Anticipatory nostalgia: missing what’s still there

‘Anticipatory nostalgia’—that sense of sadness we feel about having to leave a beautiful place while we’re still there or stop doing something wonderful before it actually ends. Hedwig Wiebes learns more about it.

There I was, at a deserted beach so vast that it seems endless, surrounded by rocky cliffs. As I descended the wooden stairs and looked around, I realized I was the only one there. Me and my two dogs, that is. Undoubtedly, this beach is jam-packed with colorful parasols and beach towels in the summer, and you’d have to squint to see the ocean through crowds of people slathered in suntan oil. But it was winter, and we had this Portuguese kingdom all to ourselves.

The dogs ran ahead in leaps and bounds as dogs do on beaches, and I looked at the happily meandering trail of paw prints that they left behind. ‘I am such a lucky person,’ I thought. And then: ‘I have to really enjoy this a little bit more than usual as we leave tomorrow’. I’d almost forgotten about that. In fact, we were leaving this area, with its gorgeous rugged beaches, altogether. Boom, my happy feeling evaporated, and gave way to a premature sense of loss for this place that I love so much. Feeling kind of sad, I walked on—preoccupied with the imminent departure.

Realizing that the moment will end

Grieving for what is not there while you still have it: it feels crazy and even ungrateful. Why would you do that? And it’s not very mindful either, because if you were really living ‘in the moment’, surely there’d be no thoughts about later or tomorrow. But the feeling can be so strong sometimes.

I remember it from my childhood, too: on Saturdays I would feel free as a bird, but Sundays were filled with gloom because I was thinking about school the next day. And later I felt it again at a fantastic Florence and the Machine concert and also when I ate a most heavenly chocolate mousse with black truffles.

These are all moments when I was enjoying something intensely and then suddenly stopped enjoying it, because I realized that the moment at some point would end.

An early sense of loss

However melancholy this might make one feel, it’s nothing to worry about, says Tim Wildschut. He is a professor of psychology, and one of around ten people worldwide who have started researching this phenomenon a couple of years ago. They call what I experienced on the beach (and so many other times) ‘anticipatory nostalgia’—that is, experiencing a nostalgic feeling while the object of your nostalgia is still present.

“That early sense of loss is in fact the recognition of the fact that what you are experiencing is very special and unique,” Wildschut says. “Your brain thinks ahead at such a moment and knows that this is something that you will recall with great pleasure later on. It gives you the opportunity, for example, to take a picture, or do something else that will let you capture the moment so that you can remember it better later.”

As the term indicates, the feeling is a specific type of nostalgia: the desire for something from the past. In the case of anticipatory nostalgia, you travel to the future in your mind and imagine the moment when you’ll be thinking back to what you’re experiencing right now in the present.

By knowing that you will want to look back on it, your brain understands that it is worth saving this moment particularly well. This mental time travel is primarily meant to motivate yourself to, for example, create a souvenir, but at the same time it makes you already feel melancholy for the moment that will no longer be there.

Beautiful and splendid memories

The bittersweet nostalgia that you feel in these moments is not only an emotion, it also serves a practical purpose. In fact, it is a way to manage difficult moments. We like to seek out the warmth of the past when things are not going well in the present.

It may seem that if you compare those two, the result might be a feeling that in the past everything was better, but what really happens is that the good things from the past give you something to hold on to, and create a feeling of trust. They show that your life is worthwhile, says American psychologist Clay Routledge in an interview in The New York Times. Beautiful and splendid memories give you a better feeling about the future than when you think of everyday events. It has even been proven that nostalgic feelings literally make you feel warmer.

Nostalgia: a neurological disease?

Interestingly, nostalgia was once regarded as something negative; it was even seen as a serious neurological disease. It was Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer who first brought up the term in the 17th century. He was treating soldiers who were suffering from a mysterious disorder which disappeared like snow on a hot summer day when he promised them that they could go home temporarily. Hofer composed the word ‘nostalgia’ from the ancient Greek words nóstos (return home) and álgos (which means pain), and the sensation indeed bears a great similarity to homesickness.

It was only in the past decades that the difference between the two became clear when researchers found out that in the case of nostalgia we do not so much long for a place from our past, but rather for a specific moment in time—and particularly for how we felt in that moment.

A stronger memory of beautiful moments

As well as the fact that the feeling of anticipatory nostalgia eventually leads to a stronger memory of the beautiful moments, experiencing the sadness of this nostalgia is not all bad. In the Middle Ages, melancholia was even viewed as something positive; it was seen as something profound, the province of writers and artists.

And in Buddhism, too, this specific feeling is met with high regard. Experiencing temporality is a great thing. ‘It is the impermanence of life that gives us perspective,’ writes American Buddhist teacher Frank Ostaseski, an end-of-life guide and founder of a Zen hospice, in his book The Five Invitations. If we are not reminded of the fact that things, including life itself, will not always last, we tend to take them for granted: ‘As we come in contact with life’s precarious nature, we also come to appreciate its preciousness. Then we don’t want to waste a minute. We want to enter our lives fully and use them in a responsible way.’

Celebrating temporality

The biggest sense of loss comes, of course, from things that will not be repeated again any time soon, maybe even ever again, like vacations and city breaks. I notice this myself, now that I have been traveling for so long and as such my life sometimes seems to be a long series of goodbyes. And although I initially thought that it wasn’t good to let my thoughts fly away during a beautiful event to a moment in the future when this lovely moment is over, I now understand its useful side. It is actually making me more mindful than ever. So let’s not grieve too much over temporality, but celebrate it as the exact thing that makes life so worthwhile.

Published on August 31, 2019, last edited July 20, 2026
Text Hedwig Wiebes