Ah, nostalgia — a beautiful lie among many. No part of your life is exempt from the longing; it doesn’t just stop at the end of childhood. I’m fully aware of the issues I had up through my last full year of college, and yet there’s something in me that looks back on that time with fondness.
Why is that?
For a long time, I’ve had a complicated relationship with the past, and nowhere has that been more apparent than in how the concept of nostalgia has manifested during this chapter of my life.
On paper, nostalgia sounds simple: a longing for a past better than your current situation. But it takes a bigger form in your head — like the past transforms from a linear path into a circle that surrounds your present, and everything you feel is a lesser version of what you once felt. I understand needing to see the past like this, but it’s the way that need to see can grow and mutate when unsupervised that’s led me to such a conflicted state over it.
I highly doubt there has been a moment in time where things didn’t suck somewhere, for someone, to some extent, so who are you to mine endorphins from those places? Well, the way I see it, it’s always about those singular times — the images that play in your head like scenes.
This one game, this one level, on this morning; this one movie, on this one night, tasting this one brand of candy; this one play date, this one night, over this one board game we drew out on a notebook and played with eraser tips.
There were times that things were pure, and my child mind saw that purity and amplified it to an extent that my adult mind knows it will never find floating out there in a world it knows too much about. It does feel weird to look at my past as perfect because I know the exact same interplay of good and bad I feel now existed in the background of those moments.
However, this perspective on nostalgia is just a component of how I see nostalgia being used most often nowadays: as something to monetize, a void of need to be filled by media and corporations instead of, I don’t know … time and reflection?
It’s like there’s a mantra that dominates the media nowadays: reboot, remake, reunion, refresh, recycle and repeat. You’ve probably already heard of plenty of examples. I can’t say there’s zero room for artistic merit in their premises, but over enough time, all of the “X character said Y swear word and we’re totally here for it” headlines start feeling like an equation, built in an executive room to control the public’s emotions.
Apparently, nostalgia now functions less as a fully personalized sensation and more as a never-ending stream of pattern recognition — of “They said/did/showed the thing!” moments. To this day, I’m not fully comfortable with the definition of nostalgia I’ve made for myself, but it surely can’t be worse than the definition being forced onto me.
The past is a lot of things, and “easy to sum up” isn’t one of them, but in the attempt, I believe something worth getting out of it all rises up. I’ve found something. I hope you have.
