We've Been Here Before

These days I've found myself humming Harry Styles's "Sign of the Times," trying to figure out where we're going now. The final lines of this song are: "Will we ever learn? We've been here before. It's just what we know." Somehow these lines remind me of Hakushu Kitahara's "Kono Michi" (This Street), but this Japanese nursery rhyme is about nostalgia, a sentimental longing for the past. However, Styles's statement with this song can be described as "solastalgia," which could be defined as a variation of nostalgia toward the present and future. Styles's solastalgia is not only a pessimistic feeling, though. Repeatedly singing "just stop your crying," he's persuading us that even such sentimentality is nothing but "a sign of the times."