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11/07/26 Nostalgia

A Xennial talking about nostalgia on the internet? Gosh, what next!
I just want to brain dump a couple of little thoughts I've had about this topic. The first is why I think it's so widespread these days, especially in people around my age. There are a number of theories about this floating around, and there's a lot to agree with in them. Like so many things, I'm sure it's a combination of factors. But my hypothesis is pretty simple - things suck right now, plain and simple. Giant evil corporations and billionaires are enshittifying everything, including our very lives. The planet is burning, nobody seems to care, and it feels like things are just getting worse with no end in sight.
The 90s and 00s, and to a lesser extent the 80s, are kind of the last time when it felt like there was a chance that things were getting better (whether this was true or not), and all of media and pop culture had not yet been totally hollowed out and turned into a giant festering slop bucket. The fact that it aligns with the supposed 20-30 year nostalgia cycle is partly coincidence, but not insignificant. For people my age, these were our formative years. We don't really remember the existential malaise of the cold war, or the horrors and feelings of doom around vietnam or the second world war. It just feels like things were good when we were young, and some time in the last 10 to 15 years they just got shitty. Because in a lot of ways that is exactly the case.

So I guess what I'm saying is that in a way nostalgia is so popular right now because it's just a kind of copium. In a way that's true, but to take that as a bad thing is wrong in the same way that taking Marx's 'opium for the people' quote as bad is wrong. When Marx said that about religion he did not mean that it a cynical construct created to suppress and sedate the people, but that it is a meaningful institution that can give comfort, hope and relief to people in an otherwise dystopian hopeless world. And as grandiose as it sounds, it's a little bit how I think about nostalgia too. One thing you will often hear, especially from older generations, is that nostalgia is frivilous, a waste of time, unhealthy and maybe even dangerous. OK Boomer, you just go back to doomscrolling AI slop for 12 hours while I engage in my legitimate hobby.
Even aside from the fact that so much of what passes for modern pursuits is simple brainrot, I really don't see why nostalgic interests can't be considered a serious or legitimate hobby. There is so much depth and richness in the past - the world in the past was still a complete world, not a cardboard cutout. There is so much to explore, learn and feel there. I often think to myself that just because the 90s stopped doesn't mean I was done with them. I could watch 90s movies, listen to 90s music, play 90s games and read 90s books all day every day and never get to the end of them. And I'm giving it a red hot go.
The worst part of the hobby is the incessant longing - the desire to step in to a time machine and actually live it all around me, but never being able to do that. That's another criticism I hear of nostalgia - the past is the past. It's gone. We can never go back there. You're wasting your time with it. But for some reason I don't hear the same criticism made of people whose hobby is history. Apparently having actually lived through a time period arbitrarily makes it not a legitimate target of interest.