ENTERTAINMENT | NOSTALGIA
Written by Thomas Giblin (he/him) | @thegreengiblin | Entertainment Editor
I have always yearned for the past. But as I've aged, that feeling has intensified. I'm now 24. With each birthday comes grief for what I've left behind. My high school years were miserable. Instead of socialising, I spent lunchtimes in the hallway of the science block. I'd watch YouTube or scroll Reddit. I dreaded waking up each morning and wallowed in my sadness, listening to Lil Peep on my commute. But I now oddly mourn and ache for this period of my life. Perhaps this is the curse of adulthood, as life is no longer as simple as it once was. Was your life better ten years ago? Nostalgia says yes. This sentimentality for the past is the defining emotion of the 21st century. Why? Because on a planet on the brink of an ecological collapse, rife with economic instability and political turmoil, the future holds little hope. Gen-Z is so anxious about the future, myself included, and nostalgia is an opiate numbing reality's pain.
Nostalgia is not a new phenomenon, with Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in 1688 coining the term. Derived from the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain or grief), Hofer describes men or women sent abroad as suffering from an "afflicted imagination." Symptoms included self-neglect, depression and suicide. Sufferers of nostalgia were consumed by a desire to return to his or her native land. Initially understood as a 'wasting disease,' millions of death certificates in the 18th century listed the cause of death as nostalgia. The first mention of nostalgia on a death certificate was in the 1720s, the last in the 1910s.
Hofer proposed that the only remedy for nostalgia was "a return to the homeland." But, in its modern form, nostalgia is a near-universal emotional experience that means a wistful longing for a different time, not a geographical location. The emotion is a contradictory phenomenon, as through rose-tinted glasses, the negative aspects of the past are ignored in favour of a manufactured appeal. Life is objectively better in the present if we can turn a blind eye to the future. Soon, our planet may fall victim to nuclear armageddon or another catastrophic pandemic, but I'd never want to go back to the "good ol' days." If you were to ask a family member or a friend about the past, "Is life better now than it was 60 years ago?" most would say "No" without any apprehension. But frame this question in a less abstract form. "Would you give up modern medical advancements to go back to the swinging sixties?" "If you were an ethnic minority and or a person of colour, would you give up all the progress made to your civil rights?" These questions point out the contradiction at the heart of nostalgia. We stroll through history, cherry-picking the things we like and ignoring what we don't.
There's a terminological distinction to be made. There's 'restorative nostalgia', a desire to return to that past, and 'reflective nostalgia', which is more critically aware. When I browse platforms like Facebook, YouTube and TikTok, the nostalgic content I consume falls into the category of 'restorative nostalgia.' I'm teary-eyed when I watch a Fortnite Season 1 edit. I long for the late nights when my friends and I would play till 3:00 am and always drop at Pleasant Park. The adverse effect on my in-person social life and physical well-being is wilfully ignored. A life without sunlight or fresh fruit wasn't healthy. But with the world around me changing so fast, the future without hope, "I'm not asking you for a week. I'm not asking you for a month. I'm not asking you for a year. Can you give me one more day?" That quote is from a trending TikTok sound accompanying thousands of videos. It's not just Fortnite Season 1 people are nostalgic for. It's anything and everything. Blockbuster, the Scholastic Book Fair, Cartoon Network, Club Penguin, Gangnam Style, One Direction, Twilight, Vine and Le Snak. Not everyone will be nostalgic for these mainstays of the 2000s and 2010s, but the internet has quantified and heightened anxiety. No one is more anxious about the future than Gen-Z, the oldest of whom are only 27.
We may be moving forward in the 21st century with literacy levels and life expectancy increasing globally, but Gen-Z reportedly has the poorest mental health of any generation. Is that due to more awareness, less stigma, or something more complex? There's no straightforward answer, but I wish there were. Whatever the extenuating circumstances are, with nostalgia and the internet, Gen-Z have found a way to inject their lives with a little bit of hope and meaning. But I’m trying to learn to be nostalgic for the present. Life is imagined from a future perspective. A future you. If I'm at a party, surrounded by those I love, I know life won't get any better, so the present is imbued with greater meaning. Hold onto these fleeting moments and live for today, knowing that what you're living through is transient. This is paradoxical, yet it works.
We should also focus instead on changing what is in our control. I don't want to breed indifference, but stoicism can be a healthy tool. It has helped me. To borrow from the Gen-Z cultural lexicon, "It is what it is. If we can appreciate the present more, whilst the future looks so bleak, at least we'll still have the present to enjoy before the world goes to shit.