When longing becomes hate – Burnout's other blog about stuff

When longing becomes hate

10 Aug, 2026

I did some research! About the topic actually, or rather a background thingy, I was mostly looking for a word. The feeling that prompted me to write this (the human kind of prompt, not the evil one) is not very unique, I assumed it to be so and after some quick search engine rounds my suspicion is confirmed. Other people feel so too, this sense of missing something that you never had, nostalgia for a time you never experienced.

The word I found was Hiraeth, apparently a Welsh word for the longing for a time before the English came, so something that most living Welsh people have never experienced. It’s the feeling for being incomplete, having missed out in life, maybe not having been at the right time in the right place. It’s quite common actually.

People have the feeling they never meet their soul mate but it’s out there, it’s the same feeling that make you fall to cults or descend into esoteric fanatism. I am not sure if it’s a modern thing, I haven’t researched that far, but logically speaking I would assume that the feeling gets stronger as more you know. You might have a lingering sense of missing out on adventure when you are confined to an island or always lived in a small village. But if you know the world in detail from the vast sea of knowledge that are books and the pre-2022 Internet, it probably gets worse.

I got this feeling for some things I felt for real, a city I have lived once, the autumn day where I went at home. It’s a specific day actually, light rain, I took a slightly longer route, inefficient basically as I was on the wrong side of the street, stomping on a few wet leaves, feeling the cold moist rain. A fleeting moment, a short walk home from work, and yet it’s in my memory.<br>Another moment was in Budapest, that moment is more interesting, the autumn day from above was 3 years ago, its only now in the scorching summer of 2026 that I remember it suddenly so very clear. But that night in Budapest, I was sitting on that bridge, drinking cheap wine with friends in the warm breeze above the Duna and I was thinking "this is the moment I will remember".<br>Feelings are weird like that, I could have sworn that there is a word for the feeling of living through a memorable moment, but I couldn’t find it.

That memory was 2014, it starts to fray, details get hazy, I hate that that happens, but this is just how memory in humans works. What is left is feelings, the longing, the Sehnsucht to be back.

I once meet a mentally ill old men on the street, apparently, he just escaped his care home (we actually helped to get him back), he was asking for directions to a place that did not exist anymore, the streets have different names now, the place is distant, not physically actually, but by time, the home he wants to get back to is 40 years away. An insurmountable distance.

I got myself some longings for "places" that don’t exist anymore. Like the Internet of 2012, even the reddit of then. Some blogs, the gaming culture, the card game shop I used to frequent (it still exists, but not in the 2018 sense, with different people and especially not with old mtg)

And here we get to the point of all of this, there is also some sense of wonder I missed out on. Like I never played Halo 2 in its Heyday, apparently that was something. I did play Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Team Fortress 2 in their prime days, that is something I think back to, but its just normal nostalgia at this point.

And then there are other times, apparently there was a quite active hacker scene in the pre-1990 Berlin, the nascent CCC in the first days, I think I would have enjoyed being around at that time. Series like Stranger Things have started some 80ties revival crazes. A time many never consciously lived through. On a similar vein, I never really played Dungeon and Dragons, I do play other Pen and Papers with people that have, and they always tell me how flawed classical DnD is, how it’s basically bad. But I never experienced it, especially not in the olden days, and I would like to have!

And then, the intrusive thought of this post, there is an indistinct longing for something. Maybe for a sense of wonder. More of it. I noticed the other day that I am quite hopeless in the sense that there are basically no positive thoughts about the future in me, maybe small things, but overall, it looks very bleak. Humanity seems pretty finished and I cannot unthink that. There is just no hope it will get better, humans as species seem to be awfully flawed and it’s catching up to us big time.

And this is my longing, the longing for a sudden reversal for despair. The feeling of experiencing something amazing, that everything will be alright. That there is something that fixes it all, and not just in the sense of "aliens enslave us but fix climate apocalypse in the meantime" I want it all, the all-inclusive saviour package. Right wing...