Are we nostalgic or does life just really suck right now?
And what can be done to balance it out
Culturally speaking, 2014 was not particularly pivotal. No pandemics to speak of; the embers of Trumpism barely stoked; a simpler time before Brexit was even in our daily lexicon. Untouched by the general suckiness of the years that followed (an official, professional stance), 2014 is the time I always look back on with visceral sentimental fondness. It’s the year I type into Spotify’s search bar when I need a pick-me-up from Wolf Alice, Marika Hackman and Caribou, the likes of which take me out of my silly little mood in the sleeting winter of 2023.
On a personal level, 2014 was a great year. It wasn’t necessarily a year where bad things didn’t happen, but it was a time when I felt most present and most alive. It was before I discovered my own crippling anxiety (another bad omen to add to 2016!) and before true work responsibilities rained down on me. I was playing in a band, working for a music PR company, moonlighting as a music journalist and even freelanced as a music assistant for Burberry. I went to Bali and I probably have never looked better (although I’m sure I didn’t think that at the time).
Cue soundtrack.
The subsequent years are just as rose-tinted. Working in a surf shop, dating boys from Carharrt, taking drugs for the first time, illicit work romances, living alone; moving to Cornwall, living in a shed, swimming in the silky Helford River at sunrise, driving my Volvo V70 with a surfboard in the back; sun-soaked stints in India, Sri Lanka, California, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Vancouver, Panama. Of course I’m giving you all the highlights – my greatest hits from 2014-2018. Perhaps I’d call these my halcyon days, and I wonder if at 40, I’ll think the same about right now.
Everything reminds us of the past. Nostalgia has become an algorithmic trend. My phone collates past photos and packages them in shiny little videos set to a variety of music moods, or tries to remind me what I was doing ‘one year ago today’, sometimes a welcome reminder of the good old days, often a trigger for wondering whether I’m as happy now as I was then. I settle into Daisy Jones & The Six and wonder what it would have been to live in California in the 70s. Television series are created based on the nostalgia algorithm, the cult show Stranger Things apparently devised from people searching for 80s references and science fiction. Homes are filled with modernist furniture and 60s-inspired kitchenware. Brands are tapping into our collective obsession with nostalgia and making us long for it even more.
For a word tinged with hazy, happy memories, the word nostalgia’s etymology speaks more of its malaise. It was coined in the 17th century by a Swiss doctor who “attributed soldiers’ mental and physical maladies to their longing to return home, nostos in Greek, and the accompanying pain, algos.” (New York Times, 2013). Put that together and you get ‘homesickness’. Centuries on, we’ve reimagined nostalgia as ‘perfection in the past’. The ‘good old days’ implies that the days we’re in now are not so good.
So does life just suck now? I might be being dramatic (typical when I’m deep in the trenches of winter) but I don’t think it’s just me. Amidst a cost of living crisis, precarious energy prices, a housing market in shambles, not to mention very real signs of environmental collapse (snow behind the Hollywood sign! Floods in California!), we’re in a bit of a state.
My friend Joe brought this up at lunch the other day. “There’s this collective pressure in the air,” he says. A few weeks ago we went to the pub next door and saw a woman go up to the bar and throw the remnants of her drink, swearing at a bewildered barman. We hear people shouting aggressively on the street. “It’s everywhere!” we think.
The problem with nostalgia is that it’s a distorted view of the past. And in some ways, it reduces it to a list of happenings instead of a depiction of how you felt. I often list off the things I did in those years and I find myself wondering: am I an impressive and interesting person, or have I just done impressive and interesting things?
Sometimes I worry that I could happily be sequestered in a cabin in the middle of a forest with my dogs and simply observe life from a distance. I imagine myself with a garden like Meryl Streep’s in It’s Complicated, planting and picking and growing and eating and swimming and lighting fires and lying in front of them. I worry that I did so much in my twenties, I feel like I’ve run out of steam. As if I don’t quite need to experience life because I’ve already done it. I’d be happy to simply look back on my life and revel in the good times I had, rather than put myself in the precarious, terrifying, anxiety-inducing position of having to live life fully again, now. No thanks, sir, I’d rather watch from my warm bed, cocooned from heartbreak or jealousy or trying to impress people or worrying about what they think about you. I don’t understand how at the age of 31, I feel like I can retire from life and just indulge in the past.
But despite my general existential, Sisyphean mood, I know I shouldn’t simply present the problem. My solution of late (although it doesn’t always work, as my friends Joe and Freya might attest having been confronted by my severe Eeyore-ness last week), is to romanticise my silly little life. What might have been snubbed by my severe Britishness has been replaced by a sometimes overwhelming level of gush. This past weekend was filled with post-rehearsal pints at a neighbourhood pub where friends just kept piling in; days bleeding into nights out bleeding into early mornings; hangovers made better with roasts at a friend’s and a strange game of drawing portraits with your toes. I went to bed a little drunk and full of community spirit.
Like all things, suckiness is a feeling that comes and goes. I am cursed with nostalgia: I deeply feel the heavy longing for another time, perhaps wanting to immortalise myself as a fun, carefree, roving 23-year-old who was not weighed down by anxiety or responsibilities or heartbreak or jealousy. I guess the trick is to remember that in 10 years, I’ll probably feel the same about being 31, happily single, financially stable, surrounded by amazing friends, working with the best people in the world.
Lovely Cat. Made me think of a passage from Meg Mason's Sorrow & Bliss as her friend explains...
“There’s no shame in it, none at all. Even now I find myself recalling the years I was married to Diana with immense nostalgia. Per the original Greek definition of course, which is utterly unrelated to the way members of the public use it to describe how they feel recounting their school days.
Nostos, Martha, Returning home. Algos, pain.
Nostalgia is the suffering caused by our unappeased yearning to return, whether or not the home we long for ever existed.”