BOOK REVIEW
Past Forward: How Nostalgia can help you live a more meaningful life, by Clay Routledge, Sounds True, 5 December 2023, 224 Pages, $19.99 (Paperback), ISBN 9781683648642
A man watches his home burn in a California wildfire and says something that sounds like denial until it starts to sound like wisdom: the fire took the house, but it could not take the memories made inside it. It is a small moment, almost a throwaway line in the flow of a research-minded book, yet it lands with the blunt force of lived experience. People keep trying to save what can be saved, and when the physical world will not cooperate, the mind does what it has always done. It reaches backward, not to hide from the future, but to carry forward a sense of who we were when life still felt whole. That is the tension that gives Past Forward: How Nostalgia Can Help You Live a More Meaningful Life its pulse: nostalgia looks like retreat, but Clay Routledge insists it often behaves like a rope thrown across a ravine.
Routledge is not a memoirist by trade, but he writes with the practiced calm of someone who has spent years watching feelings become data without losing their human shape. A PhD and a leading voice in existential psychology, he has published widely and helped build the modern experimental science of nostalgia alongside key collaborators such as Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut. At the time tied most closely to the book’s public identity, he served as Vice President of Research and Director of the Human Flourishing Lab at the Archbridge Institute, a role that positions his work where psychology meets public life. He also spent nearly two decades in academia as a professor of psychology and management, teaching and publishing across social psychology, research methods, and leadership. Those credentials matter here because Past Forward is trying to do something ambitious in plain language: persuade readers that nostalgia is not a mental flaw to be outgrown but a psychological resource that can be used with intention.
The book’s argument rests on a reversal of an old prejudice. Nostalgia began as a medical label coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, who described it as the painful sickness of soldiers longing for home, and for a long time it stayed close to the idea of illness. Over the twentieth century it drifted from bodily disease to mental weakness, and only later did scholars begin to notice its mixed emotional texture, pleasure braided with pain. Routledge gives Fred Davis his due here, especially Davis’s 1979 view that nostalgia can help people cope with life transitions by reworking the story of the self and restoring continuity across changing roles. Where Davis wrote as a sociologist with a sharp eye for biography and social change, Routledge arrives as a psychologist determined to test these claims, measure them, and show what nostalgia does, not just what it seems to mean.
One of Routledge’s strengths is his insistence on describing what nostalgia contains before he explains what it accomplishes. When people are asked to write about nostalgic memories, the most common themes revolve around close relationships: family, romantic partners, friends, and big life moments that usually include them, such as holidays, graduations, weddings, and gatherings. The self is not absent in these stories; it is usually the protagonist, the one whose life is being narrated and, quietly, edited. This point matters because it pushes nostalgia away from the stereotype of mere sentimentality and toward something closer to identity work (Bardon et al., 2015). If nostalgia is a kind of mental time travel, then it is not tourism; it is a return trip with a purpose, a way of noticing what has always been important and what has quietly become important without permission.
Routledge organizes his case across five sections and fourteen chapters, including a conclusion that functions as chapter fourteen, and the structure is more than a table of contents. Section one, “The Nostalgia Revolution,” begins by narrating the rise of a new science of nostalgia, with Routledge’s own path into the topic running alongside the field’s shift from suspicion to serious inquiry. It then pushes a central claim that sounds like a paradox until he explains it: nostalgia is often about the future, because people recruit the past when they need courage, direction, and a reason to care about what comes next. The final chapter in this first section asks what makes nostalgia possible and necessary, treating it as a basic feature of human cognition and motivation rather than a quirky mood. The movement across these early chapters feels like a camera zooming out: from personal curiosity, to scientific history, to an account of why a species obsessed with progress would also be wired to look back.
From there the book shifts, almost imperceptibly, into the self. Section two, “How Nostalgia Enhances the Self,” argues that nostalgia shapes the self-concept, supports healthier self-esteem, and can help the self grow and expand. The writing stays friendly, but the intellectual stakes rise because this is where Routledge tries to make nostalgia respectable as a tool for personal development without turning it into a motivational poster. He leans on findings that nostalgic memories are more self-defining than ordinary positive memories, and that nostalgia can increase feelings of authenticity and self-clarity while reducing the anxious preoccupation with social approval. A recurring concept here is self-continuity, the sense that the person you were, the person you are, and the person you hope to become belong to the same life. When that continuity breaks under stress or unwanted change, nostalgia can work like a stitch that holds the narrative together long enough for a person to move forward.
The third section turns outward without abandoning the inner life. In “How Nostalgia Connects You to Others,” Routledge shows how nostalgic reflection strengthens relationships, connects people to groups, and increases prosocial concern. This is one of the book’s most persuasive transitions, because it makes the earlier point about nostalgic content feel consequential: if nostalgia is full of family and friends, then it makes sense that nostalgia can counter loneliness and renew the sense of belonging. He discusses research suggesting that loneliness and anticipated social disconnection can trigger nostalgia, and that nostalgia, in turn, increases felt social connectedness. It is also here that the book’s moral complexity begins to show: group nostalgia can bind communities, but any force that binds can also exclude, and Routledge is careful enough to flag “possibilities and pitfalls” rather than treat togetherness as an unalloyed good.
Section four, “How Nostalgia Makes Life Meaningful,” is where Routledge’s existential psychology training becomes visible, not as jargon, but as a steady preoccupation with fear, mortality, and the nagging suspicion that modern life moves too fast to be lived on purpose. The chapters argue that nostalgia helps people cope with existential fears, focus on what provides meaning, and strengthen what he calls existential agency, the felt capacity to act in line with values even under uncertainty. He draws on terror management theory research that frames death awareness as a pressure that can distort choices, and he presents nostalgia as one resource that buffers that pressure by reminding people that life has contained love, purpose, and connection before and can contain it again. This is also where the book best matches the promise of its subtitle, because the “more meaningful life” on offer is not constant happiness but a sturdier relationship with what frightens people. Nostalgia, in this telling, becomes a way of making meaning portable.
The fifth section, “Using the Past to Build a Better Future,” risks sounding like a slogan, but the final movement is more pragmatic than it first appears. Chapter thirteen frames nostalgia as a tool for navigating a fast-moving world, including the churn of technology and the fatigue of constant novelty. The conclusion, “Nostalgia and the Psychology of Progress,” returns to the book’s opening tension and makes the broadest claim: nostalgia can be an ally of progress, not its enemy, because it preserves motives worth carrying into whatever comes next. Routledge’s underlying social theory is simple: human beings are built to improve their world, but they are also built to retrieve the parts of the past that teach them why improvement matters. That is how the five sections hang together, with the focus shifting from the science itself, to the self, to relationships, to meaning, and finally to change and progress as the arena where all the earlier claims have to prove themselves.
As a contribution to the field, Past Forward does two things at once, which is rare. It synthesizes two decades of experimental nostalgia research into an accessible narrative, and it also tries to rehabilitate nostalgia in public culture, where the word is often used as an insult that means weak, regressive, or politically naive. Routledge does not pretend nostalgia is always sweet, and he does not deny that nostalgia can be used for manipulation, but he argues that the basic emotion is neither pathological nor inherently conservative in the sense of opposing change. That stance aligns with his earlier 2015 book, Nostalgia: A Psychological Resource, which positioned nostalgia as something people can draw on for psychological health and well-being, but the newer book carries a broader public-facing ambition and a clearer emphasis on progress. If the 2015 work reads like an academic consolidation, Past Forward reads like an attempt to give the research a civic and personal home.
The places where debate feels healthiest are also the places where the book is most relevant to brand researchers, organizational scholars, and policy makers. Routledge includes a candid account of “nostalgia in the age of marketing,” noting that consumer research helped legitimize nostalgia by showing how strongly people prefer cultural products from their teens and early twenties and how nostalgia-based advertising can increase attention and positive brand attitudes. The tension, of course, is ethical: if nostalgia is a psychological resource tied to belonging and meaning, then nostalgia marketing is not just clever creative work, it is a form of influence over some of the softest parts of the self. Past Forward does not give a full ethical framework, and that gap is an opening for research rather than a failure, because it invites serious questions about when nostalgia appeals support wellbeing and when they exploit vulnerability. In one of the book’s more pointed moments about modern culture, Routledge observes how media franchises and “retro-marketing” leverage old characters and stories for profit, a reminder that the same emotion that helps a lonely person feel connected can also be engineered into a sales funnel.
That is why the book speaks so clearly to mental wellbeing, social resilience, and brand engagement at the same time. On the wellbeing side, Routledge summarizes evidence that nostalgia can help people cope with stress, restore self-continuity, and increase meaning, which are not small benefits in a period marked by loneliness and uncertainty. On the resilience side, the social chapters show nostalgia as a bridge back to relationships and group identity, which can help people recover after disruption, whether that disruption is personal, economic, or cultural. For brand engagement, the implication is not merely that nostalgia “works,” but that it works because it activates deep psychological functions: it reminds consumers who they were, who they are with others, and what kind of future they want to believe is still possible. Read this way, nostalgia is less a gimmick than a meaning-making technology, and that makes ethical scrutiny unavoidable, especially for organizations that want trust, not just attention.
One of the most affecting threads running through Routledge’s chapters is the refusal to treat nostalgia as either a disorder or a drug. He repeatedly notes that nostalgia was once framed as disease, then later as depression-like weakness, and he contrasts that history with contemporary evidence showing nostalgia’s role in self-growth, belonging, and coping. This matters for marketing ethics because it changes the moral baseline: if nostalgia is not a symptom to be eliminated, then nostalgic longing in consumers is not automatically a sign of manipulation or immaturity. It can be a normal attempt to regulate emotion and regain orientation, like using a compass when the landscape changes. Yet the wildfire anecdote and the research on loneliness also hint at the risk: people reach for nostalgia when life is shaky, and brands can meet them there with comfort that is genuine or comfort that is packaged. A future direction suggested by the book’s own materials is a more careful theory of “nostalgia marketing” as a moral practice: when it supports connection, gratitude, and pro-social action, it may strengthen flourishing, and when it sells false belonging or encourages retreat into grievance, it may corrode it.
As a professional assessment, Past Forward is a persuasive, readable synthesis that treats nostalgia with respect without turning it into a cure-all. Compared with Routledge’s 2015 Nostalgia: A Psychological Resource, this book feels more like a public argument for why nostalgia belongs in the toolkit of modern life, not just in academic journals. Compared with Fred Davis’s 1979 Yearning for Yesterday, it complements rather than competes: Davis offers a sociological lens on biography and social change, while Routledge supplies the experimental evidence and the applied psychological mechanisms that Davis could only theorize at the time. The result is a book that can sit on a therapist’s shelf, a social scientist’s syllabus, and a brand strategist’s desk, while still speaking to ordinary readers who only know nostalgia as a sudden ache when a song comes on in a taxi. If there is a lingering critique, it is that the book’s practical tone sometimes outruns its ethical analysis, especially around commercial and political uses of collective nostalgia, but that may be the point: it leaves room, and need, for the next wave of scholarship
Disclosure of interest
The author(s) confirm that there are no financial or non-financial competing interests.
Statement of funding
No funding was received.
References
Bardon, T., Josserand, E., & Villesèche, F. (2015). Beyond nostalgia: Identity work in corporate alumni networks. Human Relations, 68(4), 583-606.
Davis, F. (1979). Yearning for yesterday: A sociology of nostalgia. New York, 4, 2-4.
Routledge, C. (2015). Nostalgia: A psychological resource. Routledge.
*****
Reviewed by:
Mayukh Mukhopadhyay
Executive Doctoral Scholar
Indian Institute of Management Indore
*****