nostalgia in the age of escapism.

Hi! this is my first blog so I figured I would tell you something interesting that happened this weekend that led me to write this. 

On Sunday evening whilst clearing out some boxes in the spare room I came across some old photographs of my dad and his brother as children, I saw my dad celebrate his own 10th birthday, many Christmas' and New years all in a few moments. I wonder if he remembers those moments or if they have slipped away, eroded by time, deteriorated, and forgotten like an old roll of film. 

Even though these are not my memories, I still feel nostalgic when I see them, it's vicarious nostalgia if that's even possible. I wasn't there, I wasn't even alive. In my head, there is this vague concept of 'before', a time when things were more simple than they are today. Old pictures are a perfect symbol of this. It's weird this nostalgia for other people's memories, but there's a universality to these old pictures as if the warm tones of grainy pictures compose the language of longing and memory harking back to a past I don't remember and didn't experience but still feel drawn to. 

These old pictures, along with other cultural artifacts like vinyl records or the potent combination of synth and neon lettering represent collective memories, shared ideas of the past, beyond our personal experiences, another time, another place, before. This ignores all of the negative aspects of the past, favouring instead a romanticised dream granting bygone time a manufactured appeal. It's a cynical sentiment that the future can only be worse and that the best is always behind us, receding away as we drive into the abyss of the future. The past has a potential energy to it; the idea of existing in pre-nostalgic times, before everything that has happened since. Past futures in retrospect seem bright, sunny, and attractive when compared with today but the grand shame is that we can only see this by looking back. It is invisible when right in front of us. 

In the 17th century nostalgia was a disease; severe homesickness was first diagnosed in swiss mercenaries fighting in France, they had longed for their homeland, and sending them back was the only cure. Since then the definition of nostalgia has evolved from a longing for a place to a longing for time, somewhere we cant go. There is no cure for nostalgia that exists today, we only have a treatment, escapism. Reveling in all we have of the past, the trinkets and souvenirs, pictures, videos, television shows, and the shared experience of growing up in the unique atmospheres of our respective childhood decades. 

We have surrounded ourselves with the past as a cushion of sorts; incubating us in a womb that shields us from the harshness of reality. As a result, time doesn't go away anymore instead it's just put on a shelf, where it persists in syndication a perpetual ambiance to modern life, a coping mechanism in the face of rapid change. Cultural nostalgia, as we may call it is not new, but our new relationship with it is. The internet has provided unhindered access to an exhaustive archive of cultural memory eliminating the scarcity of the past in a pre-digital age and replacing it with a sheer abundance. 

The 2000s were the first truly digital decade and the first decade that saw widespread use of the public internet. So alongside the spike in innovation and globalisation, the naughts were also categorised by the intoxication of what came before. Simultaneously shoving us into the future but tugging us into the past. This is neither bad nor good because nostalgia isn't necessarily derivative, it can also be productive and creative. Still, this begs the question and consideration of how our own time will be defined and remembered. The archival power of the internet has given rise to a movement of temporal and cultural preservation. Now that we can capture time in a bottle and re-examine it whenever we would like, we don't really have to let it go. 

With the modern world changing so fast we find ourselves hurtling into the uncertainty of the future at an ever-accelerating rate. We are thrust into a tomorrow when we're unwilling immigrants of yesterday, pining for the comfort and familiarity of a homeland we can never revisit. 

Nostalgia in moderation may be a healthy indulgence; a comforting lie we tell ourselves and willingly buy into in order to adapt to an increasingly globalised, ever-changing world. It's an inevitable product of our time. When we outgrow the shell of childhood innocence and must face the harshness of the world, in times of despair and uncertainty when we are overwhelmed with feelings of hopelessness, nostalgia provides a valuable escape. It is natural for us to take solace in the past and its perceived simplicity and relative innocence, in its certainty. it has become essential for this digital day in age and in the shadow of a 24-hour news cycle, that we find viable needs of coping and that has been through many things, through nostalgic escapism. 

So no, it isn't good or bad, it can heal when called upon, and it can also deceive when too much trust is placed in its warm embrace. I think many of us feel that if we could relive a memory dear to us, we would cherish it more. if we could transport ourselves back and live it again we would relish its warmth and its brevity, we breathe it in before it yet again disappears as time always does, without much warning and without much care. The funny thing is nostalgia requires separation, a distance in time, and an acceptance that what's gone is unretrievable, otherwise, the spell doesn't work. All we can do is examine our memories; a souvenir, a song, pictures and videos, a comforting glimpse of the way we were through a window, separate, distant, and with a longing that can never be cured, and remind ourselves that we're an infinite product of where we have been, that memory is real even if they no longer exist. They happened and they disappeared and we kept something from them, some token of their passage through time, and only in that way can we revisit what cant be retrieved before the tap runs out and it goes back on the shelf. I think that's why this website exists, it pays homage to a bygone era that we are only playing in for we shall never experience social media in the naughts. That's nostalgia, even if we didn't experience it for ourselves.

Thank you for reading.