Q

While running today, Dua Lipa’s ‘Future Nostalgia’ popped up on my Spotify. The term resonated, wrapped itself over a yet unnamed entity in my web of unarticulated emotions.

Now I have never listened to, nor heard of, Future Nostalgia. Dua (or is it Lipa?) is likely referencing an entirely different concept. That is besides the point.

The point, here, is that it got me wondering what exactly has this phrase tapped into, in me? It’s like sticking a hand blind into a carton of foam, grappling for that one emotion that feels right.

Future Nostalgia. I guess you can think of it as a yearning for things yet to come, yet to have been possessed. But that would be akin to anticipation; anticipation hinting at a certain tension, a certain anxiety and uncertainty. It is something you have to work for, that may at any moment cease to be a future.

Nostalgia implies this event is a surety. Predetermined. Sans the thrill of a what-if or how?

But the certainty may not be realized. It is a fondness, a remembrance, a phantom future that is as sure as it holds in our fantasies and younger hopes. An I-could-have-been. Not regret, but a Gaussian wave of infinite possibilities of what could have been.

You think of them with a particular affection, affection for that hope you have had or the self you would have been, then you let it pass, knowing you will always have it. It is always there, always in you, always before and after you. Nostalgia. Future nostalgia,