuity."
That's why people indulged in it so much during the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Batcho, nostalgia serves several important psychological purposes, Batcho asserts.
One is the need to feel in control. Even if our circumstances are largely out of our control, nostalgia can help us believe that we have at least some of it over our own personal development.
The second is social connection. This may sound counterintuitive since nostalgia typically involves private reflection on our personal history, but nostalgic memories remind us of our relationships with others.
Batcho thinks nostalgic recollections can encourage us to seek social and emotional support because they frequently feature important people from our past.
Batcho said there's a reason our memories become fonder over time, why the negative bits tend to fade away faster.
"Remembering things as better than they were serves an evolutionary purpose. If people were to remember things faithfully to the original, most women would never want to have more than one child," Batcho explained while laughing. "It's a function of species survival that we can gloss over the bad portions of the past."
So in general, nostalgia is a healthy, even vital component of the human experience. At its core, nostalgia helps guide us back to our authentic selves and reminds us of who we were always meant to be.