Men's Quiet Nostalgia

Old games, old friends, old movies; some memories never fade.

There’s a particular kind of nostalgia many men carry that rarely gets discussed openly. It hides itself in old video games kept in their original boxes, songs from high school still played on long drives or late nights in the basement, baseball gloves in garage bins, movie quotes repeated for decades…even the sudden silence when someone mentions the town they grew up in or the girl they dated. Men are often stereotyped as emotionally distant, and there’s validity there, but let’s not pretend men are emotionless at all. They are deeply sentimental. They’ve simply learned to bury sentiment beneath more tangible, more acceptable vehicles. (For now on, I’ll write myself into the text and use more “we” or “I” instead of “they”—because I’m abundantly nostalgic).

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus spends ten long years trying to return home after the Trojan War, driven largely by longing for Ithaca and the people waiting for him there. That longing—what we would now call nostalgia—keeps him moving forward through shipwrecks, loss, and near-death encounters. Even when offered comfort, love, and immortality by the nymph Calypso, Odysseus ultimately chooses the difficult journey home instead. His desire to return was justly rooted in loyalty: a deep love for his family and his homeland and the life that shaped him.¹

Psychologists have increasingly argued that nostalgia isn’t merely escapism, but an important emotional regulation tool. Research from psychologists like Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut has shown nostalgia can increase feelings of meaning, belonging, and continuity in life. In other words, nostalgia helps people remember who they are.² For many men—especially those raised in cultures that discouraged emotional openness—memory becomes one of the safest available languages for emotion. It feels easier to say, “Remember that old album?” than, “I miss who I was back then.” That runs deep for me. I have an ability to throw a song on (I’d bet it’s hundreds if not close to a thousand songs) and can tell you exactly who I was with, what year (and sometimes month) it was, what other big things were going on in my life, how it made me feel—the first time I heard it. Some favorites:

• “London Thunder” by Foals: 2015, first week of classes my senior year at Virginia Tech, I was sitting in my roommate’s desk chair while he was picking out a hat—his laptop speakers playing the recently-released What Went Down album. I can recall the details of what I was wearing down to the side comments we were making about dinner plans that night (tacos) as we enjoyed the song.

• “Stillness of Heart” by Lenny Kravitz: October 2013, sitting alone in my dorm room eating Cheetos Cheddar Jalapeño with Arizona sweet tea. All I saw in my mind’s eye when I heard it was the sights and sounds of Times Square in the early 2000’s (or what I imagined it might be in those days) so on a complete whim and total misuse of my summer job savings, I bought a plane ticket to NYC—and yes, I went there the next week, standing in Times Square with my headphones in, Kravitz on repeat, for an hour. And then I caught a plane back to school.

• “Satellite” by Guster. Junior year of high school, chemistry class—my friend Ryan shared his earbuds with me to show me what he’d been listening to. Midway through Guster’s hit I was downloading it on my laptop.

You get the point.

I’m fascinated by how physical nostalgia can be for men. Women are often culturally permitted to process emotion verbally and relationally. Men, however, are frequently socialized toward attachment through activity and shared experience. Researchers studying male friendship patterns have found that many men connect shoulder-to-shoulder rather than face-to-face. They bond while doing something together: fishing, gaming, driving, watching sports, building things. In ministry, we see this often. Men’s conferences must include your stereotypical male activity—axe throwing is all the rage—whereas women’s conferences function great around tables where dialogue is the activity. And for us, years later, the memory of the activity becomes emotionally charged because it secretly carries the weight of the relationship itself.

That may explain why certain places hit men with almost spiritual force. Empty basketball courts at dusk. Old diners. Gas stations in small towns—there’s a parking lot in Galax, Virginia that just crushes me. The aisle of a video rental store that no longer exists: I reminisce far more than I should about the second aisle to the left in my hometown Hollywood Video where I would go religiously in fourth grade to rent Kingdom Hearts for my PS2 with my allowance money.

Those places can become emotional containers. Psychologists refer to this partly through the concept of autobiographical memory—the way physical environments become tied to identity formation and emotional milestones. A parking lot is never just a parking lot once a meaningful season of life happened there. I know I’m not the only man who’s driven to parking lots, neighborhoods, side streets—as an attempt to reclaim something—anything—from “the good old days”.

I think this is also why so many men revisit the same media repeatedly. The same albums. The same fantasy novels. The same war films. The same childhood games. I watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy (extended edition; I don’t make the rules) every single year, in the fall because that’s the best time to watch them (again, I don’t make the rules). My brothers and I watch Elf the week before Christmas every single year, even now when marriage and vocation have pulled our availabilities shockingly slim: we still make every effort to watch Will Ferrell in tights. Every year as summer winds down I read “Anthem” by Ayn Rand. Much of it bores me now, admittedly, but it’s not about the content anymore.

Studies on nostalgic media consumption suggest people often return to familiar stories during periods of stress, transition, or instability because familiarity creates emotional grounding. Revisiting old stories becomes less about entertainment and more about orientation. It reminds people of earlier versions of themselves that still feel alive somewhere underneath adulthood.

And adulthood does have a way of covering people up. Especially men. Performance slowly replaces wonder. Utility replaces imagination. Many men spend years becoming providers, managers, employees, husbands, fathers, leaders—important things, beautiful things even—but somewhere underneath those responsibilities remains the boy who stayed outside until the streetlights came on. I always joke that we’ve tragically replaced hunting sabretooth cats for Excel spreadsheets; men weren’t built for this. Nostalgia can feel painful because it reconnects men not only to memories, but to unguarded versions of themselves they no longer know how to access consistently. Or, if we do, it’s not something we like to broadcast.

There’s an interesting psychological tension here: nostalgia is often strongest during periods of uncertainty. Studies published in journals like Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin have found that people become more nostalgic when experiencing loneliness, life transitions, or existential anxiety³. That means the modern world may actually be intensifying nostalgia in men. And that makes sense, because we live in an era where communities are weaker and male friendships grow thinner quicker; institutions are distrusted and identity is increasingly unstable. Many men instinctively reach backward searching for emotional solidity. No blame in that.

Sometimes this gets misunderstood as immaturity. A grown man cares too much about old baseball cards, old bands, old movies, old stories. But I suspect what appears childish is often protective. It is for me at least. Nostalgia gives coherence to life. It tells a person their story mattered, and it still might. Researchers have even found that nostalgia can counter feelings of meaninglessness and depression by reinforcing a sense of personal continuity across time. The old song is never just an old song. It’s proof your life has been real and connected and human.

What many men may secretly need is permission to acknowledge sentimentality without embarrassment. Not every emotional life needs to emerge through dramatic vulnerability or public confession—I’m not advocating for that. Sometimes emotion emerges through restoration projects, playlists, old photographs, road trips back home, or telling the same stories again and again and again every time the old friend comes back to town. One of my all-time best friends moved away a decade ago—and without fail, every time we see each other over the holidays, we recount the time we skipped our calculus class and scheduled doctors’ appointments solely to get absent notes to give ourselves more time to take the test we dreaded (we still failed).

Sentimentality isn’t a weakness. In many ways, it’s evidence that a person has loved their life, at least portions of it, deeply enough to miss parts of it.

And maybe that’s the quiet truth beneath all this: men are often far more sentimental than they portray. Beneath the humor, sarcasm, hobbies, and rituals are memories they carry with astonishing tenderness:

They (I) remember the friend who moved away in seventh grade and the sketch of the hermit crab they (I) sent in the mail to them. I remember the first drive alone at night, uneventful as far as traffic went but spent driving through various neighborhoods as I rehearsed my presentation for Spanish II that I needed to ace the next day. I remember the smell of my grandparents’ house—not because it was necessarily pleasant (although it was)—but because to be in that house meant summer break had arrived, my grandparents (at least one) were alive, fresh-picked berries were on the dessert menu, the afternoons were spent traipsing the nearby forest and the most comfortable bed I’ve ever slept in awaited me each evening. We return to the album not only because it’s a constant hit from beginning to end, but because it got us through the heartbreak. I keep my Virginia Tech football game tickets, regardless of the outcome, because it’s evidence of time spent with my father, a tradition I now plan to share with my son, as soon as he’s ready.

Men may not always speak the language of emotion fluently, but nostalgia has a way of translating for us.

Thanks for letting me muse.

1. Wilson E. (2020). The Odyssey. North Critical Editions.

2. Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, “The Psychological, Social, and Societal Relevance of Nostalgia”, Current Opinion in Psychology, Volume 52, 2023.

3. Ibid.