Too much nostalgia
Nostalgia (noun)
nos·tal·gia | \ nä-ˈstal-jə , nə- also nȯ-, nō-; nə-ˈstäl- \
1: the state of being homesick
2: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition
Didn’t it all go so quickly, the 80s? That’s my excuse anyway.
I just didn’t have time to enjoy it properly the first-time round. And importantly, I didn’t have the money.
Now I can buy all of it. Or I could if I wanted.
The A-ha records I was too shy to buy at the time, the rara skirt I only wore once because I grew out of it so quickly, the SodaStream my parents refused to install.
Just to be clear though – I’m not one of those people who dresses up in shoulder pads, sends messages by fax and plays Nintendo like it’s 1989.
I’ve read about people who do that – particularly those who are obsessed with wartime Britain and willingly eat spam, give their children toys from the 40s (fun) and do their washing with a mangle.
Then entertain the troops at weekends.
Is this healthy?
It’s a way of escaping the harsh realities of life, and of course this year we’d be forgiven for a bit of that.
May be it’s a way of adding friction to a sometimes eerily frictionless life. Hipsters and middle class people just love to suffer. This is the only way to explain the trend for growing your own veg, learning calligraphy and listening to vinyl.
It’s probably also a reaction against all this tech – getting your milk delivered by a milkman then being able to tweet about perhaps redresses the balance.
But it’s also a way of not growing up and I’d go so far as to say it’s more typical of our generation than any other, to look back so much. May be because we have so much stuff to look back on.
So what’s the problem? Well looking back, avoiding realities, spending all our money on these, ultimately useless things isn’t going to get us thinking about our future…
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