Vintage is comforting but also paralyzing

The nostalgia between desire and pain

Nostalgia is one of the links with the past: it is the feeling of longing for people, places, experiences. A mixture between the desire for a return to another ‘somewhere’ (loved, lost and perhaps partially idealized) and the pain of the impossibility of this return. However, the relationship between nostalgia and actual experience is more complex. As Baudelaire and Bloch pointed out, we can also be nostalgic about something that was never actually known or felt, for unoccurred possibilities and lives that we only fantasized about: a nostalgia for the future, colored with hope.

The past as a search for belonging

Can all this explain our love for everything that is vintage?

Yes, because nostalgia makes us feel closer to others, satisfies the need to belong, helps to find meanings in life. For those who tend to nostalgia, the purchase of objects related to the past – especially those that have become part of the collective imagination – is a concrete strategy to satisfy these needs.

The probability of making vintage purchases is greater the more the person in need of company, security, support and connections. Objects from the past – or that take up their forms, colors, flavors – fortify their identity and self-image: they are a remedy with which to access temporarily other possibilities, to a better, different life.

A chair from the fifties is obviously not enough to reorganize a personality or develop a feeling of belonging. But the purchase may give the feeling of a change in our existence, and to have done so in a secure, point-like, controllable way by incorporating islands of the past. A change at zero risk, inside the comfort zone: objects fixed in time, old but different from the present, familiar but foreign, nourish the ideal Self and support identity, give the feeling of being complete, enrich.

Collective cocooning

And when you experience significant threats, like in these months of anguish due to Covid-19? Psychological tension and economic uncertainty will not decrease the current interest in this type of purchase, quite the opposite.

However, this collective cocooning has a downside. Because even if the memories and the connection with the past are fundamental for the human being, they carry with them the risk of transforming the past into the only possible land. If the connection with what has been stiffens enough to become obstinacy, we end up like Lot's biblical wife: unable to overcome nostalgia, she is transformed into a statue of salt. If the connection with the past becomes obstinacy, there is no room for any other thought. So not even for life itself.