Nostalgia as Therapy

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As you get older, no one really tells you how therapeutic nostalgia is or will become.

Right now, the pop culture nostalgia is definitely aimed largely at Millennials like me. From the return of boy bands, TV show and movie reboots or remakes, and even toys (oh hey Polly Pocket and Trolls)…so many of the things that I grew up with are coming back. When I shop at our local mall, the teens I see are dressed so similarly to how we used to dress in high school. It’s like automatic time travel every time I go.

So why is nostalgia making such a comeback? Of course, you can argue that everything always comes back around. I’m sure my Baby Boomer parents would say they’ve seen things from their youth come back—maybe even multiple times over. I think this time around, it’s much more powerful though. Nostalgia is coming back because Gen X and Millennials have lived through so many disasters and “unprecedented” times or events. We just want to be reminded of when things weren’t such a sh*tshow. We want to remember the times before life really started life-ing and we didn’t have to adult so hard.

I think in a lot of ways, the nostalgia has become a form of therapy for us too. It takes you back to a time when there wasn’t some new disaster or human rights violation every single day. When everything didn’t cost 10 times as much as it used to. When you didn’t have to think about car payments, student loans, and if you’d ever be able to afford to buy a house. When there was no world-altering pandemic. When people seemingly still believed in voting experienced politicians into office and not fascist regime starters.

Nostalgia is a quiet place you can land among the chaos. Watching your favorite boy bands tour again brings back those memories of listening to them in your room, fantasizing about your crushes on one or multiple members of the group. Checking out a TV show reboot or reunion from when you were younger transports you back to when (in theory) your list of responsibilities and worries was much much smaller.

When I take a walk down nostalgia lane (especially living in my childhood home), it takes me right back to sitting my room with my giant stereo, listening to my CDs—my biggest concerns being whether a boy in my class liked me, if I was pretty enough, or feeling the weight of being different than everyone around me. In those moments, I get a release from the weight of everything going on around me now.

Nostalgia is an escape. It gives you a chance to take a break from all the horrors going in the world. It gives you a chance to just enjoy something that brought you so much joy when you were younger. It reminds you of a time when things maybe weren’t quite so terrible, and you didn’t have so much to deal with.

I say all this with the disclaimer that I understand that plenty of people didn’t have idyllic childhoods. Even at young ages, they were already dealing with way more pain and difficulty than anyone should be. A trek down memory lane may not be such a helpful or therapeutic thing for them.

There certainly seems to be a growing market for nostalgia and I think that’s because it’s something that a lot of us need (even if it’s not all of us). I know it’s helped me personally get through the mess that’s been the last 6 years. Now that we have social media too, the nostalgia memes that get created are always good for a laugh.

Maybe every generation has found solace in harkening back to their youth and things that remind them of it. Maybe it’s not just us. But what I can say for sure, is I’m going to keep riding this nostalgia wave for as long as it lasts.

Here are some of my favorite things from my younger years. Going to the Pop 2000 tour last year was an absolute millennial dream come true.