How Does Solastalgia Explain My Desire to Rewatch Gilmore Girls Every Fall?
Eternal autumn, smelling snow, and climate anxiety
Did you know there is a digital archive of every flannel shirt Luke Danes wore on Gilmore Girls? There is. With the sweeping fall foliage of the opening credits and the countless town festivals, the now-classic television show creates perfect fall vibes. Every autumn, Gilmore Girls fans start a rewatch to bring the cozy atmosphere of Stars Hollow into their autumn festivities.
Gilmore Girls originally aired from 200-2007, a time during which I graduated from high school and started college. For a long time, one of the primary activities I did with my best friend was to have “Gilmore nights” where we met at my house or hers and ate ghastly amounts of junk and watched Gilmore Girls. I remember watching the controversial final two seasons with my college roommate as they aired and wanting to throw things at the TV. Recently, I started gradually rewatching the show and the series does not make me feel nostalgic for that time in my life, per se, but it does inspire intense coziness. Before we knew about hygge, we knew about Rory Gilmore’s mumu.
In a changing climate, however, it feels like summer lasts longer, encroaching on autumn’s turf. I long for sweater weather when it is still in the 80s outside.
What is Solastalgia?
Changes in our environment, such as the disruption of typical autumn patterns, can cause feelings of distress, anxiety, or nostalgia. In 2005, Australian psychologist Glen Albrecht coined the term “solastalgia” to describe the complex emotions tied to experiencing negative environmental change. He was specifically interested in how environmental changes disrupt experiences of the places we think of as home:
"As opposed to nostalgia--the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home--solastalgia is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment." (Albrecht et al).
Writing about Albrecht’s work for The Atlantic, Madeline Ostrander further explains:
"In moments of collective distress, people have tried to name the pain that comes from the disruption of home: a complex set of feelings that includes longing, love, grief, existential angst, and even a lurking sense of dread. Loss of home can evoke the pain of dispossession, profound cultural and personal disorientation, and righteous anger, all of which can haunt a society for generations."
A 2020 survey by the American Psychological Association found that more than two-thirds of American adults reported feeling anxiety about the environment. Often, solastagia and this climate anxiety are referenced in the same breath, but the experiences are different in tone.
I do feel anxious about the climate and what the future of life on this planet looks like. Solastalgia is different from this anxiety in its connections to both the specificity of home and the particular loneliness of nostalgia.
Albrecht created the term solastalgia from the Latin solacium which means comfort, and desolare, to leave alone. He meant for the word to capture the feeling of losing the comfort of home as our homes change around us.
Whereas climate anxiety perhaps focuses more on fear for the future, solastalgia validates the feelings of loss we may experience as the environment changes.
I grew up in the Midwest, an area that used to be a deciduous forest. One of the best science projects of my youth was creating a leaf scrapbook and learning how to identify a tree by its fallen leaves. Naturally, we turned our scrapbook in during October. Hayrides. Apple picking. Giant mazes in cornfields. Jackets, scarves, and wind-nipped fingers and noses. These are the memories that characterize home—and autumn—to me.
Climate models predict that by 2100, the changing color of leaves in autumn will be delayed by an average of 13 days and the colors will be muted when they do change.
Stars Hollow and Solastalgia
Gilmore Girls captures so well the atmosphere of these autumn memories that I feel solastalgia for and that I fear I will not be able to share with my own daughter in the years and decades to come.
Anticipating the show's 20th anniversary, Lauren O'Neill at The Guardian wrote about how the focus on little minutia “dinners at Lorelai’s hoity-toity family home, town meetings and idiosyncratic conversations where Rosemary’s Baby and Juicy Couture get equal weighting” create a levity to the series that allows the heavy emotional moments and the stories about mother-daughter bonds to really hit home when they arrive.
She argues that people return to the show because of how it provides both comfort and silliness:
"From the jaunty message of companionship in its theme tune (Carole King’s Where You Lead) to a central bond that pivots on simple axes of love, loyalty and filter coffee, when I think about Gilmore Girls, I think about being kept company when I felt most alone. Talk about a comfort blanket.”
I think the coziness of the series is essential to that dynamic, especially for those, like me, who associate autumn so strongly with home.
I would further argue that these vivid details of the show help capture the many little joys of seasonal changes. Rory’s pilgrim costume. Lorelai’s sweaters. The decorations at Doose’s market. The rich texture of the sets and wardrobes on Gilmore Girls captures the essence of autumn. When I feel that the season is slipping away, I can travel to Stars Hollow for a fix. This double-whammy of nostalgia and solastalgia easily explains why I get the urge to watch the show as autumn approaches. And I am not alone in that.
Finally, I could not write about climate change and Gilmore Girls without mentioning Lorelai Gilmore’s assertion that she can “smell snow.” Some of the series’ best episodes coincide with either the first snowfall (Lorelai’s magical first date with Max in "Love and War and Snow" ) or a giant snowfall (“The Bracebridge Dinner”).
I mean:
Last winter, at a point when Central Park had gone 650 days without snow, Anna North wrote for Vox about her five-year-old son's fleeting memories of playing in the snow, as New York City's annual snowfall is decreasing, as it is across the Northeast.
"Some experts believe that nostalgia for a vanishing winter can be harnessed to fight climate change, reaching people who haven’t yet been personally affected by the crisis in more immediate ways."
I hope these scientists are right, that the love of the seasons and home environments can drive people to take action. Increasingly, winter rains are replacing snow on the East Coast, generating feelings of solastalgia over memories of sledding, snowmen, and white Christmases, similar to how I feel about the crisp, cozy autumns of my childhood.
So, is it any wonder, that on September 1st, Gilmore season begins?
