austonos
noun
A desire to maintain continuity for a prior self who no longer exists.
A long time ago, I was visiting home from college and I fired up my old Super Nintendo. I found an in-progress save file for Earthbound, maybe halfway through the game, that I hadn’t touched in a couple of years. I opened it up and poked around to see where I was and what I was doing, but a feeling of austonos stopped me from playing further or overwriting the save. It was as if I thought High School Dan was somehow going to come back to finish his game and would be upset to find it disturbed.