Nostalgia - A 21st Century Mental Illness

I am of the belief that Nostalgia should at times be defined as a mental illness, the same way it was in "the olden days".

With the proliferation of the internet over the last ten years, time has flown by. This isn't because everything's fun, far from it. Time doesn't only fly when you're having a good time, it flies when you're preoccupied with any task. You can sit down in a desk, in a cubicle, at a job you hate and know you hate - and 15 years can disappear in the blink of an eye.

I don't say this to upset anyone, I'm not trying to scare anyone either. Time is a precious commodity, but that's not the point of this blog.

With the passage of time seemingly amplified in the face of algorithms dedicated to increasing interaction online, I feel as though people everywhere, myself included, have been robbed of countless years - and will continue to be. More often than not, I try to act like this never happened, and I find myself consuming media and the like from ten to twenty years ago - in what I assume is some form of coping mechanism.

It was in the middle of a jury-rigged cartoon, commercial, and bumper compilation - seeking to emulate the feeling of watching Cartoon Network in the early 2000's - that I clued into the fact that this likely isn't healthy.

"Get busy living, or get busy dying". These words are burned into my subconscious, they have been since I was a kid and watched "The Shawshank Redemption" for the first time. What do you do if something is stopping you from living? What if thinking about facing the modern world horrifies you? What if the well has already been poisoned, and all you see when you look out at the town, city, or world around you is something bleak - which will never in a million years ever resemble the world you grew up in? What do you do when the world around you changes faster than you feel you can?

Then you creep back into the familiar and comforting memories of "what used to be".

Nostalgia has become an integral aspect of day to day life for much of America at this point, and coupled with the realization that many times it goes above and beyond passing interest in the past - to outright obsession with the past - that this has begun to concern me.

You ever use tiktok? I didn't used to, I tried my damnedest to stay away from it, but I have friends and my friends like to peer pressure me. The algorithm starting recommending me nostalgia posts, immediately. Never have I been more concerned with the results I was getting. Midwest Emo over pictures of teenagers rooms from 2006, obsessive collections of ancient fast food promotions, commercials, and the like, countless pictures of gloomy suburban neighborhoods at dusk, Halloween decorations from 20 years ago in houses that haven't housed those families in years. You get the point.

When I was freshly unemployed from my dream job at 18, I got obsessed with "Full Metal Jacket", as I was seriously considering a military career to pay the bills. One scene, right at the end, where all the soldiers are marching through the fiery Vietnamese hellscape, and singing a song about the "Mickey Mouse Club", that has stuck with me. A bunch of men who were just barely men, thrown into an unfamiliar and unrelenting reality, and the only way that they could rationalize it in their mind was to revert to this childish mindset, to regress back to days when bullets weren't tearing them and their friends to shreds, to try and recapture some of the magic in a world which could not stop beating them into the ground.

Anytime I see a "nostalgia post" - it's never happy. It's miserably depressing. Near suicidal in the energy it gives off. It seems like a ghost looking back on the world he used to live in, never able to give it up, and never able to move on to the great here-after. It always goes past passing interest, and it always gives me a bad gut feeling to see it anymore.

Arrested Development. It's a term that gets used here and there, everyone uses it differently - but it's when something goes wrong developmentally, and you just don't develop in a necessary capacity. It always happens to different people differently. One minute they're fine, and then they're thrown into a situation they can't function in, and they revert to instinct - whether they become combative and aggressive or depressed and pitiful is up to them.

I am of the firm and unflinching belief that excessive Nostalgia is a mental disorder, either a form of or akin to Arrested Development, and that it's prevalence in society today will led to nothing good.

To only ever look back is to never think about the future. To only fixate on the past and "where it all went wrong" is to never solve the problems that did go wrong and make sure they never happen again. To obsess over the media of the past is not only to ignore the media of today - but to never craft or create the media of the future.

It's not over till it's over. You miss the good old days? They can come back again, you just gotta find a way to do your part. If only you knew how different things could be.

Happy Halloween.