why your happy childhood memories MUST be destroyed
It's been my growing feeling that nostalgia is a form of serious mental illness. And, unfortunately, it's one that nearly everyone in the Western world seems to have "caught," myself included.
One of the 900 reasons why I, as an atheist, still pray every morning that Facebook's data centers will burn to the ground: the deadly combination of Facebook users with third-party clickbait bullshit. You know the sites: Buzzfeed, Cracked, whatever. Sites that tirelessly toil to make already unbearable social networking environments even more unbearable, all for questionably small financial gain.
No idiotic list of five to fifty things, typically things from the past which seem to have been assembled for no other reason than OH HEY REMEMBER WHEN THIS!, is beneath these people. And while I have a pretty smart and very carefully selected f-list on the Facebooks, 75-80% of said f-list still falls for and reposts one of these idiotic lists onto ever-more-soulless Facebook at least once a month.
Why, just ten minutes ago, one of my smart, carefully-selected friends shat this directly into my Facebook news feed. "At least my mom never let me have a Hypercolor shirt!"
Wow, thank you, friend. Thank you for sharing (and commenting so profoundly upon) this incredibly valuable content, reminding us that certain material things existed and were popular in the 90s. This link and your subsequent "interpretation" truly helps me understand you as a person. Specifically, it helps me understand that as you've aged, you've become completely fucking boring, unoriginal, and most likely 100% dead inside.
(hrm, maybe that's a little harsh. ...nah.)
In the real world, I spend a lot of time hanging out with another generation of nostalgic saps. My mancave / rehearsal space is in a shared commercial space with a guy 20 years my senior. He does a lot of "horse trading" (his words, not mine) in vintage stereo equipment, particularly stuff from the 1970s. (It's a long and not particularly interesting story as to how this bizarre "living arrangement" came about, although I do have a bit of an interest in stereo gear myself.)
Basically, since I'm often there when my business-roommate does his business, I now know every guy within 30 miles who is still interested in this stuff. I see the same ten guys coming in at least once a week each. They are like junkies, except that they've all had longer lives than typical junkies (save William S. Burroughs). Oh, and instead of totally using up the stuff they consume, they're caught in a never-ending whirlwind of swapping said stuff at some inevitable degree of financial loss, in order to make room for the next new old thing that has found its way into my "roommate's" collection.
I wouldn't be able to totally begrudge the boomers if I knew they were buying it as a relic of manufacturing and beautifully overbuilt design from bygone days. The craftsmanship and attention to aesthetic detail on these old pieces is something you'll never find on new gear, which-- while it is often perfectly capable of outperforming the old stuff, thanks to innumerable technical advances-- is made to a price point, and it shows.
But the impeccable craft of the old stuff is not why these guys are interested. They are interested because they were teenagers in the 1970s, when everyone was a) into huge stereo systems and b) constantly high. See, Those Were The Good Old Days.
And their interest in period equipment parallels their limited interest in music: if the music didn't come out before 1983, they're not interested. They're in their late 50s, early 60s and still reliving their teenage fantasy-- hearing Zeppelin on the biggest, chrome-iest, loudest system that will fit in the living room, the stuff that they could only dream about as they thumbed through Audio magazine in study hall in 1974.
This, to me, is much more damning, and it's everything I never wanted to be. I swore when I was 18 that I would never grow up to fetishize the music that was current when I was 18; that, to me, was the ultimate indicator of a weak intellect and willingly acquiescing to soul-death.
And to an extent, indeed, I've done a pretty good job keeping that from happening. Instead, I mostly fetishize the music that was current when I was 23, 25.
My 31-year-old wife and I will be at a thrift store and she'll point at a pair of womens' shoes. "I bet you think these are sexy," she says. She's usually right, and then she giggles and rolls her eyes when 37-year-old me admits an attraction. She says that when she plays this trick, she just looks for stuff that looks like it was made in 1995. Me, I can't even tell. They still look to me like they were made yesterday. And they're fuggin' hot. (You'd think she'd buy and wear such a $2 pair to turn me on, but... y'know, married life.)
Aside from shoes, I don't care for much fashion from the 90s. But I do deeply fetishize certain other periods in "material history." Interestingly, it's usually stuff that came out when I was a young or very young child.
Example: I could give a damn less about cars, but I do love bikes... certain bikes. Motorcycles only look good to me if they have the look of the so-called 70s / early 80s UJM ("universal Japanese motorcycle"). Note that link is just so you can see a few pics of what I'm talking about, not anything I expect you to read. They truly don't make bikes like that any more, making only garish outsized "Harley dresser" knockoffs and even-dumber-looking plasticky sportbikes. It perplexes and angers me.
The really weird thing is, I didn't start riding until I turned 30, no one else in my family rides, and so I never really noticed motorcycles at all until ca. 2006. But show me a bike made after 1985 and I'll nearly always detest its looks, while these guys riding $1000 Carter-era Kawasaki beaters can't figure out why the guy in the Hyundai hatchback won't stop staring lustfully at them. The compulsion makes no more sense to the guy in the Hyundai.
As a musician / gear-hoarder I'm not much better. Most of my vast stash of equipment is stuff dating between 1975 and 1995, because that's the stuff I like. Thankfully, late 70s / 80s / early 90s gear fetishes are relatively cheap, versus the guys who absolutely must have a Fender Stratocaster made in 1963 and no later. (Those guys all ended up getting super-high-paying jobs just so they could afford the pointless objects of their desire. We derisively call them "tone attorneys" in certain snarky-hater musical circles of the Internet.)
I believe nostalgia is an irrational and useless evolutionary defect, one which is absolutely cancerous when suffered by a group of people en masse. It has reached epidemic levels and has choked off possible further progress in our society. We have reached a cultural lull, a virtual stop. It's all nostalgia's fault.
We fetishize all these products made in eras when people were only looking forward to a hopeful tomorrow, pushing the limits as far as they could. In the case of someone nostalgic for / obsessed with, say, aerospace / flight achievements of the late 1950s and early 1960s, it's a kind of admission that we've already fallen.
And I find this is not only true in cases of seemingly-harmless material retrofetishism, but in general. The advancement of art of all kinds has come to a complete stop. Radical changes in law, in social programs are no longer something Americans can deal with, even when they would obviously benefit us as a society.
We refuse to take necessary risks, or encourage / reward those who do. We forget that we made our "great society" entirely on the payoff of the sorts of risks which would never be accepted or funded today.
We've hit a weird, unforeseen kind of Moore's Law that applies not to technology but to us as a culture, as thinkers. In a way, I often feel we are actually radically regressing as we keep staring numbly into the abyss of history. The societies that are looking and pressing forward are the ones that will shortly end up carrying the torch.
...Well, I say that, but those cultures have been afflicted with nostalgia as well. My shop-roommate had a Vietnamese buyer come through and drop $25k in cash on his old, ratty stereo gear... $25k for stuff my shopmate would have been lucky to sell domestically on eBay for $15k, $20k. The buyer was looking to bring it all back to Vietnam and resell it there and/or in China for $75k, and he was 100% confident he'd get it even after half of it disappeared "mysteriously" on the freighter.
See, in China / Vietnam, they're still fetishizing equipment they heard about in hushed, legendary tones when the Japanese were over here "buying up America" in the 1970s. In many cases, the buyers are younger than the gear they want so badly and have never even seen this stuff in pictures before, so you'd think they would be immune to hyperbolic marketing of decades past. Not so.
And never mind that China is in fact willing to build and sell me a brand new amplifier ten times as clean, efficient, powerful, and good-sounding as anything ever made in the 1970s for about sixty bucks shipped. But show the right Chinese dude a lousy 1969 McIntosh amplifier made in the US of A, something worth about a thou tops to a US boomer... and said Chinese dude will pony up five grand in ill-begotten cash for it under the table.
...Yep, we're all gonna die.
One of the 900 reasons why I, as an atheist, still pray every morning that Facebook's data centers will burn to the ground: the deadly combination of Facebook users with third-party clickbait bullshit. You know the sites: Buzzfeed, Cracked, whatever. Sites that tirelessly toil to make already unbearable social networking environments even more unbearable, all for questionably small financial gain.
No idiotic list of five to fifty things, typically things from the past which seem to have been assembled for no other reason than OH HEY REMEMBER WHEN THIS!, is beneath these people. And while I have a pretty smart and very carefully selected f-list on the Facebooks, 75-80% of said f-list still falls for and reposts one of these idiotic lists onto ever-more-soulless Facebook at least once a month.
Why, just ten minutes ago, one of my smart, carefully-selected friends shat this directly into my Facebook news feed. "At least my mom never let me have a Hypercolor shirt!"
Wow, thank you, friend. Thank you for sharing (and commenting so profoundly upon) this incredibly valuable content, reminding us that certain material things existed and were popular in the 90s. This link and your subsequent "interpretation" truly helps me understand you as a person. Specifically, it helps me understand that as you've aged, you've become completely fucking boring, unoriginal, and most likely 100% dead inside.
(hrm, maybe that's a little harsh. ...nah.)
In the real world, I spend a lot of time hanging out with another generation of nostalgic saps. My mancave / rehearsal space is in a shared commercial space with a guy 20 years my senior. He does a lot of "horse trading" (his words, not mine) in vintage stereo equipment, particularly stuff from the 1970s. (It's a long and not particularly interesting story as to how this bizarre "living arrangement" came about, although I do have a bit of an interest in stereo gear myself.)
Basically, since I'm often there when my business-roommate does his business, I now know every guy within 30 miles who is still interested in this stuff. I see the same ten guys coming in at least once a week each. They are like junkies, except that they've all had longer lives than typical junkies (save William S. Burroughs). Oh, and instead of totally using up the stuff they consume, they're caught in a never-ending whirlwind of swapping said stuff at some inevitable degree of financial loss, in order to make room for the next new old thing that has found its way into my "roommate's" collection.
I wouldn't be able to totally begrudge the boomers if I knew they were buying it as a relic of manufacturing and beautifully overbuilt design from bygone days. The craftsmanship and attention to aesthetic detail on these old pieces is something you'll never find on new gear, which-- while it is often perfectly capable of outperforming the old stuff, thanks to innumerable technical advances-- is made to a price point, and it shows.
But the impeccable craft of the old stuff is not why these guys are interested. They are interested because they were teenagers in the 1970s, when everyone was a) into huge stereo systems and b) constantly high. See, Those Were The Good Old Days.
And their interest in period equipment parallels their limited interest in music: if the music didn't come out before 1983, they're not interested. They're in their late 50s, early 60s and still reliving their teenage fantasy-- hearing Zeppelin on the biggest, chrome-iest, loudest system that will fit in the living room, the stuff that they could only dream about as they thumbed through Audio magazine in study hall in 1974.
This, to me, is much more damning, and it's everything I never wanted to be. I swore when I was 18 that I would never grow up to fetishize the music that was current when I was 18; that, to me, was the ultimate indicator of a weak intellect and willingly acquiescing to soul-death.
And to an extent, indeed, I've done a pretty good job keeping that from happening. Instead, I mostly fetishize the music that was current when I was 23, 25.
My 31-year-old wife and I will be at a thrift store and she'll point at a pair of womens' shoes. "I bet you think these are sexy," she says. She's usually right, and then she giggles and rolls her eyes when 37-year-old me admits an attraction. She says that when she plays this trick, she just looks for stuff that looks like it was made in 1995. Me, I can't even tell. They still look to me like they were made yesterday. And they're fuggin' hot. (You'd think she'd buy and wear such a $2 pair to turn me on, but... y'know, married life.)
Aside from shoes, I don't care for much fashion from the 90s. But I do deeply fetishize certain other periods in "material history." Interestingly, it's usually stuff that came out when I was a young or very young child.
Example: I could give a damn less about cars, but I do love bikes... certain bikes. Motorcycles only look good to me if they have the look of the so-called 70s / early 80s UJM ("universal Japanese motorcycle"). Note that link is just so you can see a few pics of what I'm talking about, not anything I expect you to read. They truly don't make bikes like that any more, making only garish outsized "Harley dresser" knockoffs and even-dumber-looking plasticky sportbikes. It perplexes and angers me.
The really weird thing is, I didn't start riding until I turned 30, no one else in my family rides, and so I never really noticed motorcycles at all until ca. 2006. But show me a bike made after 1985 and I'll nearly always detest its looks, while these guys riding $1000 Carter-era Kawasaki beaters can't figure out why the guy in the Hyundai hatchback won't stop staring lustfully at them. The compulsion makes no more sense to the guy in the Hyundai.
As a musician / gear-hoarder I'm not much better. Most of my vast stash of equipment is stuff dating between 1975 and 1995, because that's the stuff I like. Thankfully, late 70s / 80s / early 90s gear fetishes are relatively cheap, versus the guys who absolutely must have a Fender Stratocaster made in 1963 and no later. (Those guys all ended up getting super-high-paying jobs just so they could afford the pointless objects of their desire. We derisively call them "tone attorneys" in certain snarky-hater musical circles of the Internet.)
I believe nostalgia is an irrational and useless evolutionary defect, one which is absolutely cancerous when suffered by a group of people en masse. It has reached epidemic levels and has choked off possible further progress in our society. We have reached a cultural lull, a virtual stop. It's all nostalgia's fault.
We fetishize all these products made in eras when people were only looking forward to a hopeful tomorrow, pushing the limits as far as they could. In the case of someone nostalgic for / obsessed with, say, aerospace / flight achievements of the late 1950s and early 1960s, it's a kind of admission that we've already fallen.
And I find this is not only true in cases of seemingly-harmless material retrofetishism, but in general. The advancement of art of all kinds has come to a complete stop. Radical changes in law, in social programs are no longer something Americans can deal with, even when they would obviously benefit us as a society.
We refuse to take necessary risks, or encourage / reward those who do. We forget that we made our "great society" entirely on the payoff of the sorts of risks which would never be accepted or funded today.
We've hit a weird, unforeseen kind of Moore's Law that applies not to technology but to us as a culture, as thinkers. In a way, I often feel we are actually radically regressing as we keep staring numbly into the abyss of history. The societies that are looking and pressing forward are the ones that will shortly end up carrying the torch.
...Well, I say that, but those cultures have been afflicted with nostalgia as well. My shop-roommate had a Vietnamese buyer come through and drop $25k in cash on his old, ratty stereo gear... $25k for stuff my shopmate would have been lucky to sell domestically on eBay for $15k, $20k. The buyer was looking to bring it all back to Vietnam and resell it there and/or in China for $75k, and he was 100% confident he'd get it even after half of it disappeared "mysteriously" on the freighter.
See, in China / Vietnam, they're still fetishizing equipment they heard about in hushed, legendary tones when the Japanese were over here "buying up America" in the 1970s. In many cases, the buyers are younger than the gear they want so badly and have never even seen this stuff in pictures before, so you'd think they would be immune to hyperbolic marketing of decades past. Not so.
And never mind that China is in fact willing to build and sell me a brand new amplifier ten times as clean, efficient, powerful, and good-sounding as anything ever made in the 1970s for about sixty bucks shipped. But show the right Chinese dude a lousy 1969 McIntosh amplifier made in the US of A, something worth about a thou tops to a US boomer... and said Chinese dude will pony up five grand in ill-begotten cash for it under the table.
...Yep, we're all gonna die.