While I was doom-swiping through Instagram stories, waiting for my turn to get a blood test, I stumbled upon André Abdala‘s story about feeling nostalgia for a time he never lived (in his case, the 80s). Of course, Germans have a word that captures this feeling: Sehnsucht. However, since Sehnsucht has a broader meaning, there’s another modern neologism for that that fits perfectly: Anemoia, formed from two words: ἄνεμος (ánemos), meaning “wind”, and νόος (nóos or nous), meaning “mind”. Unlike nostalgia, anemoia is the longing to return to a period you’ve never experienced. The term is a variation on John Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (which I happily own), where he draws an analogy to Anemosis, in which a tree is warped and permanently bent backward by strong, persistent air currents. The tree begins to lean directly into the wind that shapes it — like the Crooked Forest (Krzywy Las) in Poland. With this etymology, the word implies that your mind is like that tree. You are being warped, bent, and pulled backward in time by the unseen “winds” of history, culture, and old stories, until you find yourself leaning entirely toward an era you never actually lived in. We’ve all been there.
Peaky Blinders is one of the most prominent modern examples of a piece of media making millions of people feel profoundly homesick for an era they never actually lived through. The series influenced fashion, and the Peaky Blinders haircut brought several barbershops a golden era. Nevertheless, our imagination often distorts memories, creating scenarios that never existed in those eras, mostly because some aspects of them are missing in our modern society and cannot be recovered, as reality has shifted greatly from those times. We often forget about the hardships endured by the people at the time. However, we often exaggerate the future as well, since many catastrophic predictions have never been fulfilled (yes, Malthus, I’m talking to you and your disciples). We are stuck in a longing for a perfect past that never existed (Zygmunt Bauman’s Retrotopia), while afraid of a doomed future, we don’t have a clue how it’s going to be (Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never).
Using anemoia as a form of curation is a healthy way to filter the best from each era, but when it becomes maladaptive escapism, reality blurs. Taking the best aesthetic and cultural elements of an era and using them to enrich your present life, without actually wanting to swap your modern rights, medicine, or reality for them, enhances life itself, because there is wisdom hidden in every age. Whether you fall into Cyberpunk or Solarpunk, both are essentially a form of curation. As long as you know where the art ends and real life begins, anemoia isn’t a delusion, but rather a deeply creative appreciation for human expression across time.
Music is an excellent tool for engaging in time traveling without losing sight of reality. A jukebox is the time machine H. G. Wells imagined. We can go back in time, or even glimpse the future, as we often label some composers as “ahead of their time.” Sound waves behave like quantum mechanics in your ears, allowing you to imagine different realities, while still being yourself. C. S. Lewis said reading is a way of being inside another person’s mind while remaining yourself. I could say that listening to music can take you to other realities while staying in the present. Hence, the mystery of music adds another layer to the soundtrack of our lives.