I Struggle With Nostalgia

I always have.

Before, it was that my nostalgia lacked the sweetness to avenge the bitterness. The past was never a safe haven to rebuild and rejuvenate. It was a place to dissociate and question. Did we always only ever talk about the weather or the dog? Everything was so surface level.

Now the sweetness has returned, but there are still lots of questions to answer.

I do wonder about the amount of nostalgia that’s involved in my entertainment. I listen to football podcasts talking about the past, despite the fact I haven’t watched a game live in years. Pundits glamorising former footballers who were “unstoppable on their day.” It seems like every single footballer was one day unstoppable. We need to remember that footballers aren’t smart—they were the cunts at school that were good at football. They’re just rich now and have been through media training and learned to list things in threes. Why do I listen? How can I have little to no interest in modern football and still care so much about football from the 2000s? It’s still the same game.

Sometimes on YouTube, old wrestling videos get suggested to me, and I watch and re-evaluate what I saw when I was younger. For example, Triple H was absolutely massive. All these cunts were insanely big—guys billed as cruiserweights were the size of UFC heavyweights.

I re-watch TV series that I’ve seen numerous, numerous times. I re-watch movies I’ve seen numerous, numerous times. How many more times am I going to rewatch The Big Short? And it does give me comfort—or rather, it must give me comfort. They are great. They do hold up. They are absolute quality. But I do wonder about how I’m not ingesting anything new.

Rather, I’ll introduce things to people. I introduced Mad Men, for example, to my girlfriend. But what am I learning? What am I discovering?

I don’t even watch the UFC anymore. I used to wake up at 3 a.m. every weekend to watch it. I remember reading once that losing joy in things you used to love is a sign of depression. But I’m the happiest I’ve ever been—so why don’t I give a fuck anymore?

I don’t want to be too much of a conspiracy theorist or something, but it seems like the powers that be are happy with us being lost in nostalgia. And there’s certainly money to be made, and all the new shit the young people will watch. It’s all just reaction videos. People pretending they’ve never heard Nirvana before. That’s what counts as content now.

And I don’t know—before, it used to be the 50-year-olds saying “this generation’s got no taste.” But now it’s people in their late 20s or mid-20s. There’s such a gulf of difference in taste between someone my age and someone 19. The way my dad will still sit and watch Porridge, I’ll sit and rewatch Breaking Bad. I think what they watch is absolute pish and they’re only nine years younger than me.

How can it be that we are so different when it’s only been nine years?

The students I teach—I don’t think they even watch TV. So what is their nostalgia going to be? What are they ever going to be nostalgic about?

Even with Spotify, Shuffle isn’t even fucking random. You used to discover a song, add it to a playlist, then fall in love with the band. Now it’s the same shit again and again. They don’t want you to discover anything new.

And it’s the same with Instagram and every social media platform. It used to be chronological—whoever uploaded most recently, that’s what you’d see. Now it’s algorithm after algorithm, forcing the same opinions, the same aesthetics, the same fucking people down your throat until you never change.

Sometimes I think I don’t want to keep being proven right. Because if I’m right, then what’s the fucking point? There’s no joy left in being correct.

There is no tidy conclusion here. Nostalgia waves in between comfort and entrapment, and it will continue to do so.