why your happy childhood memories MUST be destroyed

[acalculatedname]

It's been my growing feeling that nostalgia is a form of serious mental illness. And, unfortunately, it's one that nearly everyone in the Western world seems to have "caught," myself included.

Comments

[lrig_rorrim]

"Aside from shoes, I don't care for much fashion from the 90s. But I do deeply fetishize certain other periods in "material history." Interestingly, it's usually stuff that came out when I was a young or very young child. "

It's amazing how much ambient cultural crap we absorb when we're kids. It's like the stuff sinks into our pores or something, I swear.

"I believe nostalgia is an irrational and useless evolutionary defect, one which is absolutely cancerous when suffered by a group of people en masse. It has reached epidemic levels and has choked off possible further progress in our society. We have reached a cultural lull, a virtual stop. It's all nostalgia's fault."

I don't share your cynicism in this way - but I am just fine admitting I'm a nostalgic sap. I see a lot of cultural progress - there's a groundswell of acceptance of different lifestyles, gay marriage has become actual accepted law in some places (unthinkable two decades ago, for sure), science creeps forward doing neat things all the time, and I am loving a lot of new fiction and games that are coming out (hey, those are art!).

I put it to you, sir, that you are indulging in the same kind of retro-fetishism with your cynicism that you charge with the imminent downfall of progress - this is EXACTLY the kind of thing that has been said since time immemorial, with a rather ironic lemony twist on the end. "Well, back in MY day, we weren't always looking back and idealizing the past, we were looking forward and getting stuff done."

[acalculatedname]

Hey, dude, I'm a child of the 80s, which-- looking back-- now seems like it was the beginning of the end for the US in a lot of ways. The major achievements I cite as counterexamples here are things that happened well before I was born, and I know things weren't perfect then either... am also incapable of saying definitively that things were better overall in these eras.

Packaged nostalgia as a mainstream source of profit had already become a mass industry in the 80s, if not more like the 70s (while not quite the same thing, it strikes me as so funny now re: how many rock songwriters of the mid-70s had big hits explicitly about "the good old days" of, what, like, 1968). But retrofetishism hadn't become the defining pop-cultural thing that it is now.

As for whether I'm being retro in bitching about people being too retro... that's one of those things that is impossible to prove one way or the other, I guess. It's never been "BACK IN MY DAY", though, that's for sure. :)