The feeling of missing a future that has not happened yet. It is the opposite of nostalgia, which means missing the past.

The word has appeared in several places, so it is safer not to name one single inventor. Recent marketing research used forestalgia to describe a consumer’s yearning for an idealized future.

Suggested source: Ruiying Cai and collaborators, “When the Future Feels Closer than the Past: An Experimental Research of Nostalgia versus Forestalgia in Destination Ads” (2023).