r/unpopularopinion • u/Rude_Highlight3889 • 17h ago
Nostalgia is getting out of hand
First, let me say, I get it. I get the yearning for the simpler times and the warmth of childhood and days gone by. People have done this since people have been around and I'm not saying nostalgia is a bad thing in its own right.
But the social media trends and mindset where the fondness of childhood memories and things we all remember are becoming obsessive and downright obnoxious to a point where it seems impossible to have any positive emotion in the current world is unhealthy to me.
I see so many comments about how things don't look the same, don't feel the same, will never be the same, leading up to a semblance of it being impossible to find any good in the current world. I think this mindset is actually contributing to the real and noticeable trend of people being more depressed.
This coupled with nonstop scrolling doesn't help matters. But what inspired me to write this was a tiktok i watched of someone posting simple photos from outside and the caption was "when did life stop feeling like this?" #nostalgia And I commented "when people started living their lives through their phones." Obviously I'm guilty of excessive phone use myself but the point is, nothing is stopping anyone from going out and enjoying the simple things in life.
Another thing with nostalgia too is we always tend to look at the past with rose colored glasses. Yes I definitely miss aspects of being a kid but how easily we forget the things that aren't so great. Can't drive, have no money, the pure suck of getting up to go to school to sit on classes all day and then have to take more work home, not getting to decide what you eat (usually) or how strongly we felt negative emotions or just simply how confusing and angst inducing being a kid really could be. Stressing about grades and friends and being liked and validated and petty drama and bullying and then having to figure out what the hell you do after high school. Growing up and figuring it all out sucks and it sucks from an early age on.
I did not have a bad childhood overall and was very loved at home. I just think we tend to forget that life as a whole is hard, and while there is nothing wrong with appreciating some of the things we took for granted about being a kid, what are we taking for granted right now that we don't even realize? I feel very lucky to have a good job and a home and the ability to do most things on my terms and having found a wonderful life partner. And making my own decisions and learning every day and having means to travel and do things that i could only dream about with the limitations of being a kid. We just forget to appreciate the good about where we're at and live in the moment. Wishing and pining and obsessing for "the good old days" deprives us of any opportunity to experience happiness in the moment.
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u/RinoTheBouncer 10h ago
Nostalgia isn’t just about an objectively better era or a time when things were done in a better way.
Nostalgia is about who you were and what mindset you had when you approached things and how it felt to feel something for the very first time(s) that it had so much yearning, excitement, pleasure, anticipation..etc.
Nostalgia isn’t just about VHS tapes or playing hide and seek or playing music on a Walkman or the hairstyles and outfits in music videos on MTV.
Nostalgia is much more about who we were, than how things were, and more about how it felt to know no better than how things were and to have learned to enjoy it the way we could.
Today we have cassette-sized devices in our hands that play all the music, videos, games, news articles, and connects us in video, audio and text with all the people in the world.
That sounds like a dream to everyone from back in the day when we were kids, but guess what? The abundance of stimulation made us feel burned out or rebound that we cannot feel excited by anything, because nothing “hits” the way it did before, when we did it for the first time, and when it was rare and we had to wait for it.
Some things have also changed, and they indeed used to be better, or we just connected with the old way more than anything new, because it was our first impression, our first “crush”.
It doesn’t mean modern tech is bad. No, it’s a dream. It’s wondrous. It’s full of opportunity. But we can’t feel stimulated anymore because we are adults now, we don’t think like we did as kids, we don’t get excited by the same things we did back then, and when we do, we don’t do it for the first time like we did or have to wait for a specific time or go to a specific place to experience them.
We have everything and we also have nothing, because none of that is enough anymore.
Nostalgia is missing the sense of being able to feel things for the first time again, and with the same excitement again, in the most innocent and impressionable and excited version of our mentality that will never come back, because now it feels like we felt all there is to feel, and everything we’re going to feel, is gonna be just a lesser version of what we already felt.
And that isn’t a flaw. That isn’t a trend. That isn’t pretending. This is just life and the human experience.
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u/Rude_Highlight3889 8h ago
I do agree with you 100% and the way you put this makes a lot of sense and also explains why the nostalgia factor has become so sensational in the first place.
I have a love hate relationship with the modern technology myself. I do love and appreciate it and it is wondrous and so convenient but it does take away the excitement derived from new stimuli too and I do think we're overstimulated at this point. I guess where I was coming from is this entrenched outlook that our best days are behind us with no hope for the future and how depressing that mindset is. I feel like , collectively, people used to dream and have hope and look forward to tomorrow and now we look to the past. Ironically, I just did it myself with that statement. It's very mind-bending when you think about it but I think we can all agree it does feel like something is missing in our modem world and I'm of the mindset of how do we get back to enjoying the simple pleasures?
Your comment really did cause me to stop and reflect and see that maybe I came at nostalgia a little wrong and how much I actually miss too. Perhaps more than anything was the excitement that came from simple in-person experiences like going out to eat or shopping in person. It "feels" like we don't have time or the desire to do those things anymore so we just doordash and get stuff delivered and it's very convenient but what are we so busy with that it feels like such a pain to go out anymore? I guess all the time we spend on our phones.
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u/RinoTheBouncer 3h ago
Appreciate you taking time to write in detail, and glad my words helped clarify some points about nostalgia.
I love technology, I love evolution, I love to live to see us make new breakthroughs and discoveries in all kinds of directions in life.
That said, part of me somehow feels like those are more like fantasy and less like something to anticipate. I guess it’s the nature of our cultures in modern times, which I do agree 100% with you that we’ve become much more cynical, nihilistic and pessimistic, rather than hopeful, faithful and excited for the future.
I feel like I could go on for hours talking about this, because I could chime in on religion, society, values, differences between countries and ways of life and also how as different as they are, they can be quite similar in some regards, relationships, sex, family, friendships, art, the economy, politics, and the impact of social media..etc.
But to sum it up, we are over stimulated that stimulation became an addiction, and we can only feel that stimulation from specific things, most commonly our smart devices and the internet/social media, that most people would rather text and send each other posts sitting in the same hour or room or even table, rather than actually talking and showing each other things manually or doing a shared activity.
Each person has very tall boundaries around them and conditioned themselves to think this is how independence should be. In reality, we are lonelier than ever, and we fill that void with fast-food of stimulation, instead of actually going on adventures yourself, we’d rather text than call, call than visit, or visit once in a blue moon.
We consume too much media, we are always exposed to endless options of people to meet online, giving us the illusion that we have so many friends, and we don’t, and the media we consume became very much like this image of smug condescending negativity, and newer generations are growing to believe this is the norm.
There’s no question that so many companies are banking on repackaging media in remakes because they know well that old school media supersedes modern one by miles, and they miss how these games made them feel back in the day and what the characters stood for and what it felt like to play the game when we were kids. And no wonder those are very successful because people want to feel that way en masse.
In the end, nostalgia can be crippling at times, because you need to see and do something in this world, but at the same time, I firmly believe that a person can somehow be born in the wrong time, maybe a few decades too early or a few decades too late, not to mention people who already lived in the past and exist today to lament how not only things changed, but how they no longer don’t feel any genuine excitement or hope even if they force themselves to try…
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u/Hot_Revolution_2850 17h ago
The amount of reboots and revamps of old shows for the sole purpose of nostalgia bait is seriously getting out of hand.
Living constantly in the past isn’t healthy
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u/BackWoodsPeelin 11h ago
Nostalgia is getting out of hand for me especially. I get seizures when I get the nostalgia feeling, I have to avoid that feeling as hard as I can. Ive got like 5 now and it’s all directly correlated I’ve only got seizures from that feeling.
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