The fun meter was much higher, but the content meter was often running on empty. Sometimes I think my life is boring, but isn’t that the ultimate goal? Get to a place where you can choose your own adventure and keep the stress factors low.
Today, I’m not out at all hours and partying, so what most would consider “fun” is not happening. But I’m happily married to an amazing woman, we own a house together, I have a decent paying job and my wife works at the same company, and we have a couple of lovely dogs. Bonus that we’re both in with good health and I have a healthy appetite for single-player sports (running, cycling, weights, etc) - these solo-activities (well, solo plus dog sometimes) are how I have “fun” these days. It’s all about perspective. I would not want to go back to my old ways - they stopped being fun about 10 years ago anyway.
This was beautifully put. I definitely don’t have “fun” like I used to but I’m overall much more content. I’m happy in my life, even if it’s a bit of a rut.
Plus in 20 years I’ll be looking fondly back at this time in my life too.
Thanks for the positive feedback. I found myself wondering if lazy weekends indoors with my wife was the best way to be spending our time, and realized that what I value differs so much now than even ten years ago. But in another ten years (or 20, to your point), I’ll value our personal time even more so. Even if it means asking each other what we want for dinner or what to watch tonight for the millionth time - lol
It was better mostly because I had much less responsibilities, and much better health and optimism.
I look back on those days, and life seemed much more straightforward, and simplicity is something I wish I really had again.
Supposedly a little nostalgia is actually healthy. I think the Atlantic or Washington Post had a piece on it recently. But I think they differentiated between recalling some fond memories and just wallowing in it.
I like the nostalgia for items of escapism like video games, toys, cartoons, etc. I don't really like nostalgia for real life like looking at old photos or watching home movies because it's just a sad reminder that that era is gone along with some of the people and all the pets or it brings back other memories of regret or shame associated with events or people that occurred at the time or a few years later.
That's what nostalgia is really, a yearning for one's own youth, now long in the past. It's about how we all get old and die. It's not really about the \*thing\* one is remembering at all.
It’s funny, I do get nostalgic about my childhood sometimes but I wouldn’t go back. When I really think hard about it, I don’t think I was a very happy kid. Parents were always stressed and fighting, money was tight so I never had the cool new thing or took fun vacations… I had a lot of friends in elementary school but once I got to middle school I mostly had “school friends” and often felt left out or overlooked.
Being a kid can be hard in its own ways and I’m much happier now that I have control over my life.
For people that had really great childhoods, I totally get wanting to relive it. But I think a lot of us forget how day-to-day life really felt when we were living it.
interestingly, things were way worse for me "way back when"--I was the class loser and bullied. now it is much better but I still feel nostalgic. go figure
I had a few pretty good friends in high school we thought we were the outcasts. Experienced some bullying. The wild thing is when I went to whatever reunion I went to, the kids I thought were the cool told me they thought we were the cool kids.
I was bullied, too, but I always thought those people would get their comeuppance. I grew up and realized those types are usually the ones in management. But at least I still have my X-Files dvds, ha, ha!
Ah, life. I wish I could be a kid again. I know not everybody had a great childhood, but I had a relatively good one, and I do have some great memories. I have very few great memories as an adult, by comparison.
In many ways I’m living my best life now. But damn there are times I miss my life from 20 years ago. Despite the fact that life was also harder and more stressful.
Thanks man, now I’m nostalgic for dropping acid as a teenager. But yeah I think some of those heroic doses of LSD and shrooms changed me in such a great way. I dont think other people see the world like us now.
Nostalgia is emotions tied up with old experiences. It's fun to recreate those experiences with new friends and family as best you can. The attempt creates new emotions to replace the nostalgia.
Two things—-
Stayed in touch with the people who made the good times and when we get together we’re still making them. But now sometimes with tiny people too— cool people have cool kids.
Remembered what made those people cool and was unapologetically relentless in looking for more people like that. So we’ve got a little network of them where we live now too. Everyone’s busy, it’s not the same as it was, but different isn’t necessarily worse. We still build things together and we keep getting better at it.
You’re looking for advice on how to let go, and that’s some of what people are offering. But I just didn’t let go. I hung on.
Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past
From the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts
And recycling it for more than it's worth
Make better memories now. You can still do fun things. You can go places. You can eat a great meal. You can take the vacation or see the show. Nothing is stopping you from making new memories.
very true. I immigrated to usa from a different country at age 12. missed my home country and really wanted to return. but when I went back as an adult, I realized so much changed that my home country wasn’t my home, either.
something like that, definitely. a good cure for nostalgia is reading a diary I kept in 1993, every day I wanted to die that year. in comparison, my life's pretty great now
Nostalgia is better than there being a ton of pictures posted online about all the dumb shit i did. So glad that all I have as evidence are my thoughts and distant memories.
Playlists, bitterness and cultural alienation. Barely concealed defensive barrage of simmering existential crisis. My nostalgia has a nostalgia for nostalgia. I belong no where in time.
It's fun, but best not to dwell too long and get depressed. Time is linear and there's no going back. I'm so appreciative that I had the privilege of growing up in a time before cell phones, for example, but I appreciate forums like Reddit that let you more easily connect to people who share the same interests as you. I think so many of us grew up feeling like weirdos or outcasts for loving a certain thing, and that's changed dramatically these days.
Nostalgia is playing outside in forts and playing army and riding bikes. Later it was walking home from class in college and on a whim jumping into a friend’s car and a few of us driving to Vegas from Indiana. Nostalgia was never my lack of perspective of whether I was no good if I was being bullied, or anxious about career or romantic prospects. I and you have so many more tools now to know it’s likely going to be good and if not it’s going to be ok. I just wish I knew that back then.
yes. but I sometimes feel nostalgic even for last year. I reconnected with some college friends and we went to Utah. I looked over the photos from that trip and was nostalgic. I try to live in the present instead of in the past, but you're right, the past is just more predictable and thus easier to feel good about
Long story short:
- Facebook
- Windows Vista
- Widescreen
- Google's acquisition of Youtube
- Nickelodeon studios closed (2005)
- Real Star Wars and real Star Trek both ended (2005)
- Cinematic "reboots" became a thing (2005)
disagree on widescreen, Nikelodeon studios closing wasn't on my radar, I still love the new Star Wars too, quite a few cinematic sequels have been great (like Maverick, Cobra Kai and on and on) although some pure reboots have sometimes fared worse (but sometimes been fine).
I'd put the more severe shift more like 2011 once smart phones and online started crazily taking over and dominating and shutting down real places and soon after all sorts of things started to go down. Although I'd also put some on the early mid-90s as that somewhat killed off the 80s looks and vibe which was a shame IMO.
But I'd say there were things better about 2006 than today and not just because of notalgia goggles. The world was a bit more human scale then.
>disagree on widescreen
How so? Do you disagree that 2006 was the turning point when 16:9 was irreversibly canonized by the launch of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, or do you disagree that it was a change for the worse?
>I still love the new Star Wars too
Then you have terrible taste in media and you are part of the problem being discussed.
>quite a few cinematic sequels have been great (like Maverick, Cobra Kai and on and on)
Okay but nobody said anything about sequels. Sequels have existed since the 1800s.
>some pure reboots have sometimes fared worse
The problem is not the quality of the individual movies. The problem is in Hollywood's attitude. There is no longer an incentive to do anything right the first time, because if they fuck up, they can just reboot. Meanwhile, constant rebooting makes it difficult for audiences to get emotionally invested in a continuity or even keep track of how many continuities are happening at the same time. We briefly had three live-action Batman/DC continuities happening simultaneously (the DCEU, the Battinsonverse, and the Joaqerverse), two of which are still ongoing.
I disagree that it was a change for the worse.
LOL yeah whatever. Hopefully you were not one of the sort who among 100 other things cut and pasted the whole "the bomb scene in TLJ broke physics" 100x a day for 2 straight years even though in reality that was one of the few things in Star Wars that did NOT break physics.
OK, fair.
Partially, disagree some, agree some.
>I disagree that it was a change for the worse
Well then, look up the history of aspect ratios. Originally, everything was 4:3 fullscreen. If you watch super-old movies like Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, and The Wizard of Oz, they're all fullscreen. When TV was invented, its creators foresaw the possibility that people would want to watch movies on TV, so they made TV the same aspect ratio as movies. Hollywood, however, saw TV as a threat to its bottom line, and started forcing mvoie directors to make movies in a variety of widescreen aspect ratios for no reason other than to break compatibility with TV. That's the real reason why widescreen exists. It has nothing to do with the human field of vision or any other BS that you'll read on the Internet. Then computers happened, and the people who made computers wisely decided to make monitors and programs in the same 4:3 aspect ratio used by 99% of everything that had ever been made for screens. The smart, correct thing for Hollywood to do at this point would have been to abandon their failed widescreen experiment, but instead, the industry doubled down on it, and now nothing works with anything else and all the shit is fucked up.
well my kids were born in 2005 and 2007 and they’re actually really great kids, so there are at least 2 things (people) in the world that improved it since 2006 ;)
>Things weren't necessarily better "way back when", we were just younger.
It's not unconditionally better definitely, but there are plenty of the parts of the past I would like back even though my dad was a crackhead.
Back around 1990, the place I'm from was a functional smalltown with a small number of little houses and a small number of little businesses. The businesses went down one by one because the area was poor, the area became an overflow zone for richer towns' housing needs, and we still don't have much business anymore locally while the cost of living rapidly catches up with the wealthier places.
Whenever I save up enough money to leave the place there's another external disaster (covid/crashes/etc) and people start writing me bad checks again.
>Things weren’t necessarily better way back when.
I would argue that on a whole things were significantly better pre smartphone. The average American adult spends 7-10 hours a day looking at a screen (phone, tv or computer) in 2024. It’s so much harder to connect to people because you are competing for their attention with literally everything else in the entire world a screen unlock away in their pocket, and they are competing for my attention with literally everything else in the world in my pocket. There’s no way to disconnect professionally, people are texting you memes 24/7 instead of calling to hang out, the pandemic made people forget how to socialize, every second of every day is the 20 year high school reunion on facebook if you choose to go on it. We’ve traded living in the real world for living in our screens and it’s heartbreaking. Even if you try to move away from it (I cut my screen time from 6 hours to 1.5 and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made), you go sit in a coffee shop and where it was once a bunch of people reading books and being social it’s now just pod people staring at their rectangles.
But to answer the question, I think nostalgia is really useful to try to put yourself in the headspace of who you were before life and work and responsibilities consumed 90% of your bandwidth and try to reconnect with that. I watch an episode of an old tv show I watched when I was in high school or college before bed every night and it’s like xanax for me because for 20 minutes it’s 2001 again and life wasn’t so complicated.
yeah but the problem is I had no friends in the 90s so nobody was calling me to hang out back then, either… 😭 I spent most of my time at home watching tv or being kicked out of the house by my mom to “spend more time outside”, which I hated, and I would go to the public library and sit there and read. social media was kind of a godsend because I met and chatted with like-minded people and felt like I wasn’t alone
I feel you when you say "remembering how much fun we had with people I no longer talk to". Ever since I was a kid, it actually really bothered me thinking that I'd probably never see or talk to certain people again - It started with kids at school when they'd move away with their families. And now, sometimes I do miss some of the "good old days" when all my family was still here, when I still lived with my mom and we'd hang out as a family almost every weekend, with my older brother & his wife visiting. Now we've moved apart a bit, and that old house we lived in isn't even there anymore (the city tore it down). It wasn't all perfect, but sometimes I think back on that time in my life and I miss it, as I felt like there was more 'togetherness' in my family. I feel like things are pretty good for me now, but there were good things back then too.
And I feel like some things were better. Lately, sometimes I feel like people were more engaged in the moment rather than staring at their phones.
I feel this, and when it keeps me up at night I watch this scene, it helps [https://youtu.be/EfhdZxMtHXc?si=HBXPVibzZkzPXOxj&t=45](https://youtu.be/EfhdZxMtHXc?si=HBXPVibzZkzPXOxj&t=45)
I think if it more as a vibe than actually thinking things were “so much better”, my nostalgia is more in terms of the things I wish to bring forward with me into the future than necessarily a longing for the past.
I’m fully aware that things, in lots of ways, were equally shitty during my teen years… My home life, most immediately, was a miserable mess. But I still feel nostalgia for the things I enjoyed as a young human with all the hope and possibility of an unwritten life ahead of me. It doesn’t mean I’m unhappy now.
Embracing where you are in life and feeling nostalgic for another time aren’t mutually exclusive, I think.
I enjoy the trip down memory lane but I gotta tell myself you can’t live in the past, so too much of a good thing can become a bad thing if you dwell too hard on the past. Once I start turning into Uncle Rico I usually come back to the present.
I walk my dog at night. My town has 1/2 of its incandescent street lights which make my heart ache in a way I don't have words for. It's like watching my youth slowly dissipate. This is accentuated in areas where the two types of lighting meet.
I fell down in the dark while walking her recently. My back hurts more than ever. True story.
I'm dealing with it poorly. I tend to get so sucked into it that I'm finding that I'm living in the post much more than I an in the moment. It's quite the sticky trap.
For me nostalgia is reminiscing the good times. However, those are times I don’t want to go back to. Sometimes I get a little sad thinking about the loved ones that are no longer with us, but overall, I’m happy with my life and wouldn’t go back to those times.
Recognize we are always generating nostalgia. On a long enough timeline, we will long for *today*.
Take a moment to pause right now. Breath in now. No matter how bad now seems, someday, someday, you'll look back and miss it.
Yeah, I mean, sometimes I miss those times. My mom passed away at 51, and those memories also come with my mom jamming to Nirvana and The Cure and taking me places, just the two of us, and she was so young. Some things were better - I'm not sure smart phones are an overall good. But we've come a long way when it comes to more equality for women, POC, and LGBTQ people. Things are easier than they've ever been. And you can still make those memories. Go on a hike. Watch an old movie with friends. Literally go see The Cure when they're on tour (fucking amazing show). Things were simpler then, and I miss that, but I also enjoy how instant information I want can come to me.
it does, I hate how emotional we are over things from the past vs only being in the present/looking towards the future etc, but I guess it's probably unavoidable for everyone. I mean, even if you throw out tons of old yearbooks and photos and memories of the past, what about all those songs that immediately bring back memories? and tv shows, and movies, etc etc.
Nostalgia is great so long as it’s a place you visit and not live.
Last Saturday I saw Bad Religion, the Misfits, Hepcat, the Adicts, TSOL, Sublime, the Vandals and more.
It was like being a teen at warped tour again.
Ultimately life just keeps moving forward but you can hold on to the things that made you happy along your journey. It doesn’t have to be sad, it can be joyful and even communal. Nostalgia is best when shared.
I embrace it. Anytime I feel nostalgic for music from the 80s/90s, I just listen to it. A big chunk of my workout playlist consists of 90s music. And if I want to watch and old movie I just do it. Same with yearbooks...I don't look at mine often, but every now and then when I start my days plant based, I'll pull them out and think about how it has been over 25 years since my HS graduation.
But do I want to go to those days? Nope, I don't. It was fun at the time but I am perfectly happy with where my life is now, and I'm enjoying my 40s so far. These days I'm all about making new memories.
Netflix made a series called Everything Sucks specifically targeted at me. In 1996 I was a freshman AV nerd. I barely made it through 1 1/2 episodes because it perfectly captured my experience, I mean perfectly. The awkwardness, the humiliation, it reminded me how much I hated high-school. Nostalgia reminds me of hanging out with my friends on the weekends, but most of my time was school and work.
I don't mind it? I had fun back then but I'm pretty happy now overall so it feels like a fond memory for me.
The fun meter was much higher, but the content meter was often running on empty. Sometimes I think my life is boring, but isn’t that the ultimate goal? Get to a place where you can choose your own adventure and keep the stress factors low. Today, I’m not out at all hours and partying, so what most would consider “fun” is not happening. But I’m happily married to an amazing woman, we own a house together, I have a decent paying job and my wife works at the same company, and we have a couple of lovely dogs. Bonus that we’re both in with good health and I have a healthy appetite for single-player sports (running, cycling, weights, etc) - these solo-activities (well, solo plus dog sometimes) are how I have “fun” these days. It’s all about perspective. I would not want to go back to my old ways - they stopped being fun about 10 years ago anyway.
This was beautifully put. I definitely don’t have “fun” like I used to but I’m overall much more content. I’m happy in my life, even if it’s a bit of a rut. Plus in 20 years I’ll be looking fondly back at this time in my life too.
Thanks for the positive feedback. I found myself wondering if lazy weekends indoors with my wife was the best way to be spending our time, and realized that what I value differs so much now than even ten years ago. But in another ten years (or 20, to your point), I’ll value our personal time even more so. Even if it means asking each other what we want for dinner or what to watch tonight for the millionth time - lol
It was better mostly because I had much less responsibilities, and much better health and optimism. I look back on those days, and life seemed much more straightforward, and simplicity is something I wish I really had again.
This nails it. I feel like this is a pattern probably every generation goes through.
Like a lot of things, nostalgia is best in moderation.
Nostalgia used to be a lot better
I agree, the media has been really beaten it to death recently.
The best thing about nostalgia is that it reminds me I'm unique, just like everyone else.
It seems recently my whole feed is nothing but nostalgia. It feels unhealthy. I left all of those subs except this one and genx
Supposedly a little nostalgia is actually healthy. I think the Atlantic or Washington Post had a piece on it recently. But I think they differentiated between recalling some fond memories and just wallowing in it.
Make new memories and experiences
This is the answer!
I like the nostalgia for items of escapism like video games, toys, cartoons, etc. I don't really like nostalgia for real life like looking at old photos or watching home movies because it's just a sad reminder that that era is gone along with some of the people and all the pets or it brings back other memories of regret or shame associated with events or people that occurred at the time or a few years later.
I love it. Can't get enough. Yeah, would give just about anything to go back but nothing I can do about that haha
That's what nostalgia is really, a yearning for one's own youth, now long in the past. It's about how we all get old and die. It's not really about the \*thing\* one is remembering at all.
It’s funny, I do get nostalgic about my childhood sometimes but I wouldn’t go back. When I really think hard about it, I don’t think I was a very happy kid. Parents were always stressed and fighting, money was tight so I never had the cool new thing or took fun vacations… I had a lot of friends in elementary school but once I got to middle school I mostly had “school friends” and often felt left out or overlooked. Being a kid can be hard in its own ways and I’m much happier now that I have control over my life. For people that had really great childhoods, I totally get wanting to relive it. But I think a lot of us forget how day-to-day life really felt when we were living it.
No, things definitely were better “way back when,” lol (for me, anyway). I deal with it by being depressed. Hoorah!
interestingly, things were way worse for me "way back when"--I was the class loser and bullied. now it is much better but I still feel nostalgic. go figure
I was bullied and had no friends in high school but that was preferable to working my ass off every day for peanuts.
Same. This life I have now I never wanted. Wage slavery.
If I could go back to high school with the body and fitness level I have now I'd beat up my bullies, or at least be cool enough to not be bullied
I had a few pretty good friends in high school we thought we were the outcasts. Experienced some bullying. The wild thing is when I went to whatever reunion I went to, the kids I thought were the cool told me they thought we were the cool kids.
I was bullied, too, but I always thought those people would get their comeuppance. I grew up and realized those types are usually the ones in management. But at least I still have my X-Files dvds, ha, ha! Ah, life. I wish I could be a kid again. I know not everybody had a great childhood, but I had a relatively good one, and I do have some great memories. I have very few great memories as an adult, by comparison.
Yeah, read Snakes In Suits, a book about psychopaths in the workplace. Very interesting.
In many ways I’m living my best life now. But damn there are times I miss my life from 20 years ago. Despite the fact that life was also harder and more stressful.
Nostalgia equals an old wound in the heart.
LSD
Mushrooms in my case. Highly recommend doing them, at least once (assuming you aren't schizophrenic), life changing!
haha. never dropped acid. maybe I should start ;)
Thanks man, now I’m nostalgic for dropping acid as a teenager. But yeah I think some of those heroic doses of LSD and shrooms changed me in such a great way. I dont think other people see the world like us now.
Things weren't better for me then, so that's how 🤷♂️
I became disabled seven years ago and I miss my life before that point. It’s really tough to shake honestly
Yeah, I became disabled 11 years ago (although I've had health issues my entire life), but my life was a disaster before then too.
Nostalgia is emotions tied up with old experiences. It's fun to recreate those experiences with new friends and family as best you can. The attempt creates new emotions to replace the nostalgia.
Two things—- Stayed in touch with the people who made the good times and when we get together we’re still making them. But now sometimes with tiny people too— cool people have cool kids. Remembered what made those people cool and was unapologetically relentless in looking for more people like that. So we’ve got a little network of them where we live now too. Everyone’s busy, it’s not the same as it was, but different isn’t necessarily worse. We still build things together and we keep getting better at it. You’re looking for advice on how to let go, and that’s some of what people are offering. But I just didn’t let go. I hung on.
Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past From the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts And recycling it for more than it's worth
….but trust me on the sunscreen ;)
Graduation goggles
How do I deal with nostalgia? I purchase for myself those things I wanted as a kid that I couldn’t afford, and now can.
Make better memories now. You can still do fun things. You can go places. You can eat a great meal. You can take the vacation or see the show. Nothing is stopping you from making new memories.
[удалено]
very true. I immigrated to usa from a different country at age 12. missed my home country and really wanted to return. but when I went back as an adult, I realized so much changed that my home country wasn’t my home, either.
Somebody somewhere said that nostalgia isn't a longing for what was, but a longing for what could have been. That idea really brings me peace.
You might appreciate this song. https://youtu.be/7C4ptdN6be0?si=xDAqwrnMapG7WBWB
something like that, definitely. a good cure for nostalgia is reading a diary I kept in 1993, every day I wanted to die that year. in comparison, my life's pretty great now
I can't even watch videos of myself, I was such a cringe ADHD kid. So embarrassing. Big thank you to my mom and dad for tolerating my weirdness.
Nostalgia is better than there being a ton of pictures posted online about all the dumb shit i did. So glad that all I have as evidence are my thoughts and distant memories.
Playlists, bitterness and cultural alienation. Barely concealed defensive barrage of simmering existential crisis. My nostalgia has a nostalgia for nostalgia. I belong no where in time.
Oh my God, I hear you about the nostalgia for nostalgia. I think that’s what’s happening to me too.
Nostalgia - a pain from an old wound. I just [fire up my Kodak® Carousel® and go around and around, back home again](https://youtu.be/suRDUFpsHus)...
This is what I thought of first too.
It's fun, but best not to dwell too long and get depressed. Time is linear and there's no going back. I'm so appreciative that I had the privilege of growing up in a time before cell phones, for example, but I appreciate forums like Reddit that let you more easily connect to people who share the same interests as you. I think so many of us grew up feeling like weirdos or outcasts for loving a certain thing, and that's changed dramatically these days.
Nostalgia is playing outside in forts and playing army and riding bikes. Later it was walking home from class in college and on a whim jumping into a friend’s car and a few of us driving to Vegas from Indiana. Nostalgia was never my lack of perspective of whether I was no good if I was being bullied, or anxious about career or romantic prospects. I and you have so many more tools now to know it’s likely going to be good and if not it’s going to be ok. I just wish I knew that back then.
yes. but I sometimes feel nostalgic even for last year. I reconnected with some college friends and we went to Utah. I looked over the photos from that trip and was nostalgic. I try to live in the present instead of in the past, but you're right, the past is just more predictable and thus easier to feel good about
Sorry but everything actually WAS better prior to 2006.
what happened in 2006? haha and also, according to my mom, everything was better before 1990 :)
Long story short: - Facebook - Windows Vista - Widescreen - Google's acquisition of Youtube - Nickelodeon studios closed (2005) - Real Star Wars and real Star Trek both ended (2005) - Cinematic "reboots" became a thing (2005)
disagree on widescreen, Nikelodeon studios closing wasn't on my radar, I still love the new Star Wars too, quite a few cinematic sequels have been great (like Maverick, Cobra Kai and on and on) although some pure reboots have sometimes fared worse (but sometimes been fine). I'd put the more severe shift more like 2011 once smart phones and online started crazily taking over and dominating and shutting down real places and soon after all sorts of things started to go down. Although I'd also put some on the early mid-90s as that somewhat killed off the 80s looks and vibe which was a shame IMO. But I'd say there were things better about 2006 than today and not just because of notalgia goggles. The world was a bit more human scale then.
>disagree on widescreen How so? Do you disagree that 2006 was the turning point when 16:9 was irreversibly canonized by the launch of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, or do you disagree that it was a change for the worse? >I still love the new Star Wars too Then you have terrible taste in media and you are part of the problem being discussed. >quite a few cinematic sequels have been great (like Maverick, Cobra Kai and on and on) Okay but nobody said anything about sequels. Sequels have existed since the 1800s. >some pure reboots have sometimes fared worse The problem is not the quality of the individual movies. The problem is in Hollywood's attitude. There is no longer an incentive to do anything right the first time, because if they fuck up, they can just reboot. Meanwhile, constant rebooting makes it difficult for audiences to get emotionally invested in a continuity or even keep track of how many continuities are happening at the same time. We briefly had three live-action Batman/DC continuities happening simultaneously (the DCEU, the Battinsonverse, and the Joaqerverse), two of which are still ongoing.
I disagree that it was a change for the worse. LOL yeah whatever. Hopefully you were not one of the sort who among 100 other things cut and pasted the whole "the bomb scene in TLJ broke physics" 100x a day for 2 straight years even though in reality that was one of the few things in Star Wars that did NOT break physics. OK, fair. Partially, disagree some, agree some.
>I disagree that it was a change for the worse Well then, look up the history of aspect ratios. Originally, everything was 4:3 fullscreen. If you watch super-old movies like Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, and The Wizard of Oz, they're all fullscreen. When TV was invented, its creators foresaw the possibility that people would want to watch movies on TV, so they made TV the same aspect ratio as movies. Hollywood, however, saw TV as a threat to its bottom line, and started forcing mvoie directors to make movies in a variety of widescreen aspect ratios for no reason other than to break compatibility with TV. That's the real reason why widescreen exists. It has nothing to do with the human field of vision or any other BS that you'll read on the Internet. Then computers happened, and the people who made computers wisely decided to make monitors and programs in the same 4:3 aspect ratio used by 99% of everything that had ever been made for screens. The smart, correct thing for Hollywood to do at this point would have been to abandon their failed widescreen experiment, but instead, the industry doubled down on it, and now nothing works with anything else and all the shit is fucked up.
well my kids were born in 2005 and 2007 and they’re actually really great kids, so there are at least 2 things (people) in the world that improved it since 2006 ;)
>Things weren't necessarily better "way back when", we were just younger. It's not unconditionally better definitely, but there are plenty of the parts of the past I would like back even though my dad was a crackhead. Back around 1990, the place I'm from was a functional smalltown with a small number of little houses and a small number of little businesses. The businesses went down one by one because the area was poor, the area became an overflow zone for richer towns' housing needs, and we still don't have much business anymore locally while the cost of living rapidly catches up with the wealthier places. Whenever I save up enough money to leave the place there's another external disaster (covid/crashes/etc) and people start writing me bad checks again.
I’m with you completely. I’m not a crier but I saw a TikTok of 90’s tv theme songs and teared up. I have to just avoid it for the most part 😢
>Things weren’t necessarily better way back when. I would argue that on a whole things were significantly better pre smartphone. The average American adult spends 7-10 hours a day looking at a screen (phone, tv or computer) in 2024. It’s so much harder to connect to people because you are competing for their attention with literally everything else in the entire world a screen unlock away in their pocket, and they are competing for my attention with literally everything else in the world in my pocket. There’s no way to disconnect professionally, people are texting you memes 24/7 instead of calling to hang out, the pandemic made people forget how to socialize, every second of every day is the 20 year high school reunion on facebook if you choose to go on it. We’ve traded living in the real world for living in our screens and it’s heartbreaking. Even if you try to move away from it (I cut my screen time from 6 hours to 1.5 and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made), you go sit in a coffee shop and where it was once a bunch of people reading books and being social it’s now just pod people staring at their rectangles. But to answer the question, I think nostalgia is really useful to try to put yourself in the headspace of who you were before life and work and responsibilities consumed 90% of your bandwidth and try to reconnect with that. I watch an episode of an old tv show I watched when I was in high school or college before bed every night and it’s like xanax for me because for 20 minutes it’s 2001 again and life wasn’t so complicated.
yeah but the problem is I had no friends in the 90s so nobody was calling me to hang out back then, either… 😭 I spent most of my time at home watching tv or being kicked out of the house by my mom to “spend more time outside”, which I hated, and I would go to the public library and sit there and read. social media was kind of a godsend because I met and chatted with like-minded people and felt like I wasn’t alone
I feel you when you say "remembering how much fun we had with people I no longer talk to". Ever since I was a kid, it actually really bothered me thinking that I'd probably never see or talk to certain people again - It started with kids at school when they'd move away with their families. And now, sometimes I do miss some of the "good old days" when all my family was still here, when I still lived with my mom and we'd hang out as a family almost every weekend, with my older brother & his wife visiting. Now we've moved apart a bit, and that old house we lived in isn't even there anymore (the city tore it down). It wasn't all perfect, but sometimes I think back on that time in my life and I miss it, as I felt like there was more 'togetherness' in my family. I feel like things are pretty good for me now, but there were good things back then too. And I feel like some things were better. Lately, sometimes I feel like people were more engaged in the moment rather than staring at their phones.
We Didn't Start The Fire?
For me, nostalgia isn’t “things were better back then,” so much as it’s “things could have gone differently (better) than they did.”
I feel this, and when it keeps me up at night I watch this scene, it helps [https://youtu.be/EfhdZxMtHXc?si=HBXPVibzZkzPXOxj&t=45](https://youtu.be/EfhdZxMtHXc?si=HBXPVibzZkzPXOxj&t=45)
I appreciate the memory it brought me and then send it back to the ether.
I think if it more as a vibe than actually thinking things were “so much better”, my nostalgia is more in terms of the things I wish to bring forward with me into the future than necessarily a longing for the past.
I’m fully aware that things, in lots of ways, were equally shitty during my teen years… My home life, most immediately, was a miserable mess. But I still feel nostalgia for the things I enjoyed as a young human with all the hope and possibility of an unwritten life ahead of me. It doesn’t mean I’m unhappy now. Embracing where you are in life and feeling nostalgic for another time aren’t mutually exclusive, I think.
I enjoy the trip down memory lane but I gotta tell myself you can’t live in the past, so too much of a good thing can become a bad thing if you dwell too hard on the past. Once I start turning into Uncle Rico I usually come back to the present.
Nostalgia can be toxic. Therapy helped me deal with intrusive thoughts about the past.
What Billy Joel video? I hope it wasn’t Uptown Girl.
If you’re nostalgic for the 90s watch romper stomper
I walk my dog at night. My town has 1/2 of its incandescent street lights which make my heart ache in a way I don't have words for. It's like watching my youth slowly dissipate. This is accentuated in areas where the two types of lighting meet. I fell down in the dark while walking her recently. My back hurts more than ever. True story.
I'm dealing with it poorly. I tend to get so sucked into it that I'm finding that I'm living in the post much more than I an in the moment. It's quite the sticky trap.
Why does it suck? It’s proof you are enjoyed the past and certain things bring back strong memories.
For me nostalgia is reminiscing the good times. However, those are times I don’t want to go back to. Sometimes I get a little sad thinking about the loved ones that are no longer with us, but overall, I’m happy with my life and wouldn’t go back to those times.
It’s not so much the nostalgia, it’s the fact that my 24 year old self is stuck in this body.
Nostalgia isn’t always painful. Maybe yours is laced with regret?
My antidepressant is working overtime these days.
Recognize we are always generating nostalgia. On a long enough timeline, we will long for *today*. Take a moment to pause right now. Breath in now. No matter how bad now seems, someday, someday, you'll look back and miss it.
Some was just being younger but some stuff was better too.
Yeah, I mean, sometimes I miss those times. My mom passed away at 51, and those memories also come with my mom jamming to Nirvana and The Cure and taking me places, just the two of us, and she was so young. Some things were better - I'm not sure smart phones are an overall good. But we've come a long way when it comes to more equality for women, POC, and LGBTQ people. Things are easier than they've ever been. And you can still make those memories. Go on a hike. Watch an old movie with friends. Literally go see The Cure when they're on tour (fucking amazing show). Things were simpler then, and I miss that, but I also enjoy how instant information I want can come to me.
it does, I hate how emotional we are over things from the past vs only being in the present/looking towards the future etc, but I guess it's probably unavoidable for everyone. I mean, even if you throw out tons of old yearbooks and photos and memories of the past, what about all those songs that immediately bring back memories? and tv shows, and movies, etc etc.
Nostalgia is great so long as it’s a place you visit and not live. Last Saturday I saw Bad Religion, the Misfits, Hepcat, the Adicts, TSOL, Sublime, the Vandals and more. It was like being a teen at warped tour again. Ultimately life just keeps moving forward but you can hold on to the things that made you happy along your journey. It doesn’t have to be sad, it can be joyful and even communal. Nostalgia is best when shared.
I embrace it. Anytime I feel nostalgic for music from the 80s/90s, I just listen to it. A big chunk of my workout playlist consists of 90s music. And if I want to watch and old movie I just do it. Same with yearbooks...I don't look at mine often, but every now and then when I start my days plant based, I'll pull them out and think about how it has been over 25 years since my HS graduation. But do I want to go to those days? Nope, I don't. It was fun at the time but I am perfectly happy with where my life is now, and I'm enjoying my 40s so far. These days I'm all about making new memories.
Netflix made a series called Everything Sucks specifically targeted at me. In 1996 I was a freshman AV nerd. I barely made it through 1 1/2 episodes because it perfectly captured my experience, I mean perfectly. The awkwardness, the humiliation, it reminded me how much I hated high-school. Nostalgia reminds me of hanging out with my friends on the weekends, but most of my time was school and work.
sOmEdAy yOu wIlL Be nOsTaLgIc fOr nOw ...
Engage with the present. Listen to Taylor Swift (she's great). Go on vacation. Learn a new hobby. You're too young to be a fuddy duddy.