I think people are always nostalgic for a time about 20 years before they were born.
Nostalgia is very powerful.
Nostalgia is one of the legitimate and certainly one of the most enduring of human emotions; but the politics of nostalgia is at best distracting, at worst pernicious.
Nostalgia has become so much more popular because technology and climate change are visibly present. It's easy to idolize the past, before those things were prevalent.
How many people long for that "past, simpler, and better world," I wonder, without ever recognizing the truth that perhaps it was they who were simpler and better, and not the world about them?
Nostalgia often leads to idle speculation.
I try not to be overly nostalgic, and I don't use nostalgia to be kitschy.
The scenes and events of long ago, and the persons who took part in them, wear a charming aspect to the eye of memory, which sees only the outlines and takes no note of disagreeable details. The present enjoys no such advantage, and so it always seems defective.
You look back at a time you idealize now and you only remember the good stuff. You tell the stories about the hard stuff and just laugh about it now. You don't remember how difficult it was to be stranded in Austin after driving 52 hours from Seattle in a rainstorm and having nowhere to stay for five hours. You remember that stuff and laugh about it now. You don't feel it the way you did back then when you were so scared and nervous and tired and hungry. We always idealize the past because we don't feel the painful stuff the way we used to.
I went through a phase where I thought nostalgia was a bad thing.
I hate nostalgia, I want nothing to do with it.
