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Nostalgia
11 years ago
Apologies, as this is going to be a LONG post, but it’s something that’s been forming in my head for a while...
So, I’ve been thinking about nostalgia, and the reasons behind it.
I’m a videogame enthusiast, and over the last few years, there’s been an incredible up-tick in demand for older games. There’s a growing retro-gaming movement, primarily made up of Gen X and Y members it seems, that have a strong attraction to the past, when games were harder, more creative, and less cookie cutter (and to some, before the “scourge of 3D”). Some of these arguments seem legitimate, others...
In the mainstream media, in the last 5-10 years, we’ve seen a lot of old franchises suddenly being rebooted. Wether it’s Transformers, My Little Pony, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or even Star Trek, all have seen a new lease on life, much to the delight/dismay of the public at large.
This summer, the top box office hit movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, features as one of it’s centerpieces, a mix tape of old 1970s pop-rock songs, which, due to consumer demand, has been released as an album, which has promptly been burning up what passes for the charts these days.
Everybody seems to be reaching for the past, especially people of a certain age...
I myself just turned 40.
This, psychologically, has hit me a lot harder than when I turned 30. I keep asking myself. “Do I seem 40? Am I old? To a certain generation, I probably am, in their estimation. My 29 year old mate reassures me I’m not, and I appreciate his reassurance, though I’m also pretty certain he’s a bit biased. He probably doesn’t like the idea of me getting old any more than I do.
Meanwhile, my age-cohorts have for the most part, followed to usual passage through life of job, wife, kids, etc. I myself am dealing with a mother who over the last 5 to 10 years has developed Alzheimer’s disease, and is therefore needing me to look after her, which I’m doing the best I can to accomplish.
All our lives are more complex now. Our relationships fraught with new dynamics that we have to struggle through. For many of us, the feeling of simpleness, and secureness, is merely a dream that we subconsciously remember having, and then lost somewhere. Some of this is legitimate, and some of it rose-colored glasses...
It’s true that the world is going through a rough period right now. There seems to be more wars going on than we can name, rampant crime, corruption, racism, a down economy that seems to not be lifting all boats on it’s return upswing.
At the same time we are at least on some level, haunted by our past mistakes. I at least, look back at a lot of my choices in the past with some measure of wincing embarrassment. Was I really that clueless at times? People have hurt us, betrayed us. We all have stories of the nightmare boyfriend/girlfriend, or that friend that just took advantage of us, or the asshole boss.
We’ve also experienced the humanizing of our parents. Far from the omnipotent protectors they seemed to be when we were young, we learned that they are in fact flawed, fallible beings, much like ourselves. These encounters and events have left scars on our psyches. Things we felt were simple, straight forward and reassuring, turn out to be nothing of the kind.
Our world is a very trying place for an adult. One that can leave a person emotionally beaten down and exhausted. To quote from the movie Dave,“We’ve got so many problems that we don’t even want to look at them anymore. They just blend together into this great big noise, and pretty soon we can’t even hear ourselves think.”
All this makes us numb our emotions in self defense. Nothing seems to reach us as powerfully as they did when we were young. We’ve built too much emotional armor, and have too much wreckage in the way to allow for that.
The past seems a very tempting place to escape to though. Our memories are of a time when we weren’t sullied and world weary, when accomplishment in a game could really reach us. Where we could be entertained more easily. Where a song could move us emotionally.
When things were easier, more simple. When we all felt more secure, safe and happy. When the world was a better, saner place. When people seemed competent. When we still had that image of our parents as omnipotent protectors, and we knew that everything was going to be alright...
Except that that past never really existed. Not really.
An objective view of history shows that the 70s and 80s were not that different from today. In many ways they were much much worse. The 70s suffered an economic malaise, that, while not as deep as our near miss with another great depression in the last 5 years was, was still a drag on the economy and on people’s job prospects.
This was the era of the fallout from Vietnam, and Watergate, when our blissful American spirit was broken on the shoals of Cynicism. This was also the era of a number of terrorist and international incidents, hostage taking, and bombs, the most notable being events like the Iranian Hostage Crisis, the first Afghanistan war, and the Lockerby Bombing, in which a suitcase bomb, planted by libyan terrorists, brought down a passenger liner over Scotland.
And while none of these events were on American soil, or at the scale of 9/11, they all paled next to the Cold War, in which the entire world was held in an almost perpetual hostage crisis, where a runaway arms race infested the planet with almost 50,000 nuclear weapons. On multiple occasions we came very close to literally the end of the world..
I distinctly remember the subconscious (and almost conscious) fear of the world coming to an end in a conflagration of nuclear fire. The problems we face today seem pitiful in comparison.
Meanwhile the media in the 70s and early 80s was much like the media now, with movies warning of environmental collapse and the depletion of fossil fuels, like Soylent Green (it’s made of people!) and The Road Warrior, and nuclear horror, like Damnation Alley, A Boy and his Dog, and Defcon 4.
Televison had The Day After, Threads, and Testament. Even popular music got in on the act with songs like Sting’s Russians in which he sang “I hope the Russians love their children too”. Meanwhile a German pop band called Nena, performed “99 Red Balloons”, in which a mad general starts World War 3, due to malfunctioning software confusing the aforementioned balloons for a Nuclear First Strike.
Of course as kids we were largely unaware of these developments, or at least, only partially aware. It’s not like we followed the news on a regular basis, and really only heard about these things occasionally when the adults would talk to each other about them. They never really registered with us the way current events do now.
We tended to focus on what amused us, our problems, though they seemed huge at the time (and some of them were), dwarfed by what we confront as adults. The “kid gloves” were on for most of us, and so our impressions of that time tend to be light and ambient.
By the same token though, we tend to see the world today through dark lenses, the light filtered out or at least dimmed, the darks far more prominent than they actually are. This is not to say that there aren’t any real concerns. There are some truly big ones in our time. But history tells us that they aren’t as big as we sometimes make them out to be. We’ve been through far worse.
And this attitude we have now as scarred adults, make us as blind, or as dismissive, to great things sometimes, as much as we remember our parents being towards things that mattered to us. Forgive me if I seem to be going from end of the world to inconsequential, but I think you’ll see my point by the end...
One example is modern video games. We live in what I truly believe is the coming of a second golden age of the medium. The indie sector of games has become a powerful force in the industry, introducing some really wonderful new ideas, and is starting to fill the vacuum of middle range games, vacated by the large publishers, as they chase primarily AAA titles. Now small one to five man indie teams work alongside titans like Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, and Activison. There’s a long list of excellent games that show how successful such titles can be, like Dust: An Elysian Tail, Bastion, Towerfall, Super Meatboy, Shovel Knight, Transistor, and No Man’s Sky, to name just a few.
Meanwhile in science fiction and fantasy movies, we’ve had an embarrassment of riches. When I grew up in the 80s, you were lucky if you got maybe 2 (comparatively) major releases in a year. Now we regularly get 5 or more. And just like a man in a desert being given a drink of water and a cracker, who will claim to high heaven that it’s the freshest water he ever drank, and the most incredible saltine he ever ate, we look at those older films with reverence partly because of our rose colored glasses, but also because of the comparative scarcity in which those films arrived. If we were honest with ourselves, we’d admit that a lot of those old films were truly corny creations, especially compared to some of the things that have come out of the box office lately.
And television. Don’t even get me started. True we have the scourge that is reality TV, but then we also have been given treasures like the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, A Game of Thrones, Fringe, The Newsroom, Defiance, Marvel’s Agents of Shield, etc. And to top it all off we get to watch it all when and where we want, thanks to streaming and DVRs.
Now I’m not saying that each of these fields don’t have their problems. They do. And I’m not saying that there isn’t anything that wasn’t better in the past, there is and has been. But to say everything has gone to hell in a handbasket is not really a fair assessment. On a whole, things have gotten better.
Moving to more serious topics to illustrate my point, let’s take a look at global statistics. Did you know for instance that the actual violent crime rate has been declining since the 1990s? Current crime rates are holding at about the same rate as they were in 1960. Also death from war is on the decline globally. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart.....950237/?no-ist
I know I sound like I’m meandering, but the point is this. Even though things are objectively getting better, for a number of reasons, a large number of us subjectively perceive things as getting worse. And many of us are using nostalgia for the old days as a balm against our fear and pessimism about the future. In this we’re not alone. The statement “Why, when I was a kid...” is something so often used by every generation, that it’s become a cliche. The problem with this type of thinking is that you get left behind. Think of your average nursing home patron, or that stereotypical old man that tells the kids to “get off my lawn!” Every neighborhood has at least one.
Do these people seem happy to you? Or do they seem miserable, having let time pass them by? Having let their wounds eat them up inside until only the bitterness is left...
I personally can understand how someone could end up there. I’ve had a lot happen to me in my 40 years on the planet. I’ve had my first mate die in my arms. Lost two brothers to suicide. I was molested, raped. I’ve had people cheat me and my mother both to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
By all rights, I should be crazy, or extremely cynical and suspicious of everyone.
But if I do that... If I give up on hope... Then what’s the point? Why go on living, if life is only assured to be one big painful ordeal? And don’t get me wrong. My childhood was better than many. I had and have a mother that loves me and would move heaven and earth for me, and for at least some of the time, I had some truly good friends and an excellent family. But if I spend all my time looking backwards, I’m going to miss all the great stuff that’s happening all around me right now.
If I did that. I wouldn’t have my wonderful birdy mate ( I love you, Avian). I wouldn’t have the friends I have now. I wouldn’t have the gaming group. I wouldn’t have anything. But slowly fading memories. Their great things to visit. But you shouldn’t live there...
So, I’ve been thinking about nostalgia, and the reasons behind it.
I’m a videogame enthusiast, and over the last few years, there’s been an incredible up-tick in demand for older games. There’s a growing retro-gaming movement, primarily made up of Gen X and Y members it seems, that have a strong attraction to the past, when games were harder, more creative, and less cookie cutter (and to some, before the “scourge of 3D”). Some of these arguments seem legitimate, others...
In the mainstream media, in the last 5-10 years, we’ve seen a lot of old franchises suddenly being rebooted. Wether it’s Transformers, My Little Pony, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or even Star Trek, all have seen a new lease on life, much to the delight/dismay of the public at large.
This summer, the top box office hit movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, features as one of it’s centerpieces, a mix tape of old 1970s pop-rock songs, which, due to consumer demand, has been released as an album, which has promptly been burning up what passes for the charts these days.
Everybody seems to be reaching for the past, especially people of a certain age...
I myself just turned 40.
This, psychologically, has hit me a lot harder than when I turned 30. I keep asking myself. “Do I seem 40? Am I old? To a certain generation, I probably am, in their estimation. My 29 year old mate reassures me I’m not, and I appreciate his reassurance, though I’m also pretty certain he’s a bit biased. He probably doesn’t like the idea of me getting old any more than I do.
Meanwhile, my age-cohorts have for the most part, followed to usual passage through life of job, wife, kids, etc. I myself am dealing with a mother who over the last 5 to 10 years has developed Alzheimer’s disease, and is therefore needing me to look after her, which I’m doing the best I can to accomplish.
All our lives are more complex now. Our relationships fraught with new dynamics that we have to struggle through. For many of us, the feeling of simpleness, and secureness, is merely a dream that we subconsciously remember having, and then lost somewhere. Some of this is legitimate, and some of it rose-colored glasses...
It’s true that the world is going through a rough period right now. There seems to be more wars going on than we can name, rampant crime, corruption, racism, a down economy that seems to not be lifting all boats on it’s return upswing.
At the same time we are at least on some level, haunted by our past mistakes. I at least, look back at a lot of my choices in the past with some measure of wincing embarrassment. Was I really that clueless at times? People have hurt us, betrayed us. We all have stories of the nightmare boyfriend/girlfriend, or that friend that just took advantage of us, or the asshole boss.
We’ve also experienced the humanizing of our parents. Far from the omnipotent protectors they seemed to be when we were young, we learned that they are in fact flawed, fallible beings, much like ourselves. These encounters and events have left scars on our psyches. Things we felt were simple, straight forward and reassuring, turn out to be nothing of the kind.
Our world is a very trying place for an adult. One that can leave a person emotionally beaten down and exhausted. To quote from the movie Dave,“We’ve got so many problems that we don’t even want to look at them anymore. They just blend together into this great big noise, and pretty soon we can’t even hear ourselves think.”
All this makes us numb our emotions in self defense. Nothing seems to reach us as powerfully as they did when we were young. We’ve built too much emotional armor, and have too much wreckage in the way to allow for that.
The past seems a very tempting place to escape to though. Our memories are of a time when we weren’t sullied and world weary, when accomplishment in a game could really reach us. Where we could be entertained more easily. Where a song could move us emotionally.
When things were easier, more simple. When we all felt more secure, safe and happy. When the world was a better, saner place. When people seemed competent. When we still had that image of our parents as omnipotent protectors, and we knew that everything was going to be alright...
Except that that past never really existed. Not really.
An objective view of history shows that the 70s and 80s were not that different from today. In many ways they were much much worse. The 70s suffered an economic malaise, that, while not as deep as our near miss with another great depression in the last 5 years was, was still a drag on the economy and on people’s job prospects.
This was the era of the fallout from Vietnam, and Watergate, when our blissful American spirit was broken on the shoals of Cynicism. This was also the era of a number of terrorist and international incidents, hostage taking, and bombs, the most notable being events like the Iranian Hostage Crisis, the first Afghanistan war, and the Lockerby Bombing, in which a suitcase bomb, planted by libyan terrorists, brought down a passenger liner over Scotland.
And while none of these events were on American soil, or at the scale of 9/11, they all paled next to the Cold War, in which the entire world was held in an almost perpetual hostage crisis, where a runaway arms race infested the planet with almost 50,000 nuclear weapons. On multiple occasions we came very close to literally the end of the world..
I distinctly remember the subconscious (and almost conscious) fear of the world coming to an end in a conflagration of nuclear fire. The problems we face today seem pitiful in comparison.
Meanwhile the media in the 70s and early 80s was much like the media now, with movies warning of environmental collapse and the depletion of fossil fuels, like Soylent Green (it’s made of people!) and The Road Warrior, and nuclear horror, like Damnation Alley, A Boy and his Dog, and Defcon 4.
Televison had The Day After, Threads, and Testament. Even popular music got in on the act with songs like Sting’s Russians in which he sang “I hope the Russians love their children too”. Meanwhile a German pop band called Nena, performed “99 Red Balloons”, in which a mad general starts World War 3, due to malfunctioning software confusing the aforementioned balloons for a Nuclear First Strike.
Of course as kids we were largely unaware of these developments, or at least, only partially aware. It’s not like we followed the news on a regular basis, and really only heard about these things occasionally when the adults would talk to each other about them. They never really registered with us the way current events do now.
We tended to focus on what amused us, our problems, though they seemed huge at the time (and some of them were), dwarfed by what we confront as adults. The “kid gloves” were on for most of us, and so our impressions of that time tend to be light and ambient.
By the same token though, we tend to see the world today through dark lenses, the light filtered out or at least dimmed, the darks far more prominent than they actually are. This is not to say that there aren’t any real concerns. There are some truly big ones in our time. But history tells us that they aren’t as big as we sometimes make them out to be. We’ve been through far worse.
And this attitude we have now as scarred adults, make us as blind, or as dismissive, to great things sometimes, as much as we remember our parents being towards things that mattered to us. Forgive me if I seem to be going from end of the world to inconsequential, but I think you’ll see my point by the end...
One example is modern video games. We live in what I truly believe is the coming of a second golden age of the medium. The indie sector of games has become a powerful force in the industry, introducing some really wonderful new ideas, and is starting to fill the vacuum of middle range games, vacated by the large publishers, as they chase primarily AAA titles. Now small one to five man indie teams work alongside titans like Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, and Activison. There’s a long list of excellent games that show how successful such titles can be, like Dust: An Elysian Tail, Bastion, Towerfall, Super Meatboy, Shovel Knight, Transistor, and No Man’s Sky, to name just a few.
Meanwhile in science fiction and fantasy movies, we’ve had an embarrassment of riches. When I grew up in the 80s, you were lucky if you got maybe 2 (comparatively) major releases in a year. Now we regularly get 5 or more. And just like a man in a desert being given a drink of water and a cracker, who will claim to high heaven that it’s the freshest water he ever drank, and the most incredible saltine he ever ate, we look at those older films with reverence partly because of our rose colored glasses, but also because of the comparative scarcity in which those films arrived. If we were honest with ourselves, we’d admit that a lot of those old films were truly corny creations, especially compared to some of the things that have come out of the box office lately.
And television. Don’t even get me started. True we have the scourge that is reality TV, but then we also have been given treasures like the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, A Game of Thrones, Fringe, The Newsroom, Defiance, Marvel’s Agents of Shield, etc. And to top it all off we get to watch it all when and where we want, thanks to streaming and DVRs.
Now I’m not saying that each of these fields don’t have their problems. They do. And I’m not saying that there isn’t anything that wasn’t better in the past, there is and has been. But to say everything has gone to hell in a handbasket is not really a fair assessment. On a whole, things have gotten better.
Moving to more serious topics to illustrate my point, let’s take a look at global statistics. Did you know for instance that the actual violent crime rate has been declining since the 1990s? Current crime rates are holding at about the same rate as they were in 1960. Also death from war is on the decline globally. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart.....950237/?no-ist
I know I sound like I’m meandering, but the point is this. Even though things are objectively getting better, for a number of reasons, a large number of us subjectively perceive things as getting worse. And many of us are using nostalgia for the old days as a balm against our fear and pessimism about the future. In this we’re not alone. The statement “Why, when I was a kid...” is something so often used by every generation, that it’s become a cliche. The problem with this type of thinking is that you get left behind. Think of your average nursing home patron, or that stereotypical old man that tells the kids to “get off my lawn!” Every neighborhood has at least one.
Do these people seem happy to you? Or do they seem miserable, having let time pass them by? Having let their wounds eat them up inside until only the bitterness is left...
I personally can understand how someone could end up there. I’ve had a lot happen to me in my 40 years on the planet. I’ve had my first mate die in my arms. Lost two brothers to suicide. I was molested, raped. I’ve had people cheat me and my mother both to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
By all rights, I should be crazy, or extremely cynical and suspicious of everyone.
But if I do that... If I give up on hope... Then what’s the point? Why go on living, if life is only assured to be one big painful ordeal? And don’t get me wrong. My childhood was better than many. I had and have a mother that loves me and would move heaven and earth for me, and for at least some of the time, I had some truly good friends and an excellent family. But if I spend all my time looking backwards, I’m going to miss all the great stuff that’s happening all around me right now.
If I did that. I wouldn’t have my wonderful birdy mate ( I love you, Avian). I wouldn’t have the friends I have now. I wouldn’t have the gaming group. I wouldn’t have anything. But slowly fading memories. Their great things to visit. But you shouldn’t live there...
And most importantly, am I?
:(
And Lord, but I am more sorry than I can say to hear about your mother! She's a stand-up lady, and deserves better. I hope things shake out as smoothly as they can...