Anemoia: Nostalgia for a Time Beyond Your Own

Jared Barlament
5 min readJul 30, 2019

Anemoia is a new and nearly unheard-of word. Its meaning is just as the title would suggest; a nostalgic sense of longing for a past you yourself have never lived. It is nostalgia for the “good ol’ days”; more specifically, the good ol’ days you are too young to have known. It is a sense that something was intrinsically better in the distant past than it is in the present; that we’ve lost something crucial in our ceaseless march of progress. Few haven’t felt it. Fewer still have contemplated if it really has a meaning behind senseless longing.

Jared Barlament

Columbia University undergrad studying archaeology and philosophy. Writer trying to say something of interest every once in a while.