Can you be nostalgic for something that never happened to you?

A few weeks ago I was at a dinner, sitting next to someone I’d just met. Small talk, work questions, the usual “so what do you do” that every Italian dinner table produces at some point between the antipasto and the second glass of wine.

I told him I make music. He asked what kind. And I said, like I always do, “80s inspired”. He nodded immediately. That little nod of recognition, something he already understood. Except (and this stuck with me for days) he can’t have been older than 25. So if my calculations are correct, he wasn’t born yet in the 80s. He has no memory of that decade. Niente.

So what exactly did he understand, if he has nothing to remember it by?

I’ve been thinking about this for days, mostly while driving in Milan traffic, which is where I do my best and worst thinking. And I think there are actually two completely different things happening when someone hears “80s inspired” or hears one of my tracks and feels that spark of nostalgia.

The first one is simple. If you actually lived through those years, a certain chord progression or a certain sound can take you straight back to something real. That’s nostalgia in its proper sense: you lived it, you lost it, now you miss it.

The second one is stranger, and it’s the one my dinner companion was experiencing without knowing it. He has no memory to point to. What he has is recognition of a “form”: warm pads, long reverb… and all of those “80s” things.

And here’s the part that didn’t give me sleep at night: play the exact same track to two people in the exact same room, and you can trigger two completely different things, at the same time. One of them is missing an actual summer. The other is missing a summer that only exists in his head, assembled from films he watched, VHS or photos from someone else’s family album, a general cultural idea of what “back then” was supposed to feel like. Same notes. Two completely different results, but somehow similar feelings.

This raises the obvious question: why would anyone feel nostalgic for a time they never lived in the first place?

I think it comes down to a few things stacking on top of each other. First, exposure isn’t the same as experience, but it leaves a residue anyway: you grow up surrounded by the aesthetic of an era through movies, old photographs, secondhand stories, even fashion that keeps getting recycled, and at some point you absorb the shape of it without ever living the substance. Second, there’s something comforting about a decade that’s already finished. It has a beginning, an end, a soundtrack, a closed story, which is a lot more reassuring than the mess we’re currently living through. And third, I think our brain just wants somewhere warm to go back to, and if there’s no real memory available, it’ll happily settle for a convincing one.

Memory itself works a bit like a filter. It cuts the boring parts, the problems, the bills, the argument you had right before the sunset and keeps only the emotional envelope. The warmth, without the dust. So when a track sounds nostalgic, it’s not really recreating the 80s. It’s recreating the process by which we remember anything at all. Which is probably why it works just as well on people who have nothing real to filter in the first place.

This is the part I keep coming back to, and it’s the real reason I wanted to write this down. What that twenty-something at dinner felt wasn’t a memory passed down to him by anyone. There was no Uncle Tony telling him stories. He inherited the feeling of nostalgia, missing and longing included without inheriting anything to be nostalgic about. To put it a bit crudely: it’s like feeling mourned without knowing the deceased.

Normally, nostalgia takes time. You live something, you lose it and then comes the longing. Synthwave skips the whole sequence. It manufactures the longing before there was ever anything to lose. You’re not missing what you had. You’re missing what you never had in the first place, and what maybe never existed the way you’re missing it.

Anyway. The guy at dinner asked me what track he should start with. I told him to put on “Mediterraneo” and not ask questions. He’ll either feel something real, or he’ll feel something that only pretends to be real… and honestly, at this point, I’m not sure I could tell you which one is which anymore.

About Mediterraneo: “This song is such a vibe. It felt nostalgic the first time I heard it. The saxophone is sublime.” – toasterovenly

And what do you think of this “artificial” nostalgia?

When I was 13, my mom played Born to Die by Lana Del Rey in the car, and I was instantly obsessed. I took the CD and that was the beginning of my Lana Del Rey era. 🍒
10 years later, her music is still the soundtrack of my life and a #glimmer — through friendships, #memories , experiences, and heartbreaks. And I’m still sitting in the car with my mom, listening to her songs.✨️

Fun fact: I once met someone who kissed Lana Del Rey. Still my Roman Empire. 💋

#GlimmersToGo

so close, and yet so

so close, and yet so 
far – sometimes, home is on the 
other side of the 

planet and then again, just 
underneath our eyelids, waiting 
.
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The Dictionary of a Life

Words have always fascinated me.

Some arrive unexpectedly in a book, a conversation, or an email. Others have travelled with me for years, quietly gathering meaning through experience. A dictionary tells us what words mean. Life teaches us what they come to mean.

This series is not about definitions. It is about memories.

Each entry begins with a single word and follows wherever that word leads. Sometimes it may open the door to a family story. Sometimes it may recall a place I have visited, a book I have read, a friendship I cherish, or a lesson learned along the way.

These are not comprehensive histories or scholarly reflections. They are personal recollections. Moments, impressions, and experiences that have shaped my life, Taken together, they form a different kind of dictionary: one built not from language alone, but from memory.

Welcome to a new series on Clanmother: The Dictionary of a Life.

Rebecca