Fauxstalgia: The longing for worlds you never lost

She's 22. She's filming herself in a linen pinafore, hands dusted with flour, three candles lit at three in the afternoon. The caption reads: Days like this make me feel most myself. She wasn't alive in the era she's performing. She's never lived in a cottage. The flour was probably from Lidl. She has no idea what an actual life in 1882 smelled like - the damp, the illness, the quiet terror of a toothache with no anaesthetic.

And yet. Hundreds of thousands of people liked that video. Because they understood exactly what she meant.

She is not alone. Not even close. The #cottagecore hashtag alone has racked up 17.8 billion views on TikTok. The secondhand fashion market - a significant portion of which is driven by nostalgia for pre-industrial aesthetics - was valued at $190 billion in 2024, growing at nearly 11% per year.

Meanwhile, eight in ten Gen Z adults report having felt lonely in the past twelve months - the most connected generation in human history, reaching backward in desperation toward worlds that never quite existed.

This is fauxstalgia. Not the warm, specific ache of a childhood photograph or a song that ambushes you in a supermarket - but something stranger and, I'd argue, more telling. It's the urgent longing for a world you never belonged to. Never lived in. Could not possibly have lost, because you never had it in the first place.

I've been sitting with this concept for months. Partly because it's everywhere once you start seeing it - the cottagecore feeds, the dark academia reading lists, the Brexit nostalgia for a Britain that mostly existed in a fever dream, the MAGA voters aching for a greatness that no one can quite locate on a calendar. And partly because, if I'm being honest, I've felt it myself. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and I still occasionally feel wistful for world I see in films from the 1970s. Which is insane. I would have been miserable. But there it is.

The question this essay is asking isn't the easy one - why do people romanticise the past? That's old territory. The question I'm interested in is harder: why now, why so intensely, and what exactly are we doing when we do it? Is this a coping mechanism? A form of grief? A political weapon? All three? And where does the therapeutic value end and the harm begin?

Let's go.

Fauxtalgia, nostalgia and anemoia

Nostalgia was originally a diagnosis. Not a wistful feeling - a disease. A Swiss physician named Johannes Hofer coined the term in 1688 to describe the debilitating homesickness of Swiss mercenaries stationed far from the Alps. His patients had melancholy, insomnia, fever, irregular heartbeats, disordered eating. He called it nostalgia - from the Greek nostos (the longing to return home) and algos (pain). It was, in the most literal sense, a sickness brought on by distance from home.

I find it weirdly comforting that what we now treat as a soft, sentimental quirk was once considered a medical emergency. It tells you something about how seriously these feelings should be taken.

Over the following centuries, nostalgia migrated - from illness, to psychological condition, to emotion, to marketing strategy. By the time the internet arrived, it had been industrialised. And then something changed. The feeling mutated. People started experiencing nostalgia not for their own past, but for pasts they had never lived through at all. Not just fondly - intensely. Identityingly. Politically.

Psychologists have different words for this. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows offers anemoia - nostalgia for a time you've never known. Academic researchers use "historical nostalgia" or "anachronistic nostalgia." Some call it "mediated nostalgia" - produced not by lived memory but by cultural transmission, by stories and television and the algorithm serving you footage of 1950s diners because you once paused on a video about jukeboxes.

Fauxstalgia is blunter. It captures something the clinical language misses: the performance of longing. The self-conscious construction of a relationship with an era you have to build entirely from scratch, because there's no actual memory to draw on. You have to invent your past before you can miss it. And the thing is - people are working very hard to do exactly that.

"If you can feel nostalgia for something you never had, what, exactly, are you homesick for?"

The Science of the Borrowed Ache: Why Your Brain Doesn't Care If the Memory Is Real

Here's where it gets properly interesting, and I say that as someone who spent years in clinical practice watching people do extraordinary things with their relationship to the past.

Prof. Felipe De Brigard at Duke University has proposed something that should, by rights, feel more disturbing than it does: nostalgia doesn't require memory. It requires imagination.

Since memory itself is a creative reconstruction - a simulation the brain runs, not a recording it retrieves - the line between remembering and imagining isn't the firm boundary we pretend it is. De Brigard argues that nostalgia is not associated with memory but with imagination - and that the brain can generate nostalgia for imagined positive pasts as readily as for lived ones.

This lands differently depending on your background. As a therapist, I've sat with people who had vivid childhood memories that we later established, carefully, had never happened in the form they remembered them. The memory felt real. The emotional weight was real. The ache, when they re-examined it, was real. The event? Reconstructed. Revised. Half-imagined. Memory isn't a filing cabinet. It's a novelist - one with a particular fondness for dramatic revision.

Dr. Constantine Sedikides, one of the world's leading nostalgia researchers at the University of Southampton, has spent years documenting what nostalgia actually does for us. His regulatory model shows it functions as a psychological corrective - it fires up when we're lonely, when we feel meaningless, when social anxiety is running the show, and it reduces those feelings. It's a kind of emotional first aid, self-administered. You feel bad; you go backwards; you feel, temporarily, less bad.

Here's the bit that stopped me when I first read it: the soothing effect is strongest when the nostalgic content depicts eras the person has not personally experienced. Distance from reality appears to enhance the comfort. Yep. The further the imagined past is from your actual life, the more effectively it regulates your distress. Wait. What?

The brain isn't just capable of generating nostalgia for made-up pasts - it finds those made-up pasts more soothing than real ones. Because real memories come with real complications. The imagined past is perfect by definition. It's curated. It has no awkward third acts. Nobody in your cottagecore fantasy has a bad back or a mortgage or a parent who let them down in ways that still surface at 3am.

The neuroscience backs this up in ways I find almost vertiginous. Nostalgia - real or imagined - activates the medial prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. Regions tied to self-identity, emotional processing, and social belonging. When you ache for a 1960s living room you never sat in, you're not confused or deluded. You're running the same psychological software as someone grieving their grandmother's kitchen. The brain doesn't stamp memories with a 'real' or 'invented' watermark before processing them.

This matters enormously for how we understand what's happening culturally. People who dive into fauxstalgia aren't stupid. They're not being manipulated into feeling things that don't make sense. Their feelings make perfect neurological sense. The brain found a resource, and it's using it.

But - and this is the clinical "but" that I've learned to take seriously - there's a catch. For people who are already chronic worriers, who are persistently anxious and dissatisfied with the present, nostalgia can backfire. Research by Sedikides and colleagues points to the risk: the contrast between a remembered (or imagined) carefree past and a chronically anxious present doesn't comfort - it indicts. The borrowed peace highlights the poverty of now. You're not soothed. You're trapped.

Fauxstalgia can be a genuine psychological resource and a trap that deepens exactly the wound it promises to heal. Sometimes simultaneously. Sometimes in the same person. Sometimes in the same scroll session.

The Aesthetics of Escape: How TikTok Gave Your Existential Ache a Name and Sold It Back to You

Cottagecore. Dark academia. Royalcore. Coquette. Goblincore. Regencycore. Balletcore. Oldmoneycore. The internet has industrialised fauxstalgia into a naming system so precise it feels like a personality test. Pick your era. Build your aesthetic. Find your people.

I want to be careful here, because it's easy to be dismissive about this and that dismissiveness would be both lazy and wrong. These communities are often genuinely warm. The dark academia Reddit, the cottagecore TikTok corners - people in them describe finding a sense of belonging, of being seen, of community. That's real. That matters. In a world that increasingly fails to provide belonging in its physical architecture, you find it where you can.

But these aesthetics are also - let's be honest - attempts to answer the question who am I? by answering a different question: when was I most at home? And since none of these people have been home in any of these eras, the answer is infinitely flexible. Infinitely projectable. Which is precisely the point.

Dark academia offers the imagined safety of candlelit university libraries, Platonic conversations in wood-panelled rooms, tweed blazers and Greek philosophy - stripped entirely of the realities of elite Victorian education, which was, for most people who lived through it, fairly brutal.

Cottagecore offers the fantasy of rural self-sufficiency and pastoral peace, emptied of rural poverty, crushing physical labour, the absence of antibiotics, the teeth.

The algorithm is extraordinary at this. This is not a metaphor - I mean it mechanically. TikTok's recommendation engine learned early that aestheticised historical longing generates exceptional engagement: saves, shares, long watch times, emotional comments.

TikTok's 1.6 billion monthly active users spend an average of nearly an hour a day on the platform. One interaction with a 'slow living' video and the machine begins constructing a personalised past for you, fed back through your screen in 30-second increments.

Here is your Victorian parlour. Here is your 1970s kitchen. Here is the Edwardian schoolroom where you would have been seen. The feed becomes a time machine you never asked to board, run by a company whose only actual interest is your continued presence on the platform.

And here's the thing that should give us pause: Gen Z - the generation born into the most connected, most documented, most visible era in human history - is the generation most aggressively reaching backward. This is not a coincidence. It is a response.

When the present is algorithm-mediated, authenticity-performing, brand-adjacent, AI-inflected at every turn, the past becomes the only place that can't be colonised by the attention economy. Or so it feels. That's because the market has noticed, and it has some thoughts.

What We're Actually Running From

This is the part where I put the journalist down and pick up the therapist. Bear with me.

Fauxstalgia is a coping mechanism dressed in a pinafore. It is - in clinical terms - a form of avoidance behaviour. I want to be precise about what that means and doesn't mean, because 'avoidance' has become a therapy-speak boo word, and that's not entirely fair.

Avoidance isn't always pathological. Every human being uses it, all the time, to manage an unbearable present. The question is never whether you're avoiding - it's what you're avoiding, and whether the avoidance is costing you more than the thing you're running from.

So what are people actually running from? What does the intensity of this longing point at?

Ontological insecurity

The philosopher Anthony Giddens described late modernity as producing a particular kind of existential anxiety - not the fear of specific threats, but the absence of firm structures of meaning, tradition, or identity.

When institutions fail (and they are failing), when the future feels genuinely unwritable - climate anxiety, economic precarity, AI disruption that nobody is adequately preparing people for - people reach not forward but backward. The imagined past is stable by definition. It can't get worse. It has already happened.

The grief of cognitive overload

Fauxstalgia for pre-digital eras - landline phones, handwritten letters, "simpler" communication - is almost never really about those objects. It's about the cognitive load they represent. Nobody is actually nostalgic for a rotary phone. They are nostalgic for a world that didn't require you to be contactable by everyone who has ever had a claim on your attention, simultaneously, all day, every day, at the cost of your own inner life. That's not an aesthetic preference. That's a mental health need.

A failure of present identity

Research consistently shows that nostalgia spikes when self-continuity feels disrupted -when the connection between who you were and who you are feels severed. For younger people navigating a world of identity fragmentation, algorithmic self-optimisation, and the impossible simultaneity of online and offline selves, fauxstalgia may offer a borrowed identity that feels solid.

You don't know who you are in 2025. But you know exactly who you'd have been in 1895, and that person had a consistent aesthetic, a defined role, and a clear relationship to their community. The fantasy is coherent. The present isn't. That's not weakness - that's a completely rational response to genuinely incoherent circumstances.

The absence of community

This one hits hardest for me, clinically. Most fauxstalgia aesthetics centre on community belonging - the village, the university quad, the cottage, the shared table, the neighbourhood. The eras being mourned are rarely mourned for their politics or their medicine.

They're mourned for their texture of relationship: slower, more embodied, more reliably present. People are not grieving 1890. They are grieving the possibility of being truly known by other human beings in a sustained and unhurried way. And that grief is completely legitimate.

Eight in ten Gen Z adults say they have felt lonely in the past year. Nearly half say they often feel lonely. The US Surgeon General has described loneliness as a public health epidemic, with chronic social isolation now carrying health risks comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

What people sense when they look at a sepia photograph of a village green isn't historical inaccuracy - it's an accurate reading of something they actually lack.

I had a client - I'll be careful with this - who would spend several hours a week on cottagecore communities online. Not buying anything. Not posting much. Just being there. When we explored it, what emerged wasn't a desire to live in a cottage, or even to live in the past.

It was that those communities were the only place in their week where nobody was performing productivity. Nobody was building a brand. Nobody wanted anything from them. It felt, they said, "like everyone just agreed to breathe." That's not escapism in the pathological sense. That's a person accurately identifying what their life is missing and finding the closest available approximation.

That distinction - between fauxstalgia as a signal and fauxstalgia as a destination - is the most important clinical line in this whole conversation. And we'll come back to it.

The Dark Political Underbelly: When Fauxstalgia Stops Being an Aesthetic and Starts Being a Weapon

Right. This is where it gets properly uncomfortable. Because fauxstalgia is not only the territory of sad young people in linen. It is, I'd argue, the operating system of contemporary populism. And the mechanics are more precise - and more sinister - than they might appear from the outside.

"Make America Great Again" is the most successful fauxstalgia campaign in modern political history. The again does all the work. It implies a before: a time of greatness, a state of things that was better, that existed and was lost.

But crucially - and this is the genius of it, in the most amoral sense of that word - the when is never specified. "Great Again" means different things to every person who hears it. To one voter it's the post-war economic boom. To another it's pre-immigration demographics. To another it's a manufacturing economy that sustained working-class communities. To another, if they're honest, it's a hierarchy of power that benefited them specifically. The vagueness is the product. You fill it with your own imagined past.

Research published in Frontiers in Psychology found something that should chill you: higher levels of national nostalgia - specifically, a longing for an unspecified earlier greatness - predicted both positive attitudes toward Trump and racial prejudice.

Personal nostalgia showed no such correlation. Let me say that again more slowly. Nostalgia for your own past: does not predict prejudice. Nostalgia for a collective, imagined national past: does. The distinction is not subtle. The imagined past is a political technology. The personal past is not.

The mechanism is precise, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Populist leaders don't merely evoke fauxstalgia - they engineer it. A bit like this:

Step one: name a golden age (keep it temporally vague).
Step two: name a scapegoat responsible for its loss (immigrants, elites, the wrong kind of people, take your pick).
Step three: offer yourself as the vehicle of return. The psychological payoff for the voter is genuine - national nostalgia activates the same self-continuity and belonging functions as personal nostalgia. The comfort is real. The history underpinning it is fiction.

It's also - and I want to be honest about this - not solely a right-wing phenomenon, because that would be too convenient. Nostalgia researcher Clay Routledge has pointed out that progressivism has its own fauxstalgia: the pre-colonial imaginary, a vision of Indigenous and non-Western life before European contact as one of peaceful harmony.

This too is a curated imagined past, politically useful and in many respects mythological. The specific content of fauxstalgia differs across the political spectrum. The psychological machinery is identical.

The critical distinction I want to draw here is this: fauxstalgia as personal coping is understandable, often healthy, sometimes beautiful. Fauxstalgia as political program is dangerous. Because the world being promised never existed. And the attempts to build it - to return to a past that only ever lived in imagination - inevitably require deciding who doesn't belong in the version you're building. Somebody always gets left out of the golden age.

That's not an aesthetic question. That's a moral one.

The Market That Found Your Ache: How the Wellness Industry Turned Your Existential Longing Into a Subscription

The fauxstalgia market is enormous and almost entirely unexamined, and it operates in the same way the coachfluencer market operates, and the VC-backed care market, and the AI therapy market - it identifies a genuine human need, strips out the parts that are expensive or structurally inconvenient, packages what remains in reassuring language, and charges you for the privilege.

The secondhand clothing market - a significant slice of which is driven by vintage and fauxstalgia aesthetics - was valued at $190 billion globally in 2024 and is projected to more than double by 2034.

"Slow living" courses - paying to learn bread-making, candle-pouring, botanical dyeing, and sourdough fermentation as a form of psychological restoration - are booming.

Dark academia reading lists have become Substack monetisation strategies. Stranger Things, Bridgerton, Downton Abbey. The entire Regency romance publishing category. These are not guilty pleasures. They are products engineered for a specific psychological ache, and the engineering is good.

The wellness industry has been particularly agile at reading fauxstalgia as a spending signal. Brands now sell "ancestral diets," raw milk, herbalism, traditional fermentation practices, "pre-industrial" sleep patterns - often entirely decontextualised from the cultures they draw on, sometimes in ways that veer into straight-up cultural appropriation - as both health products and identity systems.

You're not just buying a tincture. You're buying membership in an imagined past that had its priorities straight, that valued the things you value, that would have recognised you. The longing is real. The product is a fiction.

The algorithm knows exactly what it's doing. Instagram and TikTok are not neutral purveyors of aesthetic content. They are advertising infrastructure. When the cottagecore feed fills your screen, it is also filling a database. Your longing for 1880s rural England is being mapped, categorised, and sold to lifestyle brands, who feed it back to you as personalised offers. You thought you were escaping the attention economy. You were inside it the entire time.

"You thought you were escaping the attention economy. You were inside it the entire time."

This is the pattern I keep seeing across the stories I cover at The Brink. The coachfluencer who packages genuine therapeutic language into a £297 course. The VC firm that sees a "defensible asset class" in human vulnerability. The fauxstalgia aesthetic ecosystem is doing the same thing, just with linen dresses and sourdough starters instead of shadow-work bootcamps. It finds a genuine psychological gap, it offers something that feels like it fills the gap, and it keeps you paying for the feeling.

The question worth sitting with is this: is fauxstalgia a genuine coping mechanism, or has it been so thoroughly commercialised that the comfort it offers now requires constant purchase to maintain? Is the cottage still an escape if accessing it costs you a subscription?

What Healthy and Unhealthy Fauxstalgia Actually Looks Like)

I want to end with this, because it's the piece that gets lost when journalists write about this subject - and it's the piece I'm most qualified to speak to.

Not all fauxstalgia is avoidance. At its most adaptive, the longing for an imagined past can function as what existential psychotherapists call ontological homecoming - an intuition about your own values and needs, expressed through a historical metaphor rather than direct statement. Sometimes people can't say what they need. They can only point at an image that contains it.

Someone drawn to the imagined rigour and depth of ancient Greek philosophical life may be pointing at an unmet need for intellectual community - for conversations that go somewhere, for ideas taken seriously, for the particular pleasure of being in a room where thinking is the thing.

Someone drawn to the contemplative rhythm of monastery life may be expressing a hunger for stillness that their current life systematically refuses to provide. Someone deep in cottagecore communities may be - as my client was - accurately identifying that their week contains no space where nobody wants anything from them. These aren't delusions. These are diagnostics. The imagined past is a symptom that points, if you're willing to read it carefully, at a very specific present lack.

In clinical practice, I've found that the most useful question isn't why are you drawn to this era. It's: what does this era let you feel that the present doesn't? What room does it give you? What demands does it remove? What version of yourself gets to exist there?

Because the answer to those questions is almost never actually about the past. It's about the present. It's about what's missing.

What becomes unhealthy - and this is a genuine clinical concern - is the substitution. When the Pinterest board replaces the conversation. When the aesthetic becomes an identity so consuming that engagement with the actual present - its mess, its possibility, its grief - is systematically foreclosed. When fauxstalgia stops being a signal and becomes a destination. When someone spends more emotional energy tending their imagined relationship with a past they never lived through than building actual relationships in the life they do have.

There's also a specific risk for younger people whose fauxstalgia is mediated almost entirely by content: the development of a profound aesthetic vocabulary for worlds they've never experienced, alongside an increasing difficulty articulating what they actually feel in the world they do inhabit.

They can describe, in meticulous visual detail, what the light looked like in a Victorian parlour at dusk. They struggle, sometimes, to describe what they feel at 2am on a Tuesday when the ache is at its worst. The past has become more legible than the present. That's worth noticing.

And look - I say all of this with full awareness that I'm not exempt. There's a reason I described feeling wistful about the 1970s, a decade I would almost certainly have found intolerable. There's a reason most of us have a historical era we secretly feel we "belong" in, some corner of the past that feels more right than wherever we've landed. That feeling is worth taking seriously. It's pointing at something real. But the something real lives in the present, not in the past.

The past you're aching for is not a destination. It's a map of your unmet present.

What Are We Actually Asking For?

Fauxstalgia is a symptom. The disease is a present that is - for significant portions of the population, across multiple generations - genuinely and structurally difficult to inhabit.

The economic precarity that makes imagined cottage life appealing is real. The cognitive overload that makes landline phones sound like mercy is real - the research on digital fatigue, on the neurological cost of constant connectivity, is solid and growing.

The loneliness that makes every era's vision of community feel like an amputated limb is real and is, by most credible measures, getting worse.

The problem isn't that people are escaping into imagined pasts. Escapism has always existed, and it has always served a function. The problem is that the systems producing the conditions people are escaping from have learned to monetise the escape. The longing is genuine. The response it's being sold - an Instagram aesthetic, a linen dress, a £180 sourdough course, a Pinterest board, a political slogan - is not.

The past cannot be returned to. In most of its actual forms, it was worse - often dramatically worse - for most of the people who lived through it. The cottage was damp and the work was backbreaking and the infant mortality rate was something you don't want to think about over your artisan sourdough.

But the feelings that fauxstalgia points at - the hunger for slowness, for depth, for community, for being known, for a life with sufficient texture and meaning to be worth inhabiting - those are not delusions. They are not weakness. They are not aesthetic preferences.

They are demands. And the question is not whether they are valid - they obviously are. The question is whether we're going to take them seriously enough to actually build the present those demands deserve, or whether we are content to let the algorithm serve us a simulation of it while charging us for the privilege.

The again we are aching for has never existed. But the instead - a present worth living in, built around the things fauxstalgia keeps pointing at - is still possible.

If we want it badly enough to stop scrolling.