Nostalgia is good, actually

Restorative vs. reflective nostalgia

A literal water cooler moment in The Office

A friend of mine sent me a video showing things that us 90s kids used to do. I did all of them, and somehow so did a lot of other kids. These weren't mediated phenomena. They weren't social media trends - because there was no social media. No influencer started something that was cool for roughly eight minutes before we all collectively moved on to the next cool thing for seven minutes. It just happened.

Why?

I genuinely think the answer, or part of it, lies in boredom. We were bored a lot, and that was a very good thing. We could not be constantly stimulated because, again, there was nothing that could do that. The first iPhone came out when I was 14, and I got my first smartphone at 17. It wasn't until I was 19 or so that I started having the first symptoms of social media brain, and back then social media were still relatively ‘innocent.' Facebook was - this will shock you - kind of fun. It was messy, and I am sure it had its fair share of problems, but they weren't facilitating genocide in Myanmar and favoring antivaxx propaganda because of a mindless algorithm that a pathetically mediocre billionaire insists he wants his penis/company to have more masculine energy. It was weird that anyone could add anyone and, weirder still, that it was sort of normal to accept anyone as a ‘friend’ on the soon-to-be-hellsite-before-the-other-soon-to-be-hellsite (Twitter, obviously.)

Why would such a video of random, meaningless things affect me so much? Why did it affect the friend who sent it and why will it affect the other dozen or so millennials I sent it to and who will watch it soon and - this is a guarantee - react the same way? Boredom, boredom, boredom. We miss being bored. Being bored sometimes led to nothing, but it was still important to be able to get bored. It's in these moments that we got to absorb the events of the past few days, and create some meaning from them. Sometimes, being bored meant looking around me more often, and this made it more likely to strike a conversation. This despite me being a living cliché of the autistic kid in the corner roughly 80% of my time in high school, which was shit (high school, not the autism bit, although that wasn't fun in the private Lebanese Catholic school either, you will be shocked to know.)

That's what I am nostalgic for, the necessarily random moments that led to something else, sometimes. I can guarantee you that your average millennial remembers that, which is why I can watch a video of someone in Uruguay or the USA or Turkey and there would be this specific thing we have in common. We are the last generation that remembers the pre-internet age and, especially, the pre-social media age. I miss being bored more often, and the early internet even allowed that at the time. I would log in, chat, do stuff, log out. It made no sense to be constantly online. You couldn't even do that most of the time.

Nowadays, at the ancient age of almost-34, I need to make a conscious effort to let myself be bored. The phone stays in the next room. I got a radio, which means I don't get to choose the music I want to listen to at the moment, which means I have to just wait. I can't zero in on that one song or two that our algorithmic overlords of Spotify or Youtube insist I re-listen to or re-watch for the 200th time. Paradoxically, having unlimited options of music has meant that I listen to music less often. It's not even the unlimited nature of it either. You sort of had that at a record store anyway, and still do. You can never listen to all of the music there anyway, but it was and is much easier to get lost in a few albums that you picked because the cover art was nice, or because you had been following that band for a few years anyway.

The physicality of it all (usually) means that there is more intentionality put into something. If a record is being promoted at a record store, there's a good chance the people working there can tell you about it. When I went into Rarekind Records in Brighton last week, the worker there told me to let them know if I want to listen to anything. It would mean picking something, waiting for it to be played, actually listening to it, and probably having a chat with them in the meantime as they have already listened to it or needed an excuse to do so.

Streaming services, instead, spam us with series and movies that the algorithm ‘thinks’ we are most likely to click on. It sometimes works, but I genuinely believe it got to the point where I remember movies I watched on the telly or on DVD (and cassette before it - I'm that ancient) more, even if I hated them. And I did cinema studies as part of my PhD. I love movies. I just don't enjoy them as much anymore, most of the time, and I blame enshittification for that. Netflix creating an entire genre of series called “casual viewing” is dystopian as far as I'm concerned. If you didn't know, that describes shows that Netflix creates with the assumption that you won't pay too much attention to them, because you'd be on your phone at the same time. How did we get here? Enshittification. It's made everything stupider, worse, more annoying. It has turned culture into spam. Thank god for the movie theaters that insist on banning phone use inside (if you scroll through your phone in a movie theater, I sincerely hate you. Stop it.)

Good Nostalgia, Bad Nostalgia

This is why nostalgia can be good, actually. This might seem controversial, but only because we usually associate nostalgia with what Svetlana Boym called restorative nostalgia. This is the ‘things were better back in the day’ variety - the toxic kind. Think of the imperial nostalgia that drove a good chunk of the Brexit vote, or the reactionary nationalisms we see all over the world: people - often lonely men with a broken sense of themselves and with no community - trying to recreate some mythical golden age that never existed. These people want to restore an imagined past into the present. It's a projection of something they think is of the past into what they think they want in the present. And while they're having a collective meltdown over their fragile sense of self, the rest of us suffer the consequences.

No, I'm talking about the other form of nostalgia that Boym also describes, reflective nostalgia. It's as it sounds like. Like restorative nostalgia, reflective nostalgia is a longing for the past (that's what the word nostalgia means), but - crucially - it's not a desire to return to it. It’s a more intentional form of nostalgia, for those of us who recognise that no amount of reinventing the past will change the fact of our mortality. Reflective nostalgia, instead, is merely a recognition that there is a reason for why we are nostalgic for something. In other words, the nostalgia we feel represents something in the present, usually something that is lacking. I miss being bored because I feel like it's gotten harder to be bored. I didn't miss being bored at the time. I was bored. It sucked. Just not always. What I miss is having experiences that weren't planned, and those often required boredom. I still have them, but they're rarer. I can say this as a fact. That's what I miss. That's what I'm nostalgic for.

This is why working near friends makes all the difference. I am in front of a screen either way, but being surrounded by people means we’ll interrupt each other sometimes. Even when this is an agreed upon time (I recommend chatting for a bit, working for 50 min, chatting for a bit, and then repeating), it still means that we are being more intentional with our time. So when I'm with a friend on their laptop working next to me on my laptop, I may not just get more stuff done, but it would feel more meaningful because of those unplanned moments. Do you want coffee? Sure, I lost my train of thought anyway. Yeah, same. That is what you seek in those moments of loneliness.

That's why shows like The Office or Friends (and Seinfeld before them) are so popular. You don't enjoy watching employees at a paper company. You enjoy seeing them not work because you see them hanging out. That's what all of Friends and Seinfeld is about. You're on your couch watching people on a couch at a café or at one of their apartments. The UK even created an entire series on that premise: Gogglebox. You're watching people watching television because it's like having someone next to you watching television. What is missed isn't watching people watching television - because that is just sad - but those specific feelings. It mimics a sense of community, a simulacrum version of one that our neoliberal hellscape has regurgitated after impoverishing or taking away our libraries and youth centers and town halls and replacing them with co-working spaces that charge a monthly fee. That's what we miss, even those of us who do have such friends and maybe even co-workers around.

The Good and Bad News

I'll end with good and bad news. The bad news is that neoliberal capitalism has just gotten worse. We may have even moved beyond it and into techno-feudalism, if you agree with Yanis Varoufakis’ main argument in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (I recommend the ‘Everyday Anarchism’ episode with him). In any case, there are very good reasons to believe that things are getting worse and will get worse for some time. The good news is that we can still reclaim the temporalities that give our lives meaning, and which allow us to better face capitalism/techno-feudalism together anyway.

As Sho Konishi, author of Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan, put it:

you shouldn’t be afraid to do seemingly self-contradictory practices in this complex world. If you try too hard to unify everything in your life around a particular set of ideas, you could end up being homeless like me. If you feel like you are locked in, but you feel no other way to survive in this world, do something outside your ‘employed’ time that can be locked in by forces that you feel are outside your control. There are alternative times that belong to you, when you can create and belong to another temporality, and yet act in effective ways.

Expand ‘employed’ time here to mean the time that does not belong to you. If you are pressured into clicking that next video or song because the enshittified platforms all copied one another, that's not your time. Insert randomness into your life. Paradoxically, this may require you to plan this a bit for some time, because you're undoing an unhealthy habit. By you, I of course mean me because I still struggle with this problem and this newsletter is sometimes little more than my projected anxieties that I arrogantly think y’all want to read about. Thanks for coming along for the ride.