“Things used to be better.” It sounds like a feeling; warm, wistful, maybe a little sad. But nostalgia is also one of the most effective argumentative tools available, precisely because it doesn’t feel like an argument at all. This episode looks at how longing for an imagined past gets quietly attached to present-day decisions, making the present look like a deviation, a decline, something that needs correcting and why the question “better for whom, exactly?” almost never gets asked.
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AI Generated Transcript:
There’s a phrase that shows up constantly, in all sorts of contexts — politics, workplaces, family conversations, online debates. The phrase is some version of “things used to be better.” And what’s interesting isn’t whether it’s true — sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, and that’s almost beside the point. What’s interesting is how rarely that phrase gets followed up with “better for whom, exactly, and according to what measure?” Because the moment you ask that question, the phrase starts to look a lot less like a memory, and a lot more like an argument — one that’s already done most of its persuading before anyone even noticed an argument was being made.
I’m Andrei Barburas, and this is The Unlearning Project — a podcast from barburas.com, where every couple of weeks we take one assumption that usually goes unexamined and we crack it open. Today’s assumption is about nostalgia — specifically, the idea that nostalgia is just a feeling. A warm, harmless, slightly wistful emotion about the past. It’s not just that. Nostalgia is also one of the most effective tools available for shaping what people are willing to accept, support, or give up right now — and it works precisely because it doesn’t feel like an argument at all.
Let’s start with what nostalgia actually is, psychologically, because it’s a bit stranger than it first appears.
Nostalgia isn’t memory. That’s the first thing worth separating out. Memory, even imperfect memory, is at least an attempt to represent something that happened. Nostalgia is something else — it’s an emotional relationship to a version of the past, and that version is selectively constructed, almost always unconsciously, to serve a present emotional need. Research on nostalgia consistently finds that it’s not random which memories get this treatment. Nostalgic memories tend to be the comforting ones, the simplified ones, the ones with the rough edges sanded off. Nostalgia doesn’t usually retrieve a full, complicated past. It retrieves a curated highlight reel — and crucially, it retrieves it most strongly during moments when the present feels uncertain, threatening, or like it’s asking too much of us.This is the part that matters most for this episode: nostalgia tends to intensify in response to present discomfort. It’s not simply that people randomly think fondly of the past from time to time. It’s that when the present feels destabilizing — economically, socially, personally — the mind reaches for a version of the past that feels stable, simple, known, by comparison. And that reaching isn’t really about the past at all. It’s a response to the present. The past, in this sense, becomes a kind of emotional refuge — and refuges, by definition, don’t need to be accurate. They just need to feel safe.
So far, this is just psychology — an interesting feature of how memory and emotion interact. But here’s where it becomes something else entirely: because nostalgia is such a powerful emotional state, and because it’s triggered by present discomfort, it becomes an extremely useful thing to deliberately invoke — if you’re trying to get people to support something, or oppose something, or accept something, in the present.
Think about how often a present-day argument gets framed not in terms of “here’s what we should do going forward,” but in terms of “here’s what we need to get back to.” Notice the structure of that framing. It doesn’t require defending the proposed action on its own merits — what it does, what it costs, who it affects. Instead, it borrows the emotional weight of an imagined past, and attaches that weight to whatever’s being proposed now. The argument becomes: this isn’t really a new idea you need to evaluate. It’s a restoration of something that was taken from you. And restoration arguments are much harder to argue against, because disagreeing with them doesn’t just mean disagreeing with a policy or a decision — it means seeming to defend the thing that supposedly took the good version away.
This is, I think, one of the most important things to understand about nostalgia as a tool: it doesn’t just make the past look better. It makes the present look like a deviation — a wrong turn, a decline, something that needs correcting rather than something that simply is, with its own tradeoffs, its own complexity, its own mixture of better-in-some-ways and worse-in-others compared to before.
Let’s bring in Frantz Fanon here, because his work — though written in a very different context, around colonialism and the psychology of liberation — touched on something that applies remarkably well to this dynamic. Fanon wrote about how appeals to a glorified pre-colonial past could themselves become a kind of trap — a way of orienting entirely toward a reconstructed history, rather than engaging with the actual, present, complicated reality that needed to be dealt with. The danger he identified wasn’t that the past didn’t matter. It was that an idealized past could become a substitute for confronting the present — a place to retreat to, rather than a foundation to build from.
That same structure shows up in much smaller, more everyday contexts too — and this is where I think it becomes genuinely useful to notice, because it’s not just something that happens in politics or history. It happens in organizations. It happens in families. It happens in how people think about their own lives.
Think about how often “we used to be more like a family here” gets said inside companies — usually by people who’ve been there a long time, usually in response to some present-day complaint about culture, or pace, or how decisions get made. Now, sometimes that statement reflects something real — organizations do change, and not always for the better. But notice what the statement does, regardless of whether it’s accurate. It frames the present as a decline from a warmer, more authentic version of the organization. And it does this in a way that’s very hard to engage with directly — because engaging with it means either agreeing that things have gotten worse, which forecloses the conversation, or disagreeing, which can come across as dismissing someone’s lived experience, or as not having “been there” long enough to understand what’s been lost.
What rarely gets asked, in these moments, is: better for whom? “We used to be more like a family” can be a genuinely felt sentiment from someone who experienced the organization at an earlier stage as warmer and more connected — and it can, at the very same time, describe a period when the organization was smaller, less diverse, less structured, and — not coincidentally — a period before certain protections, processes, or voices existed that exist now. The nostalgic version of “family” often quietly excludes the people for whom that earlier period wasn’t particularly warm at all. Nostalgia, in other words, often has a constituency — even when it presents itself as a universal, shared feeling about a shared past.
This is, I think, the core of why nostalgia functions so well as a tool: it presents itself as apolitical. As just a feeling. As something everyone can relate to, on some level, because almost everyone has some memory that feels simpler and warmer than the present. And because it feels universal, it doesn’t get scrutinized the way an explicit argument would. Nobody fact-checks a feeling. Nobody asks a feeling for its sources. But underneath that feeling, there’s often a very specific, very selective version of the past being invoked — one that conveniently underwrites a very specific position about what should happen now.
I want to be careful not to overcorrect here, because there’s a version of this conversation that ends up dismissing nostalgia entirely, treating any positive feeling about the past as inherently suspect or manipulative. That’s not the point, and it wouldn’t be accurate either. People genuinely lose things that mattered — communities change, industries shift, relationships end, and the grief in response to that — which, incidentally, connects to something we explored in another episode — is real and worth taking seriously on its own terms.
The distinction I’d draw is this: there’s a difference between feeling nostalgia, and being recruited by it. Feeling nostalgia is just being human — it’s a normal response to time passing and things changing. Being recruited by it is when that feeling gets quietly attached to a present-day argument, and the feeling does the persuading that the argument, on its own, might not have been able to do.
So here’s what I think is actually useful, practically. The next time you notice an argument — in the news, at work, in a conversation with family — that leans heavily on some version of “things used to be better, we need to get back to that,” try a small exercise. Separate the feeling from the claim. Let the feeling be what it is — maybe it’s genuine, maybe it’s pointing at something real that was lost. But then look at the claim sitting underneath it, on its own, stripped of the emotional framing. Does it hold up, just as an idea, evaluated on what it would actually mean now, for the people affected by it now? Sometimes it will. Sometimes the nostalgia and the argument genuinely align. But sometimes, once you separate them, you’ll find the argument was doing very little work on its own — and the feeling was doing almost all of it.
Here’s the question I want to leave you with. Think of something you’ve heard recently — from a leader, a friend, a piece of media — that was framed around “getting back to” something. And ask: who would actually benefit if that happened? Not who says they would. Who actually would. And is that the same group of people the nostalgic version of the past was built around in the first place?
That’s it for this episode of The Unlearning Project. We’ll be back in two weeks with another one. Until then, hold your warmest memories a little more loosely — and your present a little less defensively.
