anemoia

you that read wrong, it’s not anemia, it’s anemoia. you read that wrong too.

Anemoia is a neologism - a new word, coined by author John Koenig in 2012. He has a project called the dictionary of obscure sorrows which aims to invent words for emotions not yet described in modern language.

Anemoia describes feeling nostalgia for a place or time you’ve never known. I think everyone has felt this to an extent, and in a truer sense, all nostalgia is felt through rose-tinted glasses, experiencing a distorted reality.

But anemoia is more explicit than that. It’s not just falsfied, repressed, or misremembered memories. It’s something you know you’ve never seen. It’s often an experience you never could have experienced. Like longing for a time period decades before you were born, or to visit a place that only exists in a book, movie, or game.

Lots of younger Americans feel this way about the 1980s. I’d argue it’s a significant contributing factor to the success of Stranger Things.

There was even that viral internet song that people claimed they knew or sounded very familiar. Ulterior Motives. It was a lost media phenomenon, no one could find the song, until someone found it in a video on an adult site…

I think recurring fantasies can become anemoia-ic. I used to fantasize about being on a deserted island. With sandy beaches and endless salty seawater, warm to the touch and inexplicably knee deep no matter how far in you go. The sun beamed but you’d never get a sunburn. It’s almost like a place between worlds, where you feel no hunger but omnipresent comfort and peace.

I’ve thought about that so many times, often to the Pink Floyd tune “Comfortably Numb”, that it’s nostalgic for me.

Do you have such a place in your mind?