Meaning of nostalgic / nostalgia

Can you please translate it in simple english?

“You realize you’re nostalgic for an era you weren’t even born in?”

Thanks.

This word [b]nostalgia /b describes the feelings of sadness and pleasure when you look back to a happy time in the past. In the sentence you quote nostalgic (adjective) for an era you weren’t born in means having these feelings about a time before you were born - almost in the sense of wishing those times would come back.

This is totally my case. While I’m happy enough in the present, I have a kind of longing for the 20’s to 40’s period. The music (old crooners, jazz, swing…), the clothes, the cars, etc. of those years fascinate me. Every time I read a story or watch a film set in those times, I feel nostalgic. Even period postcards and adverts will trigger such (strange, but nice) feelings.

How about you? Would you have liked to have lived in another era?

Some of my friends and I are completely perplexed about why so many American baby-boomers are nostalgic for the 1960s and 1970s. Many people are still paying for the damage the screwy ideas of that era did to people’s lives. We just remember the 1970s as a bad time.

I wouldn’t care to have lived in another era. I’d just like to go back and snoop around in one for a couple of weeks. It would be something like foreign travel.

Nothing could be more exciting than the era we’re living in now, where technology improves so quickly that if you blink and open your eyes, you’ll feel like you’ve been asleep for five years. In about five more years they’re going to have cancer treatments that attack only the cancer cells and not your healthy cells. They’ll kill the cancer cells anywhere in your body without making you sick the way chemotherapy does. What could be cooler than that! And it’s just one example!

It must be because we tend to idealize what we don’t know or have and often don’t fully appreciate what we have. Maybe we need perspective or can value things more if we look at them with hindsight. It’s only human nature, I guess.

What makes you say that? I remember the 70s as a happy time.

Thank God for that! Hearing this makes you think that perhaps all is not lost in the eternal battle between good and evil!