Brave New Kitty

A friend of mine just had his 20-year high school reunion. He didn’t go, having no interest in seeing people he never talked to in high school to begin with, but one of his friends did. The report on it was less than stellar, and the guy who went seemed kind of sad and lost around the whole thing, like whatever he’d wanted to happen didn’t, but he didn’t know what that would have been in the first place.

According to my friend’s friend, the group of “popular” guys—the jocks, in my high school nomenclature—showed up together in a rented limo, sans wives and already thoroughly drunk. They hung together all night, maintaining their adolescent clique, and essentially proving their persistent immaturity. As repugnant as all that is to me, mostly I just find it sad and empty.

Like all nostalgia.

Nostalgia has been huge in recent years. Oh, nostalgia has always had a certain appeal, but lately, in the past decade or so, that appeal seems to have been tweaked up a notch or two. It’s become an extremely effective marketing tool: New cars that look like old cars, new movies re-made from old movies, new versions of old songs, TV shows set in the seventies, as well as clothing styles, hair styles, and accessories reminiscent of styles from two to four decades ago. This increased interest in the recent past might be due to middle-aged baby boomers who want to relive their youth and now have the purchasing power to buy items they couldn’t afford as young adults. While I think that’s valid, I also think there’s more to it. Nostalgia has become a cultural zeitgeist, and I think one important to understand, because the pressure to succumb to it can be enormous, and doing so can be a way to avoid dealing with the present.

Let’s look at how that could be the case.

Nostalgia is more than having fond memories about the past. It’s about longing for a simpler, more vivid, or happier time. According to Dictionary.com, the etymology of the word comes from “severe homesickness.” Homesickness is a feeling of being scared and overwhelmed by one’s environment, or at the very least, of wanting one’s environment to be different. Nostalgia, then, is homesickness applied to the timeline of one’s life: a longing for the present to feel as good as the memories of the past.

But that past did not exist, and therein lies the problem: nostalgia is a fundamentally dishonest way to view history, one that can hamper our ability to deal effectively with the present. Our past, you see, was just as full of existential problems as our present is, and we need only spend a few minutes thinking about it logically to realize this. While today we may be worried about paying a mortgage and saving for retirement, twenty years ago we were worried about paying rent and launching a career. Today, we worry about our spouse and kids; twenty years ago, we worried about the stress and humiliations of dating and the possibility of being single forever. In hindsight, the problems of youth may seem simple compared to the problems of middle age, but if you’re honest with yourself, it’s just hindsight. You had just as much anxiety about your problems then as you do about your current ones. Maybe even more, as you had fewer coping skills to draw on then, which is itself another source of stress for a young adult. We may wish we were younger, but only until we remember how foolish and naïve we actually were in our twenties!

Nostalgia is a sort of projection, in the Freudian sense, of our present anxieties into our past. That is, we avoid dealing with what we long for in the present—deeper connections, a greater sense of power over our fate, or simply that some of our psychological troubles would go away—by escaping into an idealized past. In this past, we were beautiful, popular, and powerful. Our friends were better, our jobs were better, our parties were better. Even our cars, clothes, and movies were better. We felt excited and hopeful about life. In this past (which is actually just a present thought about the past), we are free to feel euphoric without reality stomping its ugly footprint onto the scene and requiring us to take action. In a very real way, nostalgia is much like the altered state induced by drugs or alcohol.

The extent to which we indulge in nostalgic longing is largely the extent to which we avoid dealing with our current psychological and emotional issues. I am not talking about meeting obligations and responsibilities; I am talking about how effective we feel, really feel, in matters of autonomy, self-expression, emotional fulfillment, and the like. It can be extremely difficult to consider, or even to be aware of the necessity to consider, these internal states when living in a culture that actively discourages such consideration. Both self-awareness and cultural awareness are necessary to do so.

If an entire culture partakes in nostalgia, what does that say about that culture? Perhaps that its primary emotional undercurrents consist of anxiety and fear, and its best attempts at dealing with them have been escape, denial, projection, and intellectual dishonesty; perhaps that these undercurrents reflect the sentiments of a majority of its individuals. Probably both, although I am not a sociologist and this is only a theory.

A culture of nostalgia occurs, I think, in times of rapid change or political upheaval that can leave people feeling overwhelmed, anxious, alienated, and powerless. The entire twentieth century had plenty of both, but no decade more so than its last, with the post-Soviet global regrouping, the rise of terrorism, rampant new technologies, and the advent of the Information Age (the Internet, to be precise, which has changed the world landscape on a scale not seen since the printing press, or perhaps nuclear weapons). Add to this the anxiety about entering a new millennium (historically, turns of centuries have always evoked a milieu of unrest), along with all the ongoing problems of the modern world, and you have a culture ripe for nostalgic yearnings. It is not a coincidence that fundamentalist Christianity and the New Age movement (in all their iterations) have experienced huge growth in recent years. Both offer escapist, anti-rational approaches to solving life’s existential problems, and both are, without exception, part of the problem and not part of the solution. Like all forms of nostalgia, they serve only to distract us from the real issues in our lives and the resources best called upon to deal with them.

What are those resources? In essence, self-awareness, honesty, and the willingness to deal with life on life’s terms (to steal a phrase from the friends of Bill W.), all of which can be more difficult to come by than we care to admit. Multitudes have been written elsewhere about all of these, including this blog, so I won’t go into the hows and whys of them now. Suffice to say that these are the traits that will get you where you want to be in life, and the more earnestly you practice them, the more success you will have.

One more thing, and it is an important one: You must come to realize that the present is the best time of your life, period. Now, and now, and now. No matter what you’re going through, no matter how you’re feeling, no matter what unfulfilled dreams weigh you down. The present is the only moment in which you can make choices and changes and fully experience all the aspects of being alive. Now, and now, and now. The present, with all its demands and sorrows and possibilities, is the only game in town.

It may all sound cold and logical, and I know human existence demands more; I am not ignoring that or belittling it. Myths and dreams, pleasure and play are all essentials of existence, too. But they can all be experienced fully without sacrificing self-awareness. More so, actually. There is no dichotomy between logic and myth, logic and dreams, or logic and pleasure. They can—and should—all exist simultaneously, harmoniously, enjoying and nourishing each other in an upward spiral of growth and creativity. Nostalgia detracts from this vision of life by making dreams and pleasures an unattainable part of a nonexistent past. Don’t do that to yourself.

It’s probably a good thing that the human memory tends to romanticize the past rather than the other way around, but it’s also something we need to be aware of. If you’re lucky you had a good youth, but dwelling on it won’t make your life better today. I think that’s what my friend’s friend discovered when he felt so let down after his high school reunion. His unmet expectations were probably more about some emptiness in his life today, emptiness that cannot be filled by trying to re-live an idealized past.

The only question now is, what will he do about it?