Nostalgia was originally diagnosed as a highly debilitating neurological disease in the seventeenth century, complete with physical symptoms like weeping, irregular heartbeat, and loss of appetite.

A closer look

Nostalgia was originally diagnosed as a highly debilitating neurological disease in the seventeenth century, complete with physical symptoms like weeping, irregular heartbeat, and loss of appetite. Today, it has been aggressively rebranded as a cozy marketing tool, but your ancestors viewed the desperate longing for the past as a literal mental illness that could potentially kill soldiers and sailors. Your brain is effectively self-medicating with chemically altered memories, desperately trying to soothe the stress of modern existence by hallucinating a safer, simpler time that never actually occurred. The fact that you spend your weekend buying incredibly overpriced, retro-themed video game consoles is technically a modern manifestation of a historical psychological disorder. It is highly amusing that a condition once treated with leeches and terror is now just the primary demographic target for every single major Hollywood reboot