The Tangled Blankets of Nostalgia
Memories of the good old days might be holding me hostage
I want to believe that it's possible to look backward and forward at the same time.
Maybe it is. Maybe it’s easy, and we're all doing it, and it's one of humanity's many little useful quirks.
But I worry it isn't.
Maybe we all try to do it, but it's one of many ways that we distract ourselves, letting a little bit of our potential energy slip away each day, undetected.
There's plenty of good reasons to look backward. To reflect on our pasts as people and as a culture. To learn from mistakes. But the most tempting reason, of course, is pure nostalgia.
I think about nostalgia a lot. I'm not even quite sure what "nostalgia" means, in practice, anymore. I don't know where normal “detached acknowledgement of the past” ends and where “delusional, self-serving wish fulfillment” begins.
Growing up, I never considered myself a very "nostalgic" person. I was too naïve to realize that I was still young, still living in the period that I would later put on a pedestal. The young adulthood that I thought I was stepping into was really still my rosy, extended period of childhood. I was like a fish asking where the "ocean" starts while swimming through a reef.
Now I feel like I drink nostalgia up every day. It shoots right into my bloodstream. That warm, happy feeling (that I can get on-demand!) might be my drug of choice.
Of course, I'm not alone. We all indulge in things from our past: a favorite song, a comfy movie, an old school project we stuffed in a closet.
If we're lucky, these things never have to truly leave us. So long as we keep them in our memory, or in our reach, they can always be there to cheer us up. We can call upon them at a moment's notice.
But lately I've been wondering if that's really something to be so grateful for.
A Nostalgic Self
To be clear, it’s not that I think we need to throw away the past.
Our joys, traumas, and bittersweet memories help shape us and help us learn from mistakes.
I don't know what it'd be like to only live in the present, or to fixate only on the future, but they both sound like disasters to me. A person who's always carpe'ing their diem might be steamrolling over opportunities for deeper thought. A person who obsesses over predicting and plotting their future might be giving into optimistic fantasies or paranoid anxieties.
That said, I can't imagine myself ever falling into either of those categories. I think I'm safe. Phew.
Instead, I've grown into a sentimental and nostalgic creature of habit (I’m willing to admit it!) I'm always dipping in and out of memory lane. I smile when I hear a song that reminds me of getting homework done after school in fifth grade, then I quickly set it to Repeat. I scoff when I look back on my old favorite TV shows, then load up some clips. I compare my current work against the drawings I made in middle school and high school.
I feel like that's totally normal and nothing to be worried about. At least, in theory.
In practice, though, it all feels like it's…too easily in reach these days?
Everything feels way too easily re-livable. All the hits from my childhood are a click away on Netflix and Spotify. All the things I've ever said and done are a click away on social media. Even when I don't ask for it, Facebook shovels "Memories" down my throat, plastering my decade-old sense of humor onto my own timeline every time I load the page.
Many of the Youtube videos I obsessed over in high school are still up there, many years later, ready to pull me back down the rabbit hole and distract me from whatever I'm supposed to be doing.
All of my interests, beliefs, and minor accomplishments from years-past have become so easy to re-visit, it's forced me to start questioning whether this is time or energy well spent.
Is it good that I can be so easily pulled away from my work, or my train of thought, by snapshots of everything I've already experienced? What do you get from a 2011 video essay on your sixth re-watch? Do you really grow as a person by re-reading Facebook statuses and Tumblr posts from your first year in college again and again?
These questions aren't rhetorical. I actually want to know.
I want to believe that browsing through my past is a form of reflection and introspection. I could argue that re-visiting things and soaking them in is the key to changing and becoming the person I want to be. But maybe those are just excuses I tell myself! Maybe it's more like letting your mind gently wander for a minute while you're driving on the highway: you're not an evil person for doing it, but you should really keep your eyes on the road.
I feel stuck. Like my shoe is in a puddle of mud. Like I’m becoming incapable of true change as an artist and person.
It's not a great feeling when, for example, I've spent most of the past five years just reblogging and reuploading my artwork from college over and over again, because I don't feel like I've made any better work in the years since. I want to share a little bit of myself with the people around me and all I have to offer is "Here's Kyle from 2015. Wasn't he good at drawing? Please Like and Share!"
I mean, let's be honest, most of the stuff I ramble about in these very blogposts is just retreading old feelings, commemorating old favorites, or re-visiting old media that I hadn't given a fair shake as a kid.
In the cruelest twist of fate, even the work I do for a living is an act of fleshing out two of my favorite Flash games from a decade ago.
It's hard not to feel like I'm somehow trapped within my own childhood. Even more embarrassing than being trapped is the feeling that it's of my own design; a tangled knot of security blankets that I've clung to for warmth. You could pull any of my emotional strings with a well-timed lo-fi VHS Digimon clip with a 2000s ska cover. My ethos as a person is extremely Top 10 Episodes of Hey Arnold That We'll Never Forget.
And it's my fault! I do it to myself!
Heck, one of my current projects is a sequel to a webcomic I made as a high schooler. And, uh, I’m turning 30 next year, folks. Revisiting these old characters, this old power fantasy…I'm searching to find answers to how I can connect my current life with how I felt way back when I came up with them. When I write these characters now, it feels comfortable, like a warm blanket. It feels right. But then I wonder…don't people usually say something about how creativity should push you and make you uncomfortable?
All of my instincts seem to shelter me away from that. My influences and sensibilities and creative work are all wrapped in a bubble marked “2000–2015.” And every so often, I feel torn over whether I should feel so ashamed about that.
Earlier this year, I cleared out my belongings from my parents' house. It involved a lot of shelves, boxes, and closets of stuff. Everything from my childhood, my high school years, and my college years were all mixed together.
I was tasked, obviously, with sorting them into "Keep" and "Throw Away" piles. I'm not particularly bad at Marie Kondo'ing my way through a pile of junk, and it didn't take me long, but it was overwhelmingly nostalgic. I could feel the temptation to keep things because of the power I felt when I held them. I can take a photo of the objects instead, but would it feel the same as keeping them in a closet somewhere?
The act of holding each object and feeling their weight reminded me that when I was young, I used to be a very cold, "logical" person. Or, at least, I used to masquerade as one. Teenage-Me claimed to have no time for silly sentimentality, and claimed that physical objects held no importance. I was anti-nostalgia, anti-keepsakes, anti-emotion. Y'know, a real Spock kind of kid.
Nowadays, I reject that kind of mentality wholeheartedly.
Yes, we could simply take a photo of all our old belongings, upload it to Google Drive, and toss the originals in the dump. But I feel like we've all seen a glimpse of what a purely digital life is like, and personally I'm not a huge fan. Facebook has already somehow taken the very concept of our memories and warped it into some weird attention-grabbing content that slots into your algorithm. I don't want to ditch everything I've ever held dear in an effort to chase a clean, minimalist life. I'm not better than my feelings and memories. I'm made of them. I want to honor them and carry them with me.
And yet…that loving acknowledgement of the past also feels like the exact thing that makes me feel so trapped.
How am I supposed to move forward if I'm constantly doting over my elementary school interests? How am I supposed to explore new ideas, challenge my beliefs, or make new work if I'm busy indulging in all these feel-good yesteryears?
The answer, I know, is to find some sort of healthy balance. But that balance has felt off for a long time now, and I don't think it's entirely my fault.
I've started believing that someone has come by and wrapped me in these blankets, year in and year out, whether I asked for them or not.
Nostalgic Media
I'm proud that, as a culture, we're slowly moving away from the stigma of animation, games, and toys being childish.
We've all felt that judgment from older generations: cartoons are for kids, video games are for kids, toys and cute things are for kids.
And, luckily, I feel like we've slowly dug ourselves out of that simplistic thinking. Which is a relief.
On the other hand…and I can't believe I'm saying this…maybe those people had a little bit of a point?
Or, put another way: maybe that attitude was right, but for extremely wrong reasons.
I want to be clear that obviously there is nothing wrong with enjoying an old TV show you used to love, or rewatching a favorite movie, or playing an old video game from your childhood.
The thing is…wouldn't it feel like more of an oasis from your daily life if it wasn't, y'know…literally everywhere?
I feel like we're drowning in it. Corporations that own the IP rights of our childhoods have succeeded in churning out a truly 24/7 nostalgia machine. How much have Warner Bros, Disney, Nickelodeon, DC, Marvel, Cartoon Network, Nintendo, Square Enix, Capcom, etc. kept us locked in a cozy state of near-constant nostalgia high?
It's no longer dosed out gradually. It's not like digging out a VHS of Toy Story because you want to try watching it again, or a yearly Twilight Zone marathon. It's not watching My Neighbor Totoro for a second time because now you're an adult and you can see it through the father's eyes. It's not reading The Grinch to your toddler because you remember your dad reading it when you were a kid.
All the media is just here, with us, all the time, ready to be clicked on.
Yearly. Monthly. Weekly. With the help of fandoms and social media, you can make one of these IPs your daily existence. Your primary interest and hobby. You now have Spider-Man content to last you every single day of your life. You can be a Pokemon person forever. There's nothing stopping you.
On one hand, sure, it's genuinely great that these things aren't lost to time. It's terrible, for individuals and the culture at-large, when an old piece of media isn’t properly preserved or recorded. I'm a big proponent of making sure old media is preserved, legally and illegally, for everyone to have access for years to come.
But I feel like there's a difference between having something preserved so that you can occasionally re-visit it, and having something wrapped around you like a blanket on a daily basis.
I want to make it clear, again, that I'm not judging anyone for what they enjoy. I'm an artist and game developer: I love cartoons and video games with all my heart. I'm still a fanboy for silly things, like Spider-Man and Pokemon. You’ll never catch me trying to distance myself from these things.
But being in that world, it makes me feel like the way that these companies have weaponized nostalgia has become…almost nefarious. And I don't even mean that companies weaponizing nostalgia is bad because it will make them loads of money. That's self-evident, and a whole other conversation anyway.
My worry is how these media properties have become hobbies. They've become people's most identifiable traits, the things they're most proud of. They've found a way to seep into every minute of people's lives.
I'm sorry. I really don't want to be cruel. But, like…does "Nickelodeon All-Stars Brawl" really deserve your daily attention? Does it warrant the obsessed speculation of what fighters will be added and what their moves will be? Again, there's nothing wrong with enjoying the game and I'm not necessarily against Nickelodeon making it, but it's a bizarre product that feels like it barely holds together. The characters don't make sense in a fighting game, and the time and budget that's needed isn't dedicated to the product to even bring their appeal from their cartoons to life. The physics are janky and the 3D renditions of the characters feel rushed. (My apologies, of course, for the devs.)
So what are we even doing here? Why are we utilizing people's nostalgia to get 30-year-olds on the internet to obsessively debate over which character from Angry Beavers is gonna make the roster? It doesn't feel like it's a good use of those characters, a good use of this game idea, or a good use of those fans' time and energy.
To reiterate again and be crystal clear: I don't actually care if you're into NASB. I just feel weird when I look at it. It makes me itchy. In the past, Nickelodeon crossovers often at least combined shows that were RUNNING AT THE TIME. It made sense to get a little kid excited about a game that featured Jimmy Neutron and Timmy Turner, because those were cartoons that the little kid was watching on TV in that era. NASB seems to exist primarily to get buzz from rose-tinted millennials with disposable income. It's a game for kids, but it's not for kids. Does that make sense?
It doesn't really exist to make kids happy. It exists to make adults nostalgic.
I can't help but feel like there's some sort of space between a corporation "respectfully honoring their old work" and "shamelessly carting out the oldies."
It's a blurry line, and I'm not saying I know where I'd draw it.
What I do know is that a shiver ran down my spine when I saw a reviewer say that Illumination's Super Mario Bros. Movie "respects him" as an audience member because it has a bunch of background easter eggs that reference Mario games. They legitimately made the argument that the number of easter eggs in the movie was an indication of how much love and "respect" the filmmakers had for the viewer.
I feel like I'm losing my mind.
When I hear stuff like that, I feel like I'm living in a bizarro upside-down world. AND YET…in the right circumstances, companies can get me the exact same way. Hook, line, and sinker.
Even if it works on us, we all know the playbook by this point.
- Companies find success with something.
- They hold onto ownership of that intellectual property for as long as possible.
- They milk it for all it's worth.
- They cart it back out later, in waves, to appeal to nostalgia.
- They get to make money all over again.
And now, in the 2010s and 2020s, "content creators" and "memes" and "social media timelines" have extended these properties and ideas even further. Now it’s infinite.
Youtube and Buzzfeed and Tumblr and Netflix and TikTok and everything else have made it possible to reach full immersion: you can fully float in a vat of My Little Pony or Ninja Turtles or The Office and never have to leave. They can be by your side forever. Every minute of every day. You can live in that vat. You never have to grow up, or even find something new to obsess over.
And for a lot of us, maybe frighteningly, it seems like we got exactly what we wanted.
Nostalgic World
It’s obvious that nostalgia works. But why does it work so well?
As you probably know from first-hand experience, nostalgia is alluring because it lets people travel back to a simpler time. You get to relive life when you were a kid, and you had more free time, less responsibilities, and less hardship. It’s nice to travel back to your childhood instead of thinking about paying rent next week.
But surely, when done too often, it would get old. Right?
That's the thing that's bothering me.
Why doesn't it get old? Why is it so hard to resist? Why would we want to wrap ourselves in these blankets instead of exploring what our current world has to offer?
When I start thinking about it, like truly getting myself spiraling down this line of thought…there's only one answer that comes up again and again.
We want to indulge in the past because the present and the future feel bleak and unsatisfying.
I know that this is always talked about through the lens of “adulthood not living up to our childhoods”, but I think there’s more to it than that. I also know that it’s naïve to try to compare decades and say "the 2020s aren’t as good as the 1980s" and things like that. But I think there are factors that have concretely made it harder to get excited about the unfamiliar.
In the present, people are getting financially squeezed by jobs with no upward mobility and with unrealistic hiring requirements. They're stressed by housing markets that haven't, at all, kept up with how populations grow and move, or with how inflation affects people's spending power. They're locked into media walled-gardens where companies keep you tied to their own subscriptions instead of letting their old properties enter the public domain. People are shoved into a new digital world where companies can more aggressively push and monetize their interests on a daily basis.
Does that create an environment that feels exciting and lush with creativity? Does that encourage you to be bold and try scary new things?
Of course it doesn't.
And what about the future?
As with other generations, we’re frozen like a deer in headlights. Frozen by the fear of what the future will look like. Similar to the justified fears of world wars and nuclear destruction that dominated the hearts and minds of the 20th century, fears of corporate consolidation and climate change and a vanishing democracy dominate our own thoughts. Any cursory glance at the news can affirm that the global state of things isn’t exactly cheery or hopeful.
And these fears, whether they’re of war or climate collapse, make it harder to optimistically picture and plan your future.
Uncertainty is, y’know, terrifying.
You know what’s less terrifying? Knowing you’ll always have Batman. Or knowing you can always relive something you did in high school.
Speaking personally, it’s so much harder for me to think about the future than it is to think about the past. At times, to be completely honest, it feels impossible. I can’t picture what 2025 or 2030 or 2041 will be like. It’s easy to imagine those years won’t arrive at all, like the world will fade away in some sort of vague apocalypse. But the truth is, they will arrive. Time marches on. It’d be better for me to start planning for them now than to close my eyes and just cross my fingers.
But I just feel incapable of doing it. I can’t picture myself in 2025. I can’t picture what my interests will be in 2025. Or my goals, or how I should start planning for them now.
It’s easier to just reflect on the past over and over again. Either with adoration or with snark. And when I default to pondering the past instead of keeping my eyes open to the present and future, I let myself be ignorant of what’s going on in the world. I let myself become comfortable enough to not help people in need, or call my representatives, or attend a protest. Even in the face of a reality that is truly horrific. Comfort breeds complacency, in a sense.
I imagine I’m not the only one who feels this way. That it’s hard to stay alert. That it’s hard to get excited about what the future could hold, whether that be technologically, environmentally, or creatively. So many of the incredible things that people do and create end up getting stamped out or overshadowed by corporations. They get washed away on the algorithmic timeline, because they can’t stand a chance against the might of Intellectual Property and Nostalgic Content.
Even the shiny new technologies that are supposed to wow us, make our lives brighter and easier, and get us excited about the future seem to be half-baked marketing ploys eager to stamp out human creativity rather than nourish it.
Hell, you don’t even need to take it as far as political doom-and-gloom. I feel frozen enough, distracted enough, to not even put the time in on exciting new comics and games that people are making. New things that are as fresh now as Spider-Man and Zelda were back when they debuted. But lifting up these new creators takes so much more effort than just indulging in the things we already know we like. Whether it’s protests or Pokemon, I still feel just as stuck and complacent to the things going on around me.
I don’t know. Maybe…maybe I’m just pessimistic.
I’ve written this piece over the course of months. I’ve gone back and forth on it, deleting rows of sentences and debating with myself over what my real belief, deep down, even is. What do I even want to say about all this?
At the time of this paragraph, it’s autumn now, and I’m visiting my parents in their new home. They live in a whole new place, far from where we grew up, with all new furniture, all new decor. New sets of towels and bed sheets. Everything. It’s a completely new chapter of their lives. Shortly after they moved, I moved to a new place as well. I entered a new chapter, just like they did. It was exciting, just as much as it was scary.
Although everything is glossy and modern in my parents’ new home, every room keeps a small kernel of the past. A pillow we had at the old house. A board game we used to play. Photos of me and my brother as kids. An old game-show up on the TV. It’s almost surreal.
And in the stress of figuring out career paths, financial worries, and family medical scares, I’ll admit to you now: those kernels are everything to us. Without them, I feel like my family would be drifting without anything to hold onto.
Without them, we’d be sinking deep into a dark place of hopelessness, our heads swirling in thoughts of our family members’ fleeting mortality and financial stability.
So, like a blanket, I cling to those things tighter. I bury my head in. I embrace its warmth.
And each time I do, I fear losing a little bit more of the person who felt compelled to write all of this in the first place.
That person who felt that enough was enough, and I need to open my eyes again.
That person who wondered if it’s possible to look backward and forward at the same time, or if that’s just a lie that we tell ourselves so that we don’t need to look around.