solastalgia means A form of homesickness experienced when one has not moved, but one's environment has changed. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 91 out of 100.
Why this word is great
SOLASTALGIA — [Noun] A form of emotional distress or homesickness experienced when one's familiar home environment is negatively transformed or degraded. Coined in 2005 by Glenn Albrecht from Latin sōlācium ("solace, comfort") + New Latin -algia ("pain"), from Greek algos ("pain"). Unlike "nostalgia"—a bittersweet longing for a past place from which one is physically removed—or "ecological grief"—a broader sorrow for abstract planetary loss—solastalgia is the acute, grounded anguish of witnessing your own landscape erode while you still stand upon it. It is the skeletal silhouette of a childhood forest consumed by wildfire, the metallic taste of fear upon finding your well water contaminated, and the profound silence where a chorus of frogs once thrummed—the profound disquiet of being homesick for a home that still, technically, holds you.
noun
- A form of homesickness experienced when one has not moved, but one's environment has changed.“There are many people writing and talking about extinction now, and about solastalgia, the psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change. Artists, musicians, dancers, and screenwriters are wringing profound solastalgia from the recesses of our collective subconscious and spinning its trajectory out into the light where we can get a better sense of it.”