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Nostalgia is referred pain
How referred pain works
Our brains can't tell exactly where a pain in the internal organs comes from, so the feeling shows up somewhere outside the body that shares some of the same nerve endings. Someone who has eaten far too much, with a stomach pressing on the esophagus, may feel it in the neck or shoulder.
The missing wages
The 1950s families that people feel nostalgic for were not very good. What they are really missing is a period when the society was moving in the right direction on the wages of working people and on lowering inequality. Two Rand economists recently estimated that if the wage trends that began in 1949 and ran into the early 1970s had continued, workers at every level of the wage structure would be getting almost 70% more by 2018. Instead, that 70% went to the upper 5% of the population.
The cost today
The results include tremendous problems around kids' homes, futures, and education, and inflation as rich people outbid everyone else for consumer goods. There is also the sense of insult when 90% of companies compete for the top 10% of consumers and give them dedicated phone lines and first boarding, while the rest wait on hold for hours. That social exclusion causes real pain, and it makes people susceptible to the argument that a return to those family forms would solve it.
Why does the brain misplace pain?
Nerves from the internal organs and nerves from the skin often feed into the same neurons in the spinal cord. The brain receives one signal along that shared route and tends to assign it to the skin or muscle, which it has far more practice locating. Heart attack pain felt in the left arm and jaw is a standard example. Irritation of the diaphragm can show up at the tip of the shoulder because the phrenic nerve serving the diaphragm arises from the same spinal levels as nerves of the shoulder.
When did wages and productivity part ways?
From 1948 to about 1973, hourly pay for typical American workers rose in step with productivity, according to analyses by the Economic Policy Institute. After 1973 productivity kept climbing while typical pay grew far more slowly. Researchers still debate how much each cause, such as declining union membership, globalization, and technology, contributed. The gap is often charted as two lines that split in the mid-1970s.
Why does nostalgia feel good?
Psychologists Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut at the University of Southampton have found that nostalgia is often triggered by loneliness or a bad mood. In their experiments, recalling a nostalgic memory increased people's sense that life is meaningful and their feelings of social connection. The word itself was coined in 1688 by the Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer, from Greek words for homecoming and pain.
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