why your happy childhood memories MUST be destroyed

[acalculatedname]

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.

Comments

[theun4givables]

I'm dying at the 33 90's trends because I was a 90's kid.

Nostalgia can be good but it also can be pretty terrifying, lol.

[alycewilson]

Of course, in my case, I recall fondly the music of the 1960s, because I spent many happy hours going through my parents' record collection, listening to albums while reading along to the lyrics. For me, that's what evokes my childhood (although "Thriller" takes a close second).

[acalculatedname]

I guess this sums up something I've always / increasingly wondered - why are people constantly nostalgic for their childhood? (and again, I'm not saying I'm immune.) To me, this is a huge sign that we as a culture are still Doing It Wrong. Adulthood should be comparatively independent and thusly more happy on the whole than childhood experience. But for most of us, we look back and see childhood as a time of comparative freedom.

This is all purely theoretical and my "solutions" all involve the elimination of anything resembling capitalism if not the concept of money altogether, so maybe I'll just stop here before I get chucked in the looney bin.

[alycewilson]

Speaking as someone who's a hair over 40, I would like to see a return to respecting elders and honoring people with experience. I suspect a lot of our yearning for childhood comes not just from the way that childhood has become a time of relative carefree living but also from the fact that we are told time and time again that being young is preferable to being older.

[cheshire23]

I guess this sums up something I've always / increasingly wondered - why are people constantly nostalgic for their childhood?

Because it calls them back to what at least appears to be a shared experience, when they've grown in vastly different directions but want to feel as if they aren't completely disconnected from each other.

At least, that's been my experience. It only works for people I shared common experiences with at the time, though.

[lrig_rorrim]

"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. "

It's amazing how much ambient cultural crap we absorb when we're kids. It's like the stuff sinks into our pores or something, I swear.

"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."I don't share your cynicism in this way - but I am just fine admitting I'm a nostalgic sap. I see a lot of cultural progress - there's a groundswell of acceptance of different lifestyles, gay marriage has become actual accepted law in some places (unthinkable two decades ago, for sure), science creeps forward doing neat things all the time, and I am loving a lot of

[acalculatedname]

Hey, dude, I'm a child of the 80s, which-- looking back-- now seems like it was the beginning of the end for the US in a lot of ways. The major achievements I cite as counterexamples here are things that happened well before I was born, and I know things weren't perfect then either... am also incapable of saying definitively that things were better overall in these eras.

Packaged nostalgia as a mainstream source of profit had already become a mass industry in the 80s, if not more like the 70s (while not quite the same thing, it strikes me as so funny now re: how many rock songwriters of the mid-70s had big hits explicitly about "the good old days" of, what, like, 1968). But retrofetishism hadn't become the defining pop-cultural thing that it is now.

As for whether I'm being retro in bitching about people being too retro... that's one of those things that is impossible to prove one way or the other, I guess. It's never been "BACK IN MY DAY", though, that's for sure. :)

[roina_arwen]

Ok, I lol'd. My husband (born in 1966) rarely listens to any music newer than the 90's (his favorite station is the 80's station. I think the only newer stuff he likes is Barenaked Ladies and Weird Al. Me, OTOH (born 1967) loves as much or more of the new music as well as enjoying what was popular when I was in HS and college.

I remember a lot of those trends, but thankfully didn't follow them!

[porn_this_way]

Specifically, it helps me understand that as you've aged, you've become completely fucking boring, unoriginal, and most likely 100% dead inside.

I LOL'ed IRL here, and kept on going. Love this entry so hardcore!

ETA: I clicked that link. I had those huge-ass JNCOs in the 90's. Can you still respect me?! Can ANYONE??

[acalculatedname]

Whatever, you should have seen how much Ocean Pacific I had in my wardrobe. A fair amount of it was also made with glow-in-the-dark puffy paint.