More precisely, solastalgia is taken from the Latin word solacium, meaning comfort, and the Greek root -algia, referring to grief, pain, or suffering. It is the existential distress one experiences when they encounter environmental changes. Particularly, it's the feeling some people get when they miss what it felt like to celebrate the holidays before.
The feeling of solastalgia is typically associated with climate change, and how the changing weather patterns affect the way people have grown to live during the winter season.
Many people have ingrained traditions or lifestyles connected to winter and the holidays, but that has slowly changed due to the rising temperature, and extreme shifts in the weather.
Cold places, like Minnesota, are gradually becoming less cold and experiencing less snow, and there are even instances when warm places, like Texas or California, have started to experience cold snaps and snow storms.
Because of these changes in the weather, people experience disruptions in their coping mechanisms for the winter months, and that's when solastalgia occurs. There's a disorientation going on in our minds when things aren't the way we remember them, the way we're used to live.
Not only this, but climate change has also affected certain cultural practices such as the indigenous hunters of Alaska who had a subsistence form of life by catching marine mammals. With the disappearance of sea ice, this has slowly vanished.
Despite the feeling of solastalgia becoming more pronounced as the years go by, people have been finding ways to adapt to the new circumstances. We may have this longing for the winters of old, but in time, we will develop newer coping mechanisms for the changing times.
(Image credit: Colin Lloyd/Unsplash)