By 
A couple of months ago, I went to a Backstreet Boys concert.
Shut up. I was pulled into it by a friend group. And okay, I also just happened to remember the words to all of the songs.
I SAID SHUT UP. YOU DON’T KNOW ME.
Seriously, try to get past that, and not lose all respect for me, because I actually do have a point to make here.
You see, normally boy band concerts involve a bunch of teen girls screaming at the top of their lungs for two hours in escapist excitement. The subtext of the fans’ screams is typically something along the lines of “Please impregnate my underage body.” It’s maybe the creepiest thing that we as society accept as being totally fine.
I’m only telling you this because when I was there, the screams sounded like a boy band concert circa 2000, but the subtext was all too different–due in part to the fact that everyone involved was a lot older. Howie had a bad knee, Kevin was likely receiving medicare, and Nick looked like a 42-year-old baby. No one was looking to get inseminated by a balding AJ McLean. It was no longer 13-year-olds crying because they desperately want the love of a pretty boy with a pretty voice. It was women with car payments and wax appointments, screaming with a far different subtext. Now it was:
“Woo! Oh my God, Howie! Take me back to a time when the middle class existed!”
“Brian! Sing Everybody, so that I can dance and pretend that the most depressing part of my life is math homework instead of ‘everything!'”
“Nick! Nick! Serenade me with a time when our president was merely a pervert and then an idiot instead of a perverted idiotic bigot with the maturity of a seven-year-old–I want it that way.”
It was nothing but the purest, most concentrated nostalgia I’ve ever witnessed. It was 2 hours of fully being 13 again.
This is certainly nothing new. One of the most commonly reoccurring millenial patterns is that we eat nostalgia for breakfast, lunch, and dinner–and the tendency to do this is even stronger as we become increasingly aware of how terrible the world is. The more terrorist attacks that happen, the more ignorance that spreads, and the more people refer to each other as “fam,” the more we all want to run away and escape to a time when everything seemed cool and easy, and when we were allowed to be ignorant idiot assholes: when we were kids.
And so, we latch onto reboots of TV shows that stopped airing 8 seconds ago, we jizz our collective trousers when they bring back the Super Nintendo or vinyl records, and we bitch incessantly about movie remakes and franchises while we wait in line and tell ourselves this Fantastic Four reboot won’t suck.
But as you can find out by asking any white person with gray hair about the 50’s, harkening back to the good ol’ days is not unique to our generation. Every generation who has ever lived has mostly argued that the world has been going downhill since they were in their 30’s because for them, it has. It happens to all of us. Our hip starts to hurt, our dick stops working, and we become less able to adjust to change over time, so we therefore assume that change is bad, everything was better 20-30 years ago, and kids today are a bunch of spoiled cunts. We’ll do it too, like clockwork. And the more this happens, the more we become compelled to dump buckets of nostalgia onto our lives.
But our generation does tend to take our nostalgia to another level for one primary reason: access.
Don’t get me wrong. Our parents do like nostalgia, and especially enjoy using it to grind human progress to a halt when it’s convenient–sure. But we live in our nostalgia, because we can. We can always listen to Semi-Charmed Life on Spotify, we always can chat with our friends and over-reminisce about high school until we forget what year it is, and we can watch Joey and Chandler get into some shenanigans full of archaic gay jokes any time we want on Netflix. The drug is always at our fingertips.
And on its own, this isn’t so bad.
After all, nostalgia is fine in small doses. An occasional spoonful of nostalgia to make the awful medicine known as “reality” go down (or a very occasional Vegas concert binge you snort up) is totally fine.
A dumptruck of nostalgia that you indiscriminately dump onto your life and bathe in every day you’re alive, however, totally sucks.
And that’s the problem: many of us tend to pour it on. Nostalgia makes its way into every escape from what we decide to post on Instagram, to watch we watch, to what music we listen to, to what we think about, to what kind of cereal we eat. We turn to thoughts and experiences of the past as a way of constantly avoiding living in the shitty, shitty now. And we do it so much that, at this point, for many, it’s a reflex.
And that’s an awful, awful reflex to have. That’s like if a doctor tapped you on the knee and you just started blurting out racial epithets.
As a form of escapism, nostalgia has a specific danger to it that we must watch out for, because nostalgia is the only escape to mentally put you into another place and time. When you habitually escape to the past, you are literally taken emotionally and psychologically out of your current, real, adult state of mind.
This makes trying to make the world or even just your life better impossible because after all, you can’t thrive in a world you’re not a part of. You can’t improve the current world if you’re stuck in the past. You can’t become a kickass you if you’re constantly sitting with your thumb up your ass going, “Remember how cool the 90’s were?”
So let’s break this down a little more. Here are four reasons why your addiction to nostalgia sucks, and you should do everything you can to get rid of it.
1) The Time You’re Longing For Sucked
Hey remember when a Democratic president said that gay people shouldn’t get married and most of the country was like “Cool. Yeah. Fuck those weirdos?”
Remember when worldwide poverty and starvation were much, much bigger problems (okay, pretend like you do because they were when you were a kid)?
Remember when it was totally cool and normal to call a girl who openly enjoyed sex a whore?
Oh, and also, you know, 9/11?
We are fucking delusional about the past. We build up the past to be our own personal idea of heaven. We make the vaguely fun parts out to be the time of our lives, and we make ourselves forget all about the parts where we almost stuck our head in an oven. So it may be worth remembering that for current adults, the time in history of your childhood totally sucked ass. And generally speaking, the older you are, the truer that is.
This is what we all too often forget about when we get into our little nostalgia circlejerks–history tends to get grosser the further back you go. The most blatant example is white baby boomers longing for the 50’s, and all of their segregated glory.
“But every generation is guilty of this in their own way.
The world may still be a planet-wide dumpster fire now, but it wasn’t better a couple decades ago. You were just an ignorant, dumbass 13-year-old.
Which brings me to my next point.
2) Being 13 Again Sounds Awful
I remember my friend’s mom telling me and him that middle school would be the best years of our lives. I also remember starting middle school, and immediately thinking “Good God, I hope not.”
Do you actually remember being an adolescent? Is there anything worse that a healthy person in the first world can experience? It was constant embarrassment. It was like accidentally letting out a loud fart at a funeral, except the fart lasted for two to three years.
Not to mention you were at your worst when you were 13. You thought you knew how the world worked because you got your first stray armpit hairs and your voice cracked while singing a Blink-182 song, and you literally knew less than anyone on the planet (and by “you,” I very much mean “I”).
Basically all of my worst memories came from this era. Everything from the era was monumentally cringe-worthy. I was a dogshit human being, and so was everyone I knew in their own ways, so I’m sure you were too. Me, I was a psychological bully with uncontrollable little boners. Maybe you were a catty bitch, maybe you valued popularity like an idiot, maybe you used racial slurs to try to be “edgy,” or maybe you connected with a friend because you both agreed Ashlee Simpson was a great artist.
Whatever it was specifically with you, I guarantee you that you were fucking awful at the time, and as a result, had at least a kind of terrible time if you actually think past watching TRL and eating Gushers.
3) The Media You Liked as a Kid Sucked
Have you ever seen the shit a kid watches and thinks is funny, or cool, or worth listening to? They have terrible taste. They’re idiots.Every generation thinks they had the best music. None of them are as unbelievably wrong as we are.
Remember, if you will for a second, being 12 and thinking this was awesome.
I defy you to listen to this now, remember that some younger version of you thought this was not only good but “cool” (I know I’m not the only one to have owned that red Yankees cap), and not at least kind of want to push your younger self into traffic.
So it seems so bizarre to want to go back to that. Why do we want to go back to a time when we were dumber people with dumber thoughts? Why do we look back fondly on a song which constantly repeats the line, “And stick it up your yeah?”
What you’re really longing for with all of these things isn’t puberty, N*Sync, or even for a pre-9/11 world. You’re longing for acceptable ignorance. You’re longing to be able to be a dipshit with no responsibilities again, and you connect the foods, music, and terrible clothes of the time with that feeling. It’s all about feeling like a child.
But here’s a thought: maybe that’s bad?
4) Being a Grown Baby Isn’t Exactly Ideal
The irony about longing to go back to our younger days like this is that when you’re that young, all you can think about it getting older. All you can think about is having a car, and buying your own shit, and getting to see naked ladies in person, and how magical all of it will be.
And you know what? Adulthood does rule in all of those ways. It is awesome. We just take the awesome freedoms of adulthood for granted, because we’re big spoiled dickholes.
Not having that adulthood freedom blows. It’s frustrating. It’s beneath what we’re meant to seek and enjoy as developed people. We realize this when we’re young, and it’s part of the reason that, if you actually think about it, you kind of hated being young.
This is another reason why we should be living in the now. Getting to go where you want when you want is awesome. Trying to fix your toilet and succeeding is fucking great. Having a mortgage is so fucking cool. Responsibility and stress are what make you alive. They make the great things about life real.
Being thirteen is fucking terrible. You suck at talking to girls, you have no sense of responsibility, and most of your life is centered around finding things to masturbate to. Besides being stupid, revisiting that state of mind won’t improve your life. It won’t pay your bills, develop your career, or make you less of a shitty father. It will just give you the feeling that none of that matters, so you’ll live like none of that matters. You’ll continue to live a stupid, out-of-the-moment life where nothing moves the fuck forward, because in your head, you’ll always be moving backwards.
Now you may be thinking, “Well come on. I may indulge in all of this, but I still pay my bills. I still keep my kid from dying. I still go to the gym…sometimes. It’s not like I actually think I’m still 13.”
Well good for you! You don’t literally have a mental disorder. Congrats. I guess you’re totally fine then and you have no problems you’re avoiding.
Or maybe that’s bullshit.
Nostalgia probably won’t kill you, but it will keep you from making progress that you could make in your life, and not just because it temporarily puts you in a child-like mindset–but also because it encourages a learned helplessness.
Inherent in the glorification of the past is the assumption that this moment right now inevitably sucks. You think, “Well the way things are right this second is boring. Let’s pretend it’s 2001, because I remember having fun once then.”
And friend, there’s nothing inevitable about it. You have a say in the moment, your life, and the world. You have a say in your career, and your love life, and your feeling of fulfillment–but only if you’re actually focusing on those things–only if you’re fully accepting and living in your current mind, situation, and increasingly gross body.
Walking into life with the assumption that the moment right now isn’t as good as the past supports a feeling that no matter how much your situation sucks, you can always imagine you’re headbanging to Kid Rock and playing Tetris, and fuck that. Change your life. Change the moment.
The past has nothing for you. It answers zero of your problems. Stop turning to it like the mental pacifier that it is.
This doesn’t just go for annoying millenials who drone on about the 90’s. This goes for boomers who long for the days of milkshakes, waitresses on rollerskates, and white kid schools. It goes for people who long for cars that used to be cooler, America before it’s youth had their nose stuck on their phone screens 24/7, the days of Obama being president, and your life when that bitch of a wife still loved you, God damn it!
Well he’s not coming back to Washington, you’re not getting your whites only bathrooms back, and maybe your wife would consider getting back with you if you stopped living in 1997, you dipshit.
Instead look, the fuck, forward.
What can you do now? What can you do given our current leaders, the current state of the world, and our current lack of boy bands? How can you best proceed and make your every day life better? What’s happening in 2017 that you can work with, improve, or get rid of?
Come join the rest of the world in this moment, so that we can stair into the abyss together and start brainstorming the answer to the grand question of, “Fuck, what do we do about all of this shit?”
I don’t care what stage of life you’re in. The glory years are still ahead if you fucking decide they are, and stop whining about how cool The Simpsons was in its prime, how good pop music was (it wasn’t) 20 years go, or how you wish we could return to the days of dial-up internet and Spagghettios. There’s something way better than all of that shit, and it’s called “everything in front of you.” You have the power to make now awesome. Avoiding that to focus on the past doesn’t make you nostalgic. It makes you a lazy asshole.
We can decide if this will be a time we look back on fondly, so let’s decide now. Let’s look forward, and do something to make now a time that’s so great, that we look back on this in 20 years in order to escape how awful 2037 is.
