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This is why you need to avoid nostalgia (and a dozen ways to do it)
I don’t want to celebrate nostalgia. I want to prevent nostalgia from happening to me.
As we get older, as people get older, heck, as I’m getting older, I’m starting to notice my memories more than my current thoughts. I’m starting to think about the past more than when I lived in it.
There are certain smells, sounds, music, movies, and phrases that transport me to a distant past without my permission. Nostalgia triggers are visual, physical, and spiritual. I’m not able to stop the feeling when it happens.
Nostalgia can be bad nostalgia—a smell comes across your table and it reminds you of a negative or traumatic experience you had as a child. Some experiences create phobias and aversions in people, and often they don’t know why it’s buried in their subconscious. Have you ever considered the origin of the phrase “guilty pleasures?” Doesn’t that go back to childhood shame? It’s so hard to be out here and be yourself, living in and for today with an eye toward the future.
There are times when I do have to reach into the past. Back then, I was in a grind-and-hustle mode, not living in the moment. Now I’m looking for clues to help me understand why I made certain decisions that landed me where I am today. I’m looking back to help me figure out how decisions I need to make going forward could be informed by my past.
I am an entrepreneur and a small-business owner. I take the time to do it right and remix what would attract attention to my clients. I seek all avenues of information, including looking back at my old successful projects wondering if now would be a good time to repurpose them. Perhaps I’m researching or I’m trying to understand something.
There is something about looking back that I cannot grasp. A sense of loneliness or isolation maybe? What is this feeling? Is there something going on that’s making people wish for something they can’t have anymore, which is the past? You can never go back. Wishing for the past is futile.
One day I was in the kitchen cooking, listening to a terrestrial radio station. I was swaying with the moment, singing at the top of my lungs sometimes, dancing to old-ass moves of my generation, and it dawned on me that all the songs that were playing were from my teenage years. I stopped dancing and cringed, thinking I could do one of two things:
One, I could continue to listen to the radio and transport myself back to the past and live there. Like the dancing ’80s music YouTuber Chrissy Allen appears to be, I knew I could be happy; the warts and pain of my childhood would dissipate into the melodies of powerful songwriting, visual lyrics, and unforgettable guitar riffs. Like tea, steeping my mind in the past often brings rich and delicious designer-brand, rose-colored glasses—the warm and fuzzy memories that remind me of being in comfortable places in my life.
Or, two, I could turn off the radio, launch my young son’s raunchy and catchy hip-hop playlist, and listen to the future.
I guess that’s all I’ve got, these two choices.
Some people don’t realize that they’re living in nostalgia all the time. They’re listening to the same music on rotation. They’re making the same decisions about clothes, with no fashion risks being taken. They’re using the same ingredients in their food because it requires no thinking and reminds them of childhood meals. They don’t rotate furnishings in their home or even try new candle scents. It’s the “we’ve always done it this way” narrative of thinking.
Living life inside nostalgia unbeknownst to you prevents you from living in the moment and prevents you from living in the future, which therefore keeps you from growing, changing, and transforming. I think about this a lot because as I walk through the world now, with my children getting older and moving out of the house, I sense that my surroundings—songs, stories, recipes, songs with samples in them—feel intentionally nostalgic, and like vintage Eagles, I can’t tell you why.
I stop myself: Is this marketing and advertising? Are advertisers just trying to get me to buy things? They must know that when they tap back to our childhood (assuming it was a happy childhood) we want more of its simple happiness, and maybe we’re not as satisfied with our existence now. As children (again, if we’re lucky) we feel safe, the hairs go down on our skin, we feel a warm glow, our mind slips into a reverie, our shoulders relax, and the migraine has mysteriously receded—all is well and good in the world. We want to keep this feeling and live there. It can be intoxicating.
And so this idea of safety is difficult to come by when you’re an adult, especially when you have children. As a parent, the focus is on keeping them safe, not necessarily keeping yourself safe. I understand the hypnotic pull of nostalgia. Even though I don’t speak it out loud, I sometimes feel in my entire being the desire to just go back in time and take my children from the fear of now to the safety of my own childhood experience.
I have strategies for eliminating this nostalgic feeling, being present, and looking ahead to what’s happening in the future. I say that because thinking about the future, living in the future, slipping into the future, planning for the future, and creating things for the future in a lot of ways keeps you open to change. And right now, we are in a moment of tumultuous change with artificial intelligence. There is literally no time for nostalgia.
But things happen, and the next thing you know, you are zippity doo dah right back to that nostalgic moment.
Nostalgia is not real. Nostalgia cradles me and rocks me into a stupor of history, a familiar false visual narrative of happiness and safety. I want to stay young.
But here are my personal strategies for noticing and then avoiding nostalgia. Keep your own counsel and get a second opinion, because like Google Maps, some territory is also not real, with roads leading to nowhere, and you may drive into a ditch.
- Do not listen to terrestrial radio. Terrestrial radio is full of nostalgia. Listen to underground and independent internet radio to get new music. Experiment with radio.garden for sounds, voices, and music from distant lands and cultures.
- Listen to music you would never listen to normally or that activates your senses, even if your response is “I hate this.” Try EDM or the type of country music that crosses genres; metal; and maybe even some new hip-hop that doesn’t use vintage samples. You know what happens when you hear a sample: It sends you right back down into nostalgia.
- Try a new restaurant with a flavor and ingredients that you’ve never had in your life. Try different textures of foods that you haven’t yet put in your mouth. If there were ever a time to be confused or delighted with the new, now would be it.
- Go to the grocery store. Pick up a piece of fruit or a vegetable that you’ve never touched or eaten before, something that has a weird shape or a weird color to you. How about an artichoke? Keep trying new things and being more experimental in your choices.
- Don’t travel to a country you’ve been to before. If you do, stay in a different city, in a different hotel, walk down different streets, and visit new neighborhoods so that you are having a new experience.
- Shop local. I love Target and am not ashamed of it. But to beat nostalgia and the comfort that goes with it, find out where the thrift shops are. I was recently in London, on Bricklane Street, and was so overwhelmed by choice but also energized. Thrift shopping requires attention and being in the moment. Sure, you may find an old leather jacket that you threw away at a garage sale now going for $500, and you are pissed off. But thrifting forces you to use your mind to put disparate items together, and that takes stamina and effort.
- Don’t listen to people who tell you to dress your age. There’s nothing wrong with people buying fashion they see on younger souls. We should all be able to wear clothes that reflect the times and our new budding aesthetic. Stay fresh by looking at street fashion and mix it up. A good innovative brand to check out could be Resonance or Archive Resale.
- Pick up a book from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author or a book that’s been translated from another language. I was excited to read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami because he writes in English and then translates his writing into Japanese. His perspective is so vastly and wildly different from my own that there’s nothing he writes about that makes me think of my childhood.
- Watch anime. Anime is bizarre. Unless you grew up on anime, there’s no way that anime’s gonna make you feel nostalgic. Depending on your age, anime may look like trash to you—the movements, colors, language, stories. It’s sometimes uncomfortable for me to watch because it can be subversive and bizarrely sexual, but comfort is a friend of nostalgia.
- Take a cybersecurity class, and learn to program and code for AI. AI classes will zip you straight to the future, and you’ll never think about nostalgia ever again.
- Write, write, write, and write some more. Reading is great, but writing is better. Write your thoughts down, stream of consciousness. Words, jumbles, things that don’t make sense. Just put it on paper. Literally. Pick up a pen or pencil and write with your hand. If you just can’t write, dictate into a microphone and record some stuff that keeps you in the moment, forward-thinking, and takes you out of a place of nostalgia.
- Start a business. If the process doesn’t kill you, it will surely make you stronger. And you will have zero time to think, relax, live in the past, or kick back and listen to music from your childhood; you’ll be eating fast food and not reading any books. You’ll be too busy researching data and trying to game the algorithm so you can get attention for your business.
Nostalgia can be a happy place for some and a traumatic place for others, or it could just be a weird place that you don’t want to be in because you don’t want to live in the past.
I want to keep looking forward to creating new ideas, concepts, and products. I want to make my own choices and decisions based on my imagination and the unknown. Take it from GloRilla: Noticing and then battling nostalgia will help you love tomorrow.
Nostalgia, Reverie and Memories is JinJa Birkenbeuel’s curated playlist on YouTube.
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