I’m probably like you. That’s a bold statement but we’re kind of like each other, having some overlapping mental architecture, shared pasts, and relatable moments. Because of this, we can share inside jokes, whether that is a widely known piece of media or something so obscure that it’s yet to impact meme culture in any meaningful way. Abstracting this commonality further, we begin to reach the shared memories of a culture or a generation or some such wider categorizing group. Herein, we enter the dismal and backward-tracking force of Nostalgia.
I grew up as the media changed. I remember the ’90s and the early 2000s to the point I recall having MSM Messenger and MySpace at one time or another. Those names alone probably harken back for some of you of a similar age to times past and likely ones looked upon with joy or a certain comfort we can no longer recreate. I think of any group, the tail end of the Millennials and first waves of Zoomers, sometimes referred to as the Zillenials, find themselves in this position more so than any other group. Let’s touch on that.
Typically considered to run between around ’94 to ’99 or 2000, Zillenials are a further contrivance on what it is that divides generations and mindsets seemingly hard-baked into the majority of people from a specific age range. Zillenials being an unofficial concept for generations makes it hard to classify as anything specific, but for people in that age range, it’s easy to find that commonality. Growing up lower middle class, on a good day, I think shows these vestiges of a past that wasn’t ours and the entrance into futures we could not wholly take root in.
Millennials often remember the old tech that is now something that one can no longer find shoved in the back of a storage space in the home. VHS cassettes, the clunky older Windows98s, Nintendo64s, early run Pokemon cards, and their competitors, and the slew of very 90s styles and trends from gaudy patterns to Power Rangers. Being born in ’95, one wouldn’t expect that much overlay for someone who spent only five years in that decade and not ones where they should have formed lasting memories. Yet, as I said, perhaps my family’s economic situation is an influencer. Those memories are no less sharp than what proceeded in the new millennium for me and what I’ve learned from so many in my peer group.
Zoomers are, as it is now, known for a lot of the tech we still see in use or could maybe come across hidden away in a closet or basement of our family home. There are sites like YouTube and Facebook, which, though a shadow of what they had been, are still about. The various consoles gaming is done on are hardly changed in anything, but specs and price points and the games they hosted can still be accessed through current hardware often enough. The trends and styles have hardly come much further from the early days of the generation. We have yet to see even middle-aged parents return to an attire that current trends would say is dressy or less casual. As I’ve mentioned, I remember the age of the Wii and MySpace, skinny jeans and shirts from Hot Topic no less than the 90s.
It’s a strange concoction, to place in a mind the world before the towers fell but to also lump children of that age in with those who could never hope to know what life was like before 9/11. Though it serves only as an American talking point of culture, or at least predominantly Western, 9/11 serves as a significant buffer between the Millenials and Zoomers. Yet, where Millenials mainly were old enough to understand the attack or at least the notion that man can do wicked things to themselves, Zoomers have only stock footage to look to and a page or so in a modern history book. To have been caught between, as Zillenial, you would find yourself, perhaps like me, in a classroom with a very archaic TV hanging in the corner, watching the news of the towers falling, not comprehending, having no way to understand the events unfolding other than the terror of seeing grown adults meant to keep you safe beginning to panic and cry and become hysterical. We were sent home by lunch that day. States away, it still sent a ripple through all of America, even if you’d never been to New York or knew anyone who had.
It was my first year in a new school and, for all intents and purposes, my first real year in school. This was the first or second week of first grade for me following my parents’ divorce. Somehow, I went to school with a kid who’d become my friend down the line who was in the same boat. And from how we shared memories in our later years, we both came to the conclusion, the reality of having to live in split homes, that childhood was not an eternal force but something that was eroded with every lesson learned and every birthday passed, did not set in until after the towers fell. I’m not trying to claim some great significance to myself or my former friend but that the event serves as a marker between generations and a shift in our society.
I’m not going to broach all the politics of pre and post-9/11 America; it simply isn’t the case tonight, but I mean to talk about the cultural shift, the change in tech, but most importantly, those things we have lost or grown out of that we struggle to not look back to.
Pre-9/11 life to me was very different. I remember so vividly the home life we shared as a family before the divorce, nights spent waiting up for one or the other parent to come to bed while the other snored beside me. I haven’t forgotten coming home in the afternoon from school to see my father doing yard work and curling up on the couch to watch Garfield and Friends or Bobby’s World on some station that probably doesn’t exist anymore. Distant as it is, I remember the nights my father wouldn’t come home, and I fall asleep on the living room floor and wake up in bed, the last memory to recollect being whatever the show Ally McBeal was about, my mother’s favorite then. Halloweens were different. Malls and Walmarts were at different ends of their inverse relationship. People dressed with care for the fact they were going out, even just to the gas station. And all the various staples that held my life together, generic cereals and Saturday morning cartoons or after-school specials with some vague message about kindness and diversity, were still all in place.
In so many ways, that past seems removed from reality. Everything seems folky or campy, like it was pulled from a sitcom. Sitcoms like Malcolm in the Middle serve as an excellent portal to those times, though I believe it ran into the mid-’00s. The arcades, pumping with jungle beats and the clatter of coins, the malls busy with so many stores that would love to be an anchor site like JCPenny or Target, a strange sense of calm from the scan lines on the television, the television being furniture as much as entertainment, a lack of boarders that separated people so common it would make you strain to find the differences. It all seems like another world, a time when the internet was a feature to boast of to friends even if it cried and screamed while you connected. A time, and maybe it was my age, when learning games were the cutting edge of children using software, and everything wasn’t a brand deal, slapped with a special license and recognizable characters. Corded phones, the innovation of uncorded phones, caller ID, and the trend of transparent but bright plastic tech. As I regale those closer to the tail end of the Zoomer generation or tell my children about these times, I find that there is no way to relate the mental image, the vibe of it all, but it’s there, a rotting memory like what followed it.
I was in a school, trying to make new friends. It was a new town, and everyone had new forms of technology to boast about that I hadn’t the slightest idea what they meant or were for. It was a time when Pokemon became a lame trend, and things like BeyBlades were the new IT item. I remember plain or patterned clothes falling away to become branded with a sports designer or high-end mall fashion. The clunky graphics stored in even more clunky containers were vanishing for discs; the VHS was now the DVD, the TV shrinking or growing to accommodate the room. I could go on for days as we recount the age of MySpace, the social network site that offered a very open source and customizable time for users. Flash and browser games ranging from the learning style to violence to what could have been seen as little more than a cash scam to an adult. Moreover, I can remember a time wherein schools had specific computer rooms or tech labs for the youngest of children to learn about computers and how to use them. The age of the great monolith of games, the PlayStation 2, hangs heavy in the past, as well as the antiquated reality of YouTube being host to videos of five minutes or less in length and not serving as a career for the young.
Now, I bring all this up; I try to paint the picture of a world that seems complicated to place as it is so transitional, so liminal in design, for good purpose. I do not like to muck about in the past. Nostalgia is a bitter pill to swallow as one wallows further in one’s own pity. It is the lullaby of cicadas, far away party music, parents arguing in hushed tones, the whine of older screens and poor lighting, and the bastard cries of so much lost in time to the wheels of progress. And from all of this, you might look back with reminiscence and wish for it back and might even regard the fond times of yesterday kindly, and maybe you’re right, and perhaps I’m just a bit warped. But I don’t pull a punch here as I say that nostalgia is a poison that has infested our minds and broken our hopes for anything new and fresh and free and unbound to this wheel of time turning in the mud.
Look all around you. You won’t need to look far for all those things created in the Millenial days of the ’90s, faded or became icons through the 2000s, and then slowly began to reemerge through the 2010s until the 2020s, where they are the most common things. Hardly can we go a day without a reboot of some older program, a re-release of an old video game, an artist trying to cash in on the 90’s styles that made them a star, and every company under the sun pulling from the depths of their archives some obscure object to serve as a fresh carrot in marketing. We are poisoning ourselves with memories we can not fully recollect. Painting ourselves in the colors of a world we no longer can rejoin. Together, we are digging up the dead while burying the newborns. Through nostalgia, we are putting our heads through the portal into yesterday and with our fervor to grab it, to clutch at so many beanie babies sent to donations, to see that last minute of the tape before the static hits, to take a last drink of Fruitopia or some other such novelty of the time, we’re kicking out the chair and finding those final breaths not bittersweet or pleasant, but too thick in the odor of decay and dust.
I think we all can appreciate a trip down memory lane. We can only really communicate true facts through the medium of memory, but hardly does that mean these forgotten times should be given the whole limelight of our modern day and never see the faltering of a world that doesn’t have a place for it. Yesterday is inescapable; it will tow in our wake until we are dead, and even then, the storage bins of Kodak photos shot on a disposable, the preserved can of Surge soda, and that favorite shirt worn at your tenth birthday before your best friend moved away, will linger a time still. And as they linger, their meaning will become that of totems of a forgotten time and forgotten person until the entire culture of the time is not even a memory. But in that passage from life to dead, we are making the inevitable future one so lousy with those stuck in the phases of grief, mourning something that can never come again and like a lost relative best observed for a moment, in flash photography or anecdote rather than the star of the show, the soul concern, the lifeblood now so lousy with dirt and elements of injury we can not hope to move further. Nostalgia is but one pleasant look back, but if we do not turn away in time, it becomes the void that looks back into us and empties us until we can mirror the hollow of that darkened space of history. If we can not move on, we will not move on and sink into the mire that consumes all things, settled in their way, rigid against a time that would wash them to the ocean but now must drown it. We must overcome ourselves, these precious lost days, to form the new world, to gift onto the youth their own precious days in better times.
Trazor 