Consider the long game. It is a small thing, and small things are where habits live. What looks like nostalgia from the outside is usually something simpler from the inside: tiredness, a deadline, a wish not to look foolish. The evidence here is thinner than the confident commentary suggests, and the honest position is a shrug with a direction of travel. Ask most people why they did what they did and they will give you a reason; ask them again a week later and the reason will have quietly changed.
Where the model breaks
The evidence here is thinner than the confident commentary suggests, and the honest position is a shrug with a direction of travel. It is tempting to call this irrational. It is more useful to ask what it is for. Economists have spent decades modelling nostalgia as a quantity. It behaves more like a weather system. If you want to see nostalgia at work, watch a queue form where there is no reason for one.
