nostalgia-induced paralysis, willful regression, things of that nature

reflections on living all of the past 30 years at once during every single moment of every single day

if everything in the 20th century revolved around sex, the 21st century is similarly infatuated with nostalgia. it’s nothing new to look back fondly on the past, but we’re living through a moment when nostalgia, more than anything else, is being relied upon to sell us products and to shape our culture, to provide boundless pleasure as it inspires us to fold in on ourselves rather than continue to grow. if we’re not careful, nostalgia can be an obsession, an addiction that derails our lives or otherwise lead to personal regression. citizen kane could never define this post-buzzfeed era when the film’s once-profound message—that every capitalist is fueled not by the prospect of power but instead by whatever object they received for christmas when they were six—is now widely understood to be a baseline truth.

most millennials grew up with nostalgia weaponized against us via older generations’ uphill-both-ways crankiness. boomers romanticized a difficult time before the inventions of certain technologies which, on the surface at least, make our lives considerably easier. but this feels quaint in the face of the corporate exploitation of our own nostalgia that this same generation has helped carry out with this same technology that’s shaped nostalgia into an ever-renewable economic force that leans on the recollection of simpler times rather than any sense of quality to upsell us on just about everything that’s currently fashionable (i.e. being recycled from our childhood, e.g. jeans quite literally ripped to shreds) as it taps into that same unscratchable itch which gen Xers have long reveled in, and which more restrictively shackles all of us born afterwards.

i don’t mean to insinuate that boomers don’t also suffer nostalgia-as-affliction, given the specific and often-TMI recollections they tend to leave in the comments sections of youtube trailers for obscure ’70s movies. but for them it seems like nostalgia induces some sort of pleasant, temporary brain fog, whereas we—as the first fully-online generation—are subjected to nostalgia so relentlessly that it feels like we’re caught in the middle of a messy cartesian divorce where the brain is constantly being rerouted to places where the body can’t follow. our masochism in pursuing nostalgia—a supernatural force that can’t be sated by our doting attention—borders on the religious. in the same way my parents gently try to whisk their children back to the church, my siblings and i have gently tried to whisk them back to their childhoods with the christmas gifts we buy them, which they never seem to connect to in the emotional way we expect them to.

i started noticing my own regression in 2020, during the early days of quarantine, as i began revisiting all the music i listened to in high school, streaming play-throughs of the video games i loved from that period of my life, and even reviving a dice-based fantasy NBA franchise i devised as a kid spanning the 1990s and early-’00s. but each of these activities felt unexpectedly empty after a while and often led me to the same dead end, the same feelings of remorse that i’d wasted my time on something so trivial. i didn’t want to play the video games i loved when i was a teenager so much as the thought of them made me want to be a teenager again. franz ferdinand’s self-tilted holds up ok, but it can’t prevent me from waking up every morning to learn the worst thing i’ve ever known about the present or immediate future of my country.

there are two primary types of nostalgia traps i’ve found myself getting stuck in: one physical, the other digital. i fall into the physical trap every time i extend a trip to my hometown beyond a few days. without fail, a certain sickness sets in after the initial rush of being home that isn’t dissimilar to the feeling that comes with an overindulgence in sugar. in the same way i can’t really eat more than a handful of skittles anymore, no matter how many are left in the bag, the pleasures of re-connecting with friends and driving around the frequently-unrecognizable city i grew up in always seem to have a definite drop-off point that lands sooner than i anticipate. there are only so many memories that can be dredged up and shared or experienced privately before i’m back to living in the present, inconveniently removed physically from the life i’ve built for myself.

more dangerous still is the digital realm, which includes everything from nostalgia-bait social media channels, to the open-world video games i grew up with, to the possibility of digging up any sort of visual-media time capsule suddenly made accessible to me again after 20 years via the public cultural archive that is youtube. as the former category proves, all it takes is the sudden recollection of a discontinued product sold two decades ago to make you begin spiraling, while any video game with no clear end point invites you to kill more time within it than you have to offer, like standing in a hot shower in a cold apartment before work. with regard to rediscovering any of the VHS featurettes i had as a kid, i think i saw the TV glow really nailed the reality of what that looks like as an adult when you find it uploaded to some mutual nostalgia case’s channel. call it the pink opaque effect.

one of the biggest impetuses for writing this piece was my inheritance of the family gamecube, the gaming system i spent the most time with in high school and the one from my youth that i’ve gone the longest period without playing (my last save files for most of these games appear to be from 2009). i was nearly salivating once i had the system set up back in january, but instead of astral-projecting to the late 2000s—or even enduring the pain of realizing my maturity when the load screen produced nothing in the way of dopamine—i instead had to initiate a financially demanding, months-long process of having the broken system restored. which, metaphorically, feels a little on-the-nose when we’re comparing a rose-tinted childhood with the harsh realities of adulthood.

(at the time of writing this, my gamecube was laid away at a repair shop, and i feared the worst: that it was unfixable and would need to be shelved alongside long-dead laptops and ziplocks full of flip phones and early-model ipods in various states of disrepair, all scuffed, scratched, and dusty. i’ve come to notice that the techno-dystopian imagery of the matrix looks more and more like my reality as my apartment fills with these fossils of what i can still recall feeling like the future when these products were new and in perfect working order, all kept around in the off-chance that i can once again get them running and therefore enter the various temporary matrices they promise.)

worse still among digital spaces is our own social media accounts, which have somehow aged enough that they hold images and text posts that are over a decade old. over the past year, as my girlfriend and i have gotten to know each other better, we’ve both become reliant on visual cues buried among the photos on our inactive facebook accounts for backing up the stories about high school and college we share with each other, only to find ourselves lost in these photo grids, eyes glazed over, exploring them on our own rather than presenting them to our partner. i’ve noticed that she does the same thing with her phone’s camera roll, which also crucially serves as her primary source for maintaining the memories of several of the most important people in her life who are no longer alive. when i do it, i’m feeling a very different sense of longing: mostly just a desperation to find the outfits i’m wearing in these pictures buried somewhere in my closet now that they’re fashionable again.

which brings me back to the carousel-like renewable economic force nostalgia has become. going by what my instagram algorithm feeds me based on my expressed interests and minimal shopping history on the app, most of what’s being peddled in online spaces is faux-vintage graphic tees and other clothes that match what our parents wore in photos from when we were kids, interspersed with music and NBA accounts dredging up VHS-quality videos of iconic or forgotten moments. while music has managed to birth a nearly separate industry over the past decade or so dedicated to reunion tours, legacy festivals, and reissue campaigns—to say nothing of the fact that the majority of the music produced within the original industry now aims to convincingly replicate any of these eras—the NBA has similarly decimated its timeline by normalizing cycled-out jerseys and logos both as merch items and as uniforms for active players.

during quarantine, as i began getting into basketball again for the first time since i was a kid, i quickly learned that it felt healthier to start in the present era than to cling to the period i knew best through my massive collection of basketball cards and my subscription to inside stuff. but it’s impossible to watch a telecast without constantly noticing one of these players either behind the commentators’ booth or on the bench among the coaching staff, if not in the constant barrage of stats being hurled at you telling you whose record lebron is currently on the verge of breaking. what’s funny is that i barely even got to watch these figures who defined a significant portion of my childhood play, given that i didn’t have cable growing up, and yet the most painful pang of nostalgia i’ve ever felt was in the midst of a recent screening of a documentary about the vancouver grizzlies as i felt irreparably severed from this thing that i was never really even a part of.

nick cave describes grief in one more time with feeling in a way i’ve never forgotten. he explains how the moment of trauma is like a crime scene that we can never truly escape, a cordoned-off mental space we’re permanently bound to. “we’re like on a rubber band,” he muses, “and life can go on and on and on, but eventually it just keeps coming back to that thing.” what’s implied here is the pain of the rubber band snap which only hurts more the further you pull it back. again, he’s talking about actual grief here caused by the trauma of losing family members, which is hardly comparable to missing all 460 vancouver grizzlies games. but the imagery helps: i feel like i get hit with a little rubber band just about every day when i see that another album i grew up with is turning 20. it isn’t physical pain that i feel, though, so much as it is mental—a temporary moment of paralysis while processing how much time has passed since i first heard this record, effectively removing myself from the present until i’ve rationalized this information.

and more of our favorite albums seem to be achieving more significant anniversaries with every passing year as more of their creators are more frequently regrouping to tour in support of them. across various mediums, we’re constantly subjected to these relics from the last period of your life when free time felt unlimited. scrolling social media, you happen upon actors recreating famous scenes from famous movies released 35 years ago, nearly aged out of recognizability, often times dressing the youthful part despite the wrinkles and blemishes that come with age clearly apparent. setting aside the cultural arrested development of this imagery and the existential terror outlined in the previous paragraph, it’s intended as a source of comfort, a reminder that a part of our own youth is still here with us in the present day, removing it entirely from the critical voice that tends to accompany us in our engagement with media in the present.

my brother made a note of this in his own substack in which he revisits past NBA finals series through the lens of various movies their narratives recall. there was a time in our lives when he and i hated nothing more than the los angeles lakers—the team that seemed primed to ruin every single finals series for us misfortunate kids who could barely catch a game outside of ABC’s annual playoff broadcast for the rest of our lives. and yet i now find myself gravitating towards images of shaq and kobe like a moth to a flame, or a monkey to a cloth-covered surrogate mother in an era when everything else feels like wireframe. even the figures we detested most from our childhoods tend to offer a sense of comfort our favorites among their contemporary counterparts can’t.

it’s a confusing time to be alive when it feels like we’re now living all of the past 100 years at once, all of it removed from a neat timeline or any other context it once held. the radio hits you most liked to make fun of as a kid—none of them nearly as bad as you remember—are playing on the grocery store speakers alongside the music you thought was edgy, the music that you privately identified with to the point where you thought it helped define who you were as an individual. it all feels a bit like witnessing a parent at their job for the first time, entirely removed from the context of home and warmth and privacy and love, as all the dividers you constructed decades ago with confidence come crumbling down at the deli counter. i think this has something to do with the fact that i’ve been cranking out this newsletter for four years at this point, and consuming culture at a voracious pace well before that—it feels like foraging forward rather than enduring the still-inevitable calcified fate of lot’s wife.

i have a childhood memory of staring outside my bedroom window at a skunk endlessly running in tight circles, as if chasing its tail, in my family’s driveway. i called my mom over because i thought it was a funny spectacle, but was surprised that her response was instead one of concern about this animal which, i now realize, was a threatening presence in a neighborhood full of kids. incidentally, i’d give anything to go back to that memory.